transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of This Is Actually Happening, ad-free, right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Hi, listeners. Last week's episode featured Nanda Nunnally, who survived the deadly 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri. As the tornado tore through Nanda's house, she was suddenly struck by a memory of bullying another girl, Christy Davis, in 8th grade. As the tornado tore through Nanda's house, she was suddenly struck by a memory of bullying another girl, Christy Davis, in 8th grade. As she huddled in her closet, fearing for her life, she had a vivid thought, I'll never get to apologize to Christy. After Nanda survived, she reached out to Christy and made that apology. Today, we hear from Christy Davis, the woman Nanda bullied as a teenager. Christy tells her own life story, her account of the apology, and the subsequent healing that took place. If you haven't heard Nanda's story from last week, I urge you to listen to hers first before listening to Christy's today to get the full context of what happened. These two stories were brought to us by and co-produced with Pauline Bartolone and were funded in part by UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center as part of its Spreading Love Through the Media initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation. But now, on to Christy's story for today's episode, What If Your Bully Actually Apologized?

Speaker 2:
[01:34] The trauma, the terror, the memory of the trauma, and the redemption come together and collide, that just creates so much emotion. Because it's the wonderful and the horrible meeting.

Speaker 1:
[01:55] From Audible Originals, I'm Whit Missildine. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 403. What if your childhood bully actually apologized?

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 4:
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Speaker 2:
[03:52] My parents are both from rural Kentucky. My mom was from an established, respectable farm family. My father was from a family that often got labeled poor white trash. His mother had 18 pregnancies, 14 births and 10 survivors. They lived on a river, and about every three to five years, the house, the two bedroom house, would flood like five, six feet up the walls. And the entire family would have to retreat and camp in the cemetery in the cold until the water would recede. My father had dyslexia before it was ever identified or named that. He had failed fourth grade three times because he couldn't read. And the teacher said something sharp to him and he punched her. And that was the end of his formal education. He was very smart and very clever and also very mean and charming and scrappy. He was cruel to animals. He was cruel to females. And I've looked at a couple of pictures of him when he was quite young. And I see a tremendous amount of pain and rage in his face. My father's father and an uncle or a cousin, there were these men that I heard racist talk from and saw racist behaviors from. If you go to Wikipedia and look up Livermore, Kentucky, you will see a terrible story about the public hanging of a black man in a public theater. I have family that live there and there's a lot of shame really about even living in a town that had such a notorious nationally known hate crime. It was lynching by a mob. And I think my father's racism has roots in the fact that they lived in this house that flooded and they were really poor and they ended up camping in the cold rain in a cemetery. There were one or two black families in this very small town and they didn't have it as bad as my dad's family. And he was teased about that. Because if you are living in squalor and poverty and circumstances that are worse than those black people that live over in the edge of town, then you were really an outcast in 1940s rural Kentucky. And I think that was where the rage started baking. My mom was really cute. She looked so much like Judy Garland that her nickname was Judy. And my dad was very handsome and very well dressed. He did what a lot of people culturally in poverty did, which is to groom and dress very well, to like rise above his circumstances. My dad had a very bad reputation. And all the girls thought he was cute. And he paid attention to my mother. And my mom loved the attention she got from dating a bad boy. That was very exciting for her. My father went off to Korea. He got shipped out from San Francisco to Korea. And he ended up being far deeper in China than the official record likes to admit. He was in combat. He got shot. So he's a Purple Heart veteran. After he recuperated, the officers learned that he was very talented at building and cement. So he spent the rest of his career building lodging for the military. And then when he came back home, he picked up with my mother. Before me, I have had a sister. She's passed away recently, who was 17 years older than me when I was born, a brother who was 15 years older than me when I was born, and another sister who was 10 years older. And so I was definitely an oops, 10 years after the fact. And I was born in 1968. My father inherited a cement finishing trade from his father, and he was very good at it. My three siblings were all born in Kentucky. And then Indiana University in Bloomington really expanded. And there was basically endless cement work. And so that's where my family moved, and that's where I was born. My father really bonded with my sister. My mother really bonded with my brother. And it's where the diabolical chess game began in the family of using children as pawns in a parent's war against each other. It was a crazy, unpredictable, almost nonstop war zone with very few moments of respite or peace. And the longer the peace was, the more tension would start to build because you knew it had been peaceful for too long. And so you knew something was going to blow again because it always did. So my father doesn't actually learn to read until he's about 19 years old. And he learns to read just enough and he never reads quickly. You know, we would be on a family vacation and he couldn't read a road sign fast enough and he wouldn't take the exit. And then he would go into a rage that might last two hours as we're driving across multiple states because he missed the exit and he's too mad to turn around. My father was really violent and he was particularly violent with my brother. But the girls weren't spared either. And when I was very little, I witnessed my father breaking my sister's glasses on her face. My sister trying to escape my father by crawling under a row of cars on her belly because it was better to get her stomach scraped up by the pavement than to be caught by my dad. His violence was random and unpredictable and something that might make him laugh one day would be a thing that put him into a rage another day. Somewhere I was four or five, I was on the receiving end of a violent rage incident from my father. I had a startle reaction to a horse, and I came running in the house crying. My father asked me why I was crying and I couldn't articulate it because I was crying too hard. And he just really physically demolished me. He beat me till I passed out and I woke up in my own urine. And my world really went wonky. Then when I was six, my siblings began to leave. So they all got as far away from my mom and dad as possible. They were very sorry as they were leaving me and then I was alone with them. I had just watched all my protection leave. My mom was one of those people who believed that you don't take your problems outside the home. And so I was the person that she told all of her problems to about my dad, starting from the time that I was about six. All the problems, like all their emotional problems, their sexual problems, I mean, she absolutely parentified me and used me as her sounding board. And I didn't know any different. It was when I went through puberty, which was sixth grade, that I began to really want to differentiate from my mom. And I didn't want to play that role. She felt betrayed, and I was angry. I started to feel anger towards my mother for not protecting her children. I know so much more about what trauma and abuse can do to a brain and how it can wear it down. And yeah, my mom did a lot of inappropriate things. But man, her bandwidth must have just been so narrow by that point. My father was overtly racist. I remember on several occasions him saying that he thought that what the Klan did was good. And I remember being really horrified by that even when I was quite young, because my elementary school teachers were pretty vocal that racism was not okay. This was the 1970s in a big college town that had a lot of international students. My father used the n-word frequently. What he tried to instill in all of us, you know, was that black people were dangerous, that they were bad, that we weren't safe around them. There were all of two black kids in my elementary school classes, a boy and a girl. And I was friends with both of them. And what happened was that the black girl ended up moving two blocks away from me in this subdivision. And after she did that, she asked me to come over to play after school. And I did that several times. And my father drove past one time and saw me with her. And when I got home, he was like, you didn't tell me that I'm not going to say her name was black. And I was like, why would I need to do that? And he told me I couldn't play with her anymore. And so on the playground in fourth grade, I got invited over to come play after school. And I told her that I couldn't. And she asked me why. And I said, my father won't let me play with you because you're black. I can't go to your house. I can play with you here, but I can't play with you at your house. And she punched me in the stomach. And I don't blame her. When she punched me in the stomach, I felt a lot of things.

Speaker 5:
[14:30] I felt betrayed.

Speaker 2:
[14:31] I also understood. I felt like I was in the middle so often. Like in this case, my dad would do something terrible and his children would pay for it. I feel like I was paying for the sins of my father. And it didn't make me think, oh, my dad was right about black people. I just got punched in the stomach. It made me think, this is so messed up and I cannot wait to grow up and get the fuck out of my house.

Speaker 6:
[15:10] When a birthday party in suburban San Jose turns deadly, 18-year-old identical twins are arrested for suspected murder. One of them spends nearly two years in jail before the truth comes out. Authorities locked up the wrong twin. How could one brother let his twin take the fall? And why would the other give up his freedom for a crime he didn't commit? Blood Will Tell is a modern-day Shakespearean saga about what we're willing to sacrifice for the people we love and whether our most tragic mistakes are worthy of redemption. Listen to Blood Will Tell, a new series from Audible and Campside Media wherever you get your podcasts. At adobe.com/do that with Acrobat.

Speaker 2:
[16:37] At the end of fifth grade, all of the fifth graders get sent over to the middle school for a day so that they can become oriented, so they can see what the school looks like, maybe meet some of the teachers. And I was excited to go to middle school, and I get to the middle school, and there's some sort of whisper campaign, and a message comes back to me that there's a seventh grader who is really mad at me and that I had better watch my back when I come to middle school. So this day just like got shattered. I didn't know who she was. But boy, when I went to middle school in sixth grade, I think it was within the first two weeks of school, I certainly learned who she was. So as I had been warned during my fifth grade visit, this girl Nanda made true on her promise. And within the first couple weeks of middle school, she cornered me. I remember her grabbing me by the shoulders, shoving me against a locker. I remember the back of my head hitting the locker pretty hard. She said some really harsh and scary things to me. The sixth graders and eighth graders are really different in body size. Nanda looked like a full grown woman when she was in eighth grade. Quite a bit taller than me, quite a bit bigger than me. And she was so beautiful.

Speaker 5:
[18:05] And I just was like, oh my god, this incredibly beautiful, statuesque girl with presence wants to kill me.

Speaker 2:
[18:16] Another incident that I remember, because she had enlisted, she had enlisted friends to help bully me. I was on the parallel uneven bars in sixth grade and an eighth grade girl who had been put in charge of spotting me decided not to. She let me fall and I fell on my head. Fortunately, I fell on a mat and also fortunately, I didn't get seriously injured, although I do remember it hurting for some time. But I was terrified. If I wasn't in class, if I was in the hallway, so before school, after school, lunchtime, hallways, bathrooms, for many weeks, maybe months, I was just really scared. I was scared that something terrible was going to happen. I went from being hypervigilant at home, but having school as a place of refuge and recognition and validation to school, also becoming a scary place. So I went from scary place to scary place. And I was also really upset because I knew I hadn't done anything. Because what had happened is she had accused me of picking on her sister who was two years younger than me. I'm like, no, that didn't happen. But reason and truth didn't seem to matter. My relationship with my father had deteriorated even more because when I went through adolescence, he became even crazier. I had learned at this point not to tell my parents about any problems that I was having at school because then I would have two problems. And I especially didn't tell my parents about Nanda because she was a black girl. And I did not want to give my racist parents any fuel for their sad belief system. So there was no safety or respite there. And so I decided that to protect myself and to protect Nanda, that I would not tell my parents about being bullied at school. And I also, I didn't know what he might do. Eventually, I became so afraid that I either told a teacher or I told the vice principal. Nanda and I got pulled into the office and she denied all of it. There was some residual backlash, but I think that after that got expressed, I think that it stopped. My parents were blue collar workers. My mom worked in a factory. My dad was a cement finisher. And I was really confused about my class position because, you know, my parents were blue collar workers. But what was really important to me at the time was I wanted to be like the university kids in town. So the kids that I liked and was drawn to, their parents were professors. I had to have my Levi's. I had to have my IZOD shirt and I was precocious and bookish. I had won the school spelling bee in fourth grade and fifth grade. My teachers really liked me. I worked very hard to perform so that I could have adult validation. Getting those adults to see me and take care of me was survival. Like many adolescent girls, I went from being a person who was fairly body confident to being a person who was not body confident. I was doing okay, but I was also growing restless and thinking, I'm never going to fit into this world. I'm not the kid of a university parent. In eighth grade, something in me snapped and me and my best friend went full on punk rock. Girls in IZOD shirts don't express rage, but girls in Sex Pistols shirts get to. There was suddenly a place for big, difficult emotions and pushback, and I don't need to fit in. Just a very big, fuck you attitude change. High school was high school. I was still in an I cannot wait to get out of here mindset. Most of my older friends were from the punk scene, and I was getting fed lots of music, literature, experiences. When I was 16, my parents finally got divorced. They had been married for 33 years. My father had had many affairs, and I was aware of them and my mother wasn't. I really couldn't tell her she was very unwilling to hear. But my father had an affair with her best friend who was married. That woman's husband went insane because his wife was having an affair. He began disguising his voice and calling my mother, and disguising his voice as a woman and saying like, your husband and the woman's name are currently behind the store at such and such place. So she started getting all of these phone calls. Then my father's tires got slashed. Then this man whose wife was cheating with my father set his own house on fire. So it was chaos, and I was 16, and there was a culminating violent incident. My father began to drink heavily, very heavily. He came home very visibly drunk at like 5 o'clock in the morning, and he threatened to kill my mother, and he struck her and knocked her down in front of me. I told him I was going to call the sheriff. And he looked so shocked. I had my hand on the phone, and as I was calling the sheriff, he fled the scene. Then there was a really messy and painful divorce. The judge asked for my transcripts for my grades, and he told both of my parents in court that I was college material, and that they would each be contributing to my tuition and room and board. And they were both really upset about that. I started college while I was still in high school, and I remember my father calling me and saying, if you cared about me at all, you would write a letter to that judge and tell him that it's wrong, because you know that no good comes of women being educated. You should just get married and start having babies. It took me eight years to finish my undergraduate, but I really loved it. I was really busy changing majors, going to lots of parties, working three jobs. I just worked all kinds of little retail jobs, and then I started doing community radio shows. But I became incredibly depressed, almost not functioning depressed. I would say that I was processing PTSD of my home life. Once I got to the safety of not living under that roof, also, you know, life was happening. Some relationships were great. Some friendships were crap. I probably destroyed some relationships that were potentially good because I had no good skills modeled for me. Then I met someone at the restaurant that I was working at and we started a relationship. And in 1995, when I was 25 years old, I finally left my hometown. I moved to Oregon, rural Oregon. I had been in Oregon for four months and I found this WANTAD in the paper, and the job was for delivering story times and early literacy training to both home and institutional daycares. My first week on the job, there was this whole group of people that had gathered. They'd been dreaming up this project for the library for a couple of years, and they had applied for grant funding, and it was a group of child psychologists, educators, librarians, early literacy specialist people, and they had looked at all the statistics, the high child abuse, the low literacy rates. So they had come up with this whole thing of how they wanted to have the library go into people's home daycares and teach the providers a little bit about early literacy, leave bags of books. They handed me a binder of articles that had informed their decisions, and the most important article in the first article was just about how stories create empathy. Studies had been shown, experiments had been done, that when young children read stories, especially that had characters that had had struggles and then they had had helpers, that these children developed empathy and started showing a lot more concern, say if somebody on the playground fell down and scraped their knee. Kids that had had stories read to them were much more likely to respond to the distress of their classmates and their friends. I'm going into homes where there was a lot of poverty and no books. And I realize now when I reflect that, getting an opportunity to work with this population that was poor, there was a lot of violence in this community. This was probably an act of me trying to ameliorate, to just try to make better or change the trajectory of some kids. And I work at that library for 23 years. It is just so meaningful and so impactful. And I've really gotten into working with our local Kiwanis Club and help them start the program so that we could have the Dolly Parton Imagination Library here in our community. You know, every child from the time they're born up until their fifth birthday can get a book delivered to their home once a month. I'm really on fire about that because when I was going into these home daycares, probably 80% of them had no books in the house at all. No books, no magazines, no newspapers. Part of my job, I had to be compelling enough and entertaining enough to get them pulled away from the TV and pulled into a story that was in print and held in my hand. My library career, it's made me think a lot about how different things could have been for my father and therefore for me and my entire family if in, say, rural Kentucky, the concept of dyslexia which at the time was called word blindness and this was not something that was common knowledge to educators in poor rural communities. Like if that had been known and addressed, what could have been different if this very bright and creative man, because my father was bright and creative, what if he had been taught reading skills instead of being called retarded or stupid? Could that have halted or perhaps eased his racism, his misogyny, his homophobia, his xenophobia, like all of his phobias? What if for my father, school had been a safe haven, like it was for me? I met my husband in 2000. We bought a house together in 2003, and we got married in 2005. In the spring of 2011, I was working full-time in a large county library system. But I knew that if I ever wanted to leave this system that I had worked in for a long time, that I would have to have my master's degree. So I'd been accepted to library school. Also in the spring of 2011, I am essentially crippled by a combination of endometriosis, fibroid tumors, and a condition called adenomyosis. I'm extremely anemic. My marriage isn't going great. And so during my winter break of my first year of graduate school, I scheduled my hysterectomy. And over the course of months, my energy returned because I was no longer anemic. And I really threw myself into working full-time and graduate school. So, it's August of 2012. I'm on my computer. I'm on social media. And for some reason, for the very first time, I see that there is a folder that is messages from people that I'm not friends with. Within this folder, I see this name of this person who terrorized me when I was in 6th grade. And I am immediately really freaked out. I'm like, oh my god, she, how is this person found me? Nanda messaged me in 2011. I did not see the message until 2012. And I think that I waited a couple of weeks before I responded. And I even ask a family member for advice. And that family member, it was a sibling, said, don't respond to that.

Speaker 5:
[32:44] It's a trap.

Speaker 2:
[32:45] People don't change. And I sat with that and thought, no, that's not true. So I read her letter and it says, Christy, I have wanted to contact you many times throughout the years. I hope this message finds you well. Let me begin by saying, I'm sorry! I'm sorry for the awful way I treated you during your sixth grade year at Dyer. When I think about that time, it makes me sick to know I was capable of being so horrible. I am ashamed that I treated another person with such disrespect. You did nothing to deserve my actions and I am not worthy of your forgiveness.

Speaker 5:
[33:33] I have raised three children and each one had difficulties with bullies and racism. During each situation, I was transported back to what I put you through. I wish I could give you a hug and tell you I'm sorry in person. I wish I could take it all back. I wish I wish, but nothing can make up for what I did. I survived the tornado in Joplin, Missouri. While I was in my closet thinking my life was going to end, your face came to me. I don't want to leave this earth without telling you how sorry I am. I sent you a friend request on Facebook because there was no way to message you otherwise. After friending some mutual friend, I won't say his name, I was able to contact you through this message. Please know I will not try to contact you again unless you wish, and I completely understand if you don't. I hope your life is wonderful. You deserve wonderful.

Speaker 2:
[34:35] If you would like to contact me, my number is, my email is.

Speaker 5:
[34:40] Take care, Christy.

Speaker 2:
[34:41] Always in your debt, Nanda.

Speaker 5:
[34:46] Gets me every time. It's a real apology.

Speaker 2:
[34:51] It's a beautiful, real apology. And so when my family member was like, no, that's a trap.

Speaker 5:
[35:00] People don't change.

Speaker 2:
[35:02] I was like, no, you're wrong. This is real. I feel it. And to verify that, I started like looking at her social media. And I was like, wow, this person is even more beautiful than she was when she was in eighth grade. And more importantly than that, she's beautiful on the inside because she's so active in helping people who are less fortunate than her. She speaks with a clear, strong, kind voice. I was really impressed with what she had made of her life. And in Missouri, no less. Missouri is not an easy place for people of color. I've had people do quite a few shitty things to me in my life. I never got an apology like that from my father. In fact, he didn't change. He became more of what he was as he got older. He became more entrenched, cruel, racist. There was never an apology for any of the things that went down. There were occasionally excuses that they were weak. What stands out for me with Nanda is that she's really one of the only people who's ever wronged me, who has really apologized sincerely. And I really felt it, and I could really accept it. The trauma, the terror, the memory of the trauma, and the redemption come together and collide, that just creates so much emotion. Because it's the wonderful and the horrible meeting. The world is so hard right now. And the world has revealed itself, like United States civilization, has proven itself time and time again, that it is as racist and messed up as ever. And you just see that our progress has been collectively not enough, really inadequate. It's true, I didn't do anything to cause Nanda to bully me. And at the same time, it's still really a lot for her to offer me an apology. This is so much bigger than us. I could have remained an outlet for whatever kind of rage she was experiencing because of socioeconomic issues, race issues, believing she was defending her family issues. I mean, I could have remained that for her. That could have been easy and convenient. And she didn't choose what was easy and convenient.

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Speaker 8:
[38:29] I'm Leon Nayfok, best known as the host and co-creator of podcasts, Slow Burn, Fiasco and Think Twice, Michael Jackson. I'm here to tell you about my show, Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer, whose name is synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions and vicious on-stage fights. But before the Jerry Springer Show became a symbol of cultural decline, its namesake was a popular Midwestern politician and a serious-minded idealist with lofty ambitions. Through dozens of intimate and revealing interviews with those who knew Springer best, I examined Springer's lifelong struggle to reconcile his TV persona with his political dreams and aspirations. Named one of the best podcasts of the year by The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer is a story about choices, how we make them, how we justify them to ourselves, and how we transcend them or don't. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge the whole series ad free right now on Audible. Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app.

Speaker 2:
[39:36] So after I read the letter from Nanda, I sit with it for a while. It really makes my heart race. I'm really wondering if it's a trap or a trick. I read it and reread it and think, no, it's not. I don't take my sibling's advice to ignore it. And I sit down and I write her. And I let her know that I also have reached out via social media and made some apologies for some things that I did. Nanda and I have a back and forth conversation for quite a few days. There's a lot of back and forth of us trying to examine what was going on in our lives and one another's lives, and not lost on me at all that we were products of our time and we were projecting on to each other. She was like, you were this pretty blue-eyed blonde-haired girl, and pretty blue-eyed blonde-haired girls got the pass. I didn't think of myself as pretty at all. I was certainly blonde-haired and blue-eyed. I thought of myself as a pretty awkward nerd, but she saw me differently. This was hilarious in a tragic way when we discussed it. She thought I was coming from all the privilege that she imagined that a blonde-haired blue-eyed girl would have. But, you know, Ananda was in town because her father was pursuing a Ph.D. And I lived in the town that I lived in because my father was a cement mason and he was pouring concrete with his fourth grade education. We projected things onto each other. And then when I talked to her recently, she told me something that I just keep turning over in my mind. She said that when a new black girl or person of color would enter the middle school, like move from another place, there was somebody in her peer group, in her social group, who would be like, oh, you have to fight that person. You have to go behind the school at 2 o'clock and you have to fight that person to establish your dominance. And when she told me that, I was like, holy heck. Like they're putting you in a in a boxing ring to like prove your worth, to like keep your standing. I mean, my God, that is so messed up. She didn't want to do that. She probably just had so much nonsense put on her and so much anger to try and make sense of and contain or not contain. That apology gave me a lot of hope. It also brought to light something that we see in movies or see in literature or hear about that confronted with what we believe to be eminent death. We review things and it's interesting what pops up and pretty consistently, what pops up is about the quality of our relationships. So what popped up for her was that this was a relationship that was way below her quality standards. She wanted to write that, she wanted to fix that, and she wanted to do it in a very careful way that demanded nothing of me. That's really skillful. It's so horrible to be bullied. On the flip side, I got lucky by being bullied by somebody who was so much more capable of rising above that, analyzing that, fixing that. She just has such high emotional intelligence, such integrity, she does such good in the world. I got really lucky. You know, the person that picked me to pick on also happened to be the person that had an unusual capacity for apology and repair. It's important when you make amends that you have to respect the boundaries of the person that you're trying to do the repair with, as Nanda did with me. They may or may not accept your apology. Bottom line it is, make the apology, make the repair attempt, unless you have a really compelling reason to think that doing so is actually going to cause that person more harm. And obviously it's very important too for your own personal safety. Don't go apologize to somebody who is likely to turn around and like really harm you in ways physical or emotional. We don't communicate heavily, but in 2015, 2019, 2023, 24, 25, we became increasingly curious about what was going on at the time of our interaction, what was going on in society. There was a lot of taunting and a lot of bullying. It was really part of our culture and there was a lot of conflict and divide. One of the things that I noticed, and this is a thing about people with a conscience versus people who don't, people with an internal moral compass versus people who don't have one, her memories of what she did have been far harder on her than what she did to me. Her guilt and her shame over her bullying has impacted her so much more profoundly than it impacted me and I was just like, wow. The only time I had the jolt was when she was like, yeah, I let you know on your fifth grade visit that you were in for it the next year. As she told me stuff, I was like, oh yeah, I remember being afraid to go to the bathroom or, oh yeah, I do remember being bumped into in the hallway and dropping all my stuff. It's not the visceral reaction I had with her picking me up and slamming me and that impact to the back of my head. That was what really remained. I don't know that people need to pay for it. I do have a sense of justice, but I feel like she made choices during a very limited time in her life that have impacted her for such a long time. I want to say, hey, you've apologized, it's okay. So, my father died four hours before his 96th birthday on October 28th of 2024. I went to my father's funeral for a variety of reasons. One was duty, a sense of duty. One was performance. I'm going to show up and show my family that I am here. And that was difficult to do because my two living siblings have estranged themselves from me following the death of my eldest sibling. So, not only did I go to my father's funeral stressed out, I went to my father's funeral knowing that my two siblings were going to not speak to me in front of the entire extended family. And I needed proof that he was gone. I needed physical proof to see that he was gone. And I'm a little embarrassed to say that he scared me so much that I was even afraid to get very close to his casket. I got close enough to see him in there, but I was still afraid of him even though he was dead.

Speaker 5:
[47:26] He was so brutal. Where there's life, there's hope.

Speaker 2:
[47:32] So I had a little bit more grief about the relationship that never was, that never could have been, the apologies that never came. I found out from the woman that he married, that he had an affair with. She had seven children from her previous marriage. And the youngest one at my father's funeral, she pulled me aside and told me, oh, your dad was so proud of you.

Speaker 5:
[47:57] His librarian, I'm like, what?

Speaker 2:
[48:00] And she just was like, oh yeah, he was just so proud of you for getting that degree, for getting educated, for becoming the leader and becoming the director and becoming a person who was managing construction projects because I managed some remodels in the buildings of some branches after I became director down in Southern Oregon. And he was so impressed with you.

Speaker 5:
[48:22] And I just stood there crying and said, would have been great if he had told me.

Speaker 2:
[48:28] But also, when your kid does something that looks good, it's not important for you to tell the person who did the work that you're proud of them. You talk about it because it reflects well on you. It's important to show whoever's listening that someone you produce that's an extension of you did something impressive. So, while there is the compliment in it, it also really wasn't for me. Those in power do not give it up without a fight. We are in the grips and the horror of that fight, right this very minute. Very fortunately, a lot of people are born with or develop a moral compass, and that helps them navigate the world. And then there are people who externalize their moral compass, and they put that moral compass in the hands of a faith leader, a politician, a tech billionaire. They're going to have a lot harder time being part of the solution because they don't have an internal locus of control, reflection. There's no internal moral compass. I don't know if that can be repaired. I just have to hope that there are enough of us with internal moral compasses that flex that and exercise that, that we can become the collective power that can prevail and have a society that makes sense. I want to express some gratitude to Rebecca Solnit, who tries to remind us every day that the healing and the power is going to be in the collective, not in heroes with big power, but the power of the collective. And I think that Nanda and I are part of that collective and part of that power.

Speaker 1:
[50:27] Today's episode featured Christy Davis. This episode was brought to us by and co-produced with Pauline Bartolone, and was funded in part by UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, as part of its Spreading Love Through the Media initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation. If you'd like to hear some deeper reflections on Christy's story, as well as reflections on the last few episodes, including updates about the show, please subscribe to my Substack, called Beyond The Story, at whitmissildine.substack.com. That's whitmissildine.substack.com. And the Substack is called Beyond The Story. If you'd like to reach out to Christy, you can find her email address and a link to her own Substack in the show notes. From Audible Originals, you are listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music to listen ad free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Whit Missildine. Today's episode was co-produced by me, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. We'd also like to thank Head of Creative Development at Audible, Kate Navin, Head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Lui, and Chief Content Officer Rachel Giazza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. The opening music features the song Sleep Paralysis by Scott Velasquez. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook or follow us on Instagram at Actually Happening. On the show's website, thisisactuallyhappening.com, you can find out more about the podcast, contact us with any questions, submit your own story, or visit the store, where you can find This Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, t-shirts, wall art, hoodies, and more. That's thisisactuallyhappening.com. And finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com/happening. Even $2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening. Follow This Is Actually Happening on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of This Is Actually Happening ad-free by joining Audible.