James Giago Davies: We grew up never knowing my veteran dad was suffering

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Entire families survive PTSD

Forgiveness for a fallen hero
By James Giago Davies
nativesunnews.today

After Irvin “Shorty” Davies finished fighting for his country, he married my mom, Ethel Giago. He had survived the Great Depression, survived the poverty, the despair, the five-year drought that buried his family farm under a deep layer of windblown dirt. He barely survived an explosion that almost sank the USS Pensacola. By the time he got hitched in a little white church in Wasta, South Dakota, he had seen the world, seen humanity at its ugliest, and he had come back a changed man, a disturbed man, a tortured soul.

And we grew up calling him dad, suspecting nothing.

PTSD is a horrible thing. It robs people of some vital aspect of human intimacy. My dad never told me that he loved me. I never once heard him tell my mom he loved her. That part of him was broken, forever.

When I saw him in his open casket, I could not bring myself to cry, it was only a decade since I had watched him beat my mom to the kitchen floor with his fists, break my little sister’s arm for losing his cigarettes.

When my three boys came along, I started to see my dad in their faces and mannerisms. One day I sarcastically said to one, “Good job, Irvin!”

“Who is Irvin, Dad?” he asked. Irvin was my dad, I told him. Pretty soon I was calling all three of them Irvin on an escalating basis. They would say, “Which one of us, Dad?” I would say Big Irvin or Middle Irvin or Little Irvin. Wasn’t long before they were calling each other Irvin.