"What do you do when you think you have a murderer in the family?"
October 27, 2014 11:46 AM Subscribe
My Grandma the Poisoner. And now, once again, I feel like I’m supposed to care. Like there should be closure. Either I purge my past, forgive her, and arrive at a higher vibrational state, or I find proof of what she’s done over the years and expose her once and for all. I’d always planned to search her house one last time, but now the house is gone. And nobody is exhuming any bodies, and Grandma doesn’t even know what Grandma did. And there’s not going to be any grand finale. And as I sat there listening to Grandma sing with my children—not quite crying, I wasn’t quite crying—I realized that I didn’t care what had happened, that nobody cares what happened, that caring is for cops on CSI and doctors on ER and muscle-bound Marines in the movies.
Despite stereotyping, the majority of (known) homicidal poisoners are reportedly male. (The majority of persons diagnosed with Munchausen by Proxy, however--which can also lead to the death of the target--are female.)
Related, previously.
Despite stereotyping, the majority of (known) homicidal poisoners are reportedly male. (The majority of persons diagnosed with Munchausen by Proxy, however--which can also lead to the death of the target--are female.)
Related, previously.
The grandmother's behavior in this piece, coupled with the family's weirdly passive response, is so over-the-top extreme that I've read it twice and am still genuinely unsure whether this is nonfiction or fiction.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:10 PM on October 27, 2014 [28 favorites]
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:10 PM on October 27, 2014 [28 favorites]
As a family member, it's understandable not to care and to just want to love your loved ones or even to just now care. Because the whole thing is exhausting and once the person is old and not likely to hurt anyone else who cares?
I'm glad this story shared this kind of response so earnestly and understandably because it's a very normal and understandable and common reaction to having dangerous family members. In tackling the problem of people who do things like this in society and how to get family members to come forward, it's good to know common reactions family members have, and reasons they more often than not say nothing about it and let the problem continue. If it's true, I don't know that protecting ones self or grandma from the hard ship of being turned in is a tradeoff worth all the actual deaths.
I understand why it FEELS better to not rock the boat, but this is a situation where should these things be occurring and family members seeing it, we need to get education and encouragement to families to feel safe reporting it.
Making our prison system a humane place to keep dangerous relatives in decent and even healthy and human friendly conditions would probably assist with families feeling comfortable reporting a loved one they think may be harming people.
(And I agree I have no idea this story is true, it's a little harder to know what to make of it if fiction.)
posted by xarnop at 12:15 PM on October 27, 2014 [5 favorites]
I'm glad this story shared this kind of response so earnestly and understandably because it's a very normal and understandable and common reaction to having dangerous family members. In tackling the problem of people who do things like this in society and how to get family members to come forward, it's good to know common reactions family members have, and reasons they more often than not say nothing about it and let the problem continue. If it's true, I don't know that protecting ones self or grandma from the hard ship of being turned in is a tradeoff worth all the actual deaths.
I understand why it FEELS better to not rock the boat, but this is a situation where should these things be occurring and family members seeing it, we need to get education and encouragement to families to feel safe reporting it.
Making our prison system a humane place to keep dangerous relatives in decent and even healthy and human friendly conditions would probably assist with families feeling comfortable reporting a loved one they think may be harming people.
(And I agree I have no idea this story is true, it's a little harder to know what to make of it if fiction.)
posted by xarnop at 12:15 PM on October 27, 2014 [5 favorites]
I did find myself skeptical when I read that his pregnant wife had not stopped herself, or been stopped, from consuming any food on the premises. This particular anecdote starts to sound like hysterical, retrospective suspicion, instead of another truly suspicious incident:
We visited her just before my wife miscarried, and even though my wife knew to stay away from her food, everyone slips up a little from time to time.
posted by blue suede stockings at 12:15 PM on October 27, 2014 [7 favorites]
We visited her just before my wife miscarried, and even though my wife knew to stay away from her food, everyone slips up a little from time to time.
posted by blue suede stockings at 12:15 PM on October 27, 2014 [7 favorites]
"What do you do when you think you have a murderer in the family?"
Say to yourself, "Whoa, I have a killer story for Vice.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:20 PM on October 27, 2014 [25 favorites]
Say to yourself, "Whoa, I have a killer story for Vice.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:20 PM on October 27, 2014 [25 favorites]
So...yeah. It's one thing to suspect Grandma killed her husband, or kid, when you were also a kid and had no input in the situation and no way of verifying it. If I suspected my grandma of, say, causing my wife to miscarry, I would be beside myself. Not that I could do anything now, but I would feel guilt at having exposed my wife to that danger. Jesus. Even if you don't care about the miscarriage, what damage might have been done? What damage to the writer's own body might there be, after years of ingesting various unknown poisons? That would keep me up at night.
I think this writer is either taking a provocatively casual tone or in deep denial.
I do think this kind of thing goes on more than we know. Families don't want to think their members do bad things, and bad things are easy to hide. Or they used to be.
posted by emjaybee at 12:22 PM on October 27, 2014
I think this writer is either taking a provocatively casual tone or in deep denial.
I do think this kind of thing goes on more than we know. Families don't want to think their members do bad things, and bad things are easy to hide. Or they used to be.
posted by emjaybee at 12:22 PM on October 27, 2014
For once tho, the comments are worth a glance, especially "This is an excellent piece, a stark contrast to most of the bullshit Vice tries to get away with."
posted by octobersurprise at 12:25 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by octobersurprise at 12:25 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
I think this writer is either taking a provocatively casual tone or in deep denial.
That's interesting -- is the writer being deliberately naive/casual in this piece, to convey the cognitive dissociation and unreality of growing up in his situation? Or is he truly in denial? I mean, when writing about his wife's miscarriage he's like, "Oh yeah, that!" He had completely forgotten about it until he re-read his notes? Something very odd about that.
On the other hand, he was apparently poisoned multiple times as a child, so maybe the odd tone is a result of mental impairment?
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:29 PM on October 27, 2014 [5 favorites]
That's interesting -- is the writer being deliberately naive/casual in this piece, to convey the cognitive dissociation and unreality of growing up in his situation? Or is he truly in denial? I mean, when writing about his wife's miscarriage he's like, "Oh yeah, that!" He had completely forgotten about it until he re-read his notes? Something very odd about that.
On the other hand, he was apparently poisoned multiple times as a child, so maybe the odd tone is a result of mental impairment?
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:29 PM on October 27, 2014 [5 favorites]
I have had an unfortunately large number of extremely dangerous bad people in my life who also happen to be a nice family member to someone or other who is in total denial of it. It's very normal. Not that that means this is or isn't fiction, but I know many people who just want to all be at peace and move on and who cares horrifying stuff like this. It's more often for abuses and crimes like this to simple get ignored and continue than get reported. It's a thing, in life, one that I hope we will learn to overcome even though it seems nice to love everyone and not rock the boat and all be nice.
Being "nice" and following social conventions and not ruffling feathers is a great method of evil behaviors to spread.
I know some peoplewho all went to grampas bday last year and all wanted to make nice and be friends, because after all, he molested and raped his own daughters so many years ago and that's in the past now right? Let's all be friends and move on to a higher level of being and all loving each other. I mean genuinely I understand those desires to not care and just love everyone because I feel them to, but I think those urges need to be challenged because they can really suck at empowering terrible behavior to thrive.
posted by xarnop at 12:36 PM on October 27, 2014 [41 favorites]
Being "nice" and following social conventions and not ruffling feathers is a great method of evil behaviors to spread.
I know some peoplewho all went to grampas bday last year and all wanted to make nice and be friends, because after all, he molested and raped his own daughters so many years ago and that's in the past now right? Let's all be friends and move on to a higher level of being and all loving each other. I mean genuinely I understand those desires to not care and just love everyone because I feel them to, but I think those urges need to be challenged because they can really suck at empowering terrible behavior to thrive.
posted by xarnop at 12:36 PM on October 27, 2014 [41 favorites]
is the writer being deliberately naive/casual in this piece, to convey the cognitive dissociation and unreality of growing up in his situation? Or is he truly in denial?
I dunno, but if I heard this story—in this way—from a stranger at a bar I'd assume either that he or she was a stone weirdo who needed to be humored or someone fucking with me.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:36 PM on October 27, 2014 [4 favorites]
I dunno, but if I heard this story—in this way—from a stranger at a bar I'd assume either that he or she was a stone weirdo who needed to be humored or someone fucking with me.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:36 PM on October 27, 2014 [4 favorites]
I also think that shock reactions should be understood as natural and wanting to love people is also natural. And generally good. So people who react this way are not trying to be monsters they just don't have the tools to grapple with it and often are dealing with complex needs for family that merrits a bit of understanding I think.
posted by xarnop at 12:38 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by xarnop at 12:38 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
This was a really good article, and it has the ring of truth to it for me.
I can absolutely relate to how you just don't have it on your radar to think about your family in such negative terms when you are young, and this naivete can sometimes travel with you to your adulthood where it creates some blurry thinking and finally a light-bulb moment. In my mom's family growing up, there were serious alcohol issues that for the most part were protected from the grandchildren, although my mom was definitely a victim growing up. The entire narrative of my childhood was that my grandfather had the alcohol issue and he was the elephant in the room that people didn't talk about much.
When I got older, my parents revealed to me that may grandmother, who was married to this grandfather, also had drinking issues, and it explained on some level the enabling that was going on. Up to that point that didn't even dawn on me and it blew my categories a bit. But I also had a memory that surfaced at that moment of taking a drink out of the never-empty glass of what I thought was water that my grandmother always kept on ice, and it had a sharp tangy taste to it, which I also had smelled at different times, but never gave more than a couple of thoughts to. I grew up later to experience those smells and tastes independently, but I had not put together the memory of that experience with what I knew wine tasted and smelled like until that moment. It's as if my sets of memories traveled on two different tracks, and then suddenly they merged at that moment.
And then you have to figure out what to do with this new-found information in light of the regular ways that you incorporated a different set of data to create the narrative of your childhood. The cognitive dissonance in these cases is pretty weird, because although you know something to be true, it doesn't change immediately the fundamental textured experience that you've been carrying around most of your life. And often we act on and recall memory impressions based on our feelings, and not the other way around.
posted by SpacemanStix at 12:41 PM on October 27, 2014 [31 favorites]
I can absolutely relate to how you just don't have it on your radar to think about your family in such negative terms when you are young, and this naivete can sometimes travel with you to your adulthood where it creates some blurry thinking and finally a light-bulb moment. In my mom's family growing up, there were serious alcohol issues that for the most part were protected from the grandchildren, although my mom was definitely a victim growing up. The entire narrative of my childhood was that my grandfather had the alcohol issue and he was the elephant in the room that people didn't talk about much.
When I got older, my parents revealed to me that may grandmother, who was married to this grandfather, also had drinking issues, and it explained on some level the enabling that was going on. Up to that point that didn't even dawn on me and it blew my categories a bit. But I also had a memory that surfaced at that moment of taking a drink out of the never-empty glass of what I thought was water that my grandmother always kept on ice, and it had a sharp tangy taste to it, which I also had smelled at different times, but never gave more than a couple of thoughts to. I grew up later to experience those smells and tastes independently, but I had not put together the memory of that experience with what I knew wine tasted and smelled like until that moment. It's as if my sets of memories traveled on two different tracks, and then suddenly they merged at that moment.
And then you have to figure out what to do with this new-found information in light of the regular ways that you incorporated a different set of data to create the narrative of your childhood. The cognitive dissonance in these cases is pretty weird, because although you know something to be true, it doesn't change immediately the fundamental textured experience that you've been carrying around most of your life. And often we act on and recall memory impressions based on our feelings, and not the other way around.
posted by SpacemanStix at 12:41 PM on October 27, 2014 [31 favorites]
This is suspicion with a high bar to proof. You can't just drive over to Smithkline labs with a batch of Grandma's moist cookies and say, "Yeah, so I think my grandmother wants us to die or at least feel very sick" without either a mandatory psych eval or incurring some very high costs for a perhaps incomplete set of tests done on items which Grandma may not have even doctored that day. As many lipstick-smeared pictures of Crippen as there are about, getting a hefty thermos of her coffee homeground might cause her to back off of her already infrequent dosing schedule.
posted by adipocere at 12:45 PM on October 27, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by adipocere at 12:45 PM on October 27, 2014 [1 favorite]
The grandmother's behavior in this piece, coupled with the family's weirdly passive response, is so over-the-top extreme that I've read it twice and am still genuinely unsure whether this is nonfiction or fiction.
Most people probably haven't heard of Munchausen By Proxy By Proxy, in which the sufferer is driven to seek the sympathy of others by pretending to be a victim of Munchausen By Proxy.
posted by uosuaq at 12:46 PM on October 27, 2014 [25 favorites]
Most people probably haven't heard of Munchausen By Proxy By Proxy, in which the sufferer is driven to seek the sympathy of others by pretending to be a victim of Munchausen By Proxy.
posted by uosuaq at 12:46 PM on October 27, 2014 [25 favorites]
You know, another possibility is that there was, I don't know, toxic mold in the house or something. He is basing the entire idea that she is a poisoner because he found one bottle that someone told him to take to the poison control center.
posted by corb at 12:57 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by corb at 12:57 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
I thought this was going to be fiction, but the author also notes in passing his uncle's drowning in this article from a couple years ago.
posted by Esteemed Offendi at 12:58 PM on October 27, 2014
posted by Esteemed Offendi at 12:58 PM on October 27, 2014
corb: He is basing the entire idea that she is a poisoner because he found one bottle that someone told him to take to the poison control center.
Really? Is that your takeaway? Let's look at the article:
In my narrative of suspicions, she preferred to use vitamin A (which can cause sleepiness, blurred vision, and nausea, among other things)
She was infamous at the local grocery store. They saved the shark livers for her.
Of course, the longer you stayed with Grandma, the more likely something bad would happen to you. If you visited her for a week, you’d suffer from the shits, you’d be exhausted, and your vision would start to blur.
Then I started noticing that every time I went to Grandma’s, I’d pass out on the couch or on the train on the way back to the city. When I stopped eating Grandma’s food, my brother thought I was paranoid. But I stopped passing out, and pretty soon he stopped eating Grandma’s food too.
so she wouldn’t notice the layer of crystalline powder atop that fancy lox she was giving you.
She had a rehearsal in the city, but she passed out on the couch and missed it.
“Canned beets and sunflower seeds,” I typed into my computer. “URGENT PRODUCT RECALL,”
Before Grandma put me to bed she’d sometimes serve me this really rich hot chocolate that looked oily and thin. And when I woke up it would be 24 or even 72 hours later. Three or four times we rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night because I was having trouble breathing.
Maybe the author is exaggerating, or misremebering, or is cherry-picking memories and events. But that's not your criticism, which is so simple and underinformed that I have to think that you didn't even read the article, or perhaps, you worked for INSCOM.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:05 PM on October 27, 2014 [13 favorites]
Really? Is that your takeaway? Let's look at the article:
In my narrative of suspicions, she preferred to use vitamin A (which can cause sleepiness, blurred vision, and nausea, among other things)
She was infamous at the local grocery store. They saved the shark livers for her.
Of course, the longer you stayed with Grandma, the more likely something bad would happen to you. If you visited her for a week, you’d suffer from the shits, you’d be exhausted, and your vision would start to blur.
Then I started noticing that every time I went to Grandma’s, I’d pass out on the couch or on the train on the way back to the city. When I stopped eating Grandma’s food, my brother thought I was paranoid. But I stopped passing out, and pretty soon he stopped eating Grandma’s food too.
so she wouldn’t notice the layer of crystalline powder atop that fancy lox she was giving you.
She had a rehearsal in the city, but she passed out on the couch and missed it.
“Canned beets and sunflower seeds,” I typed into my computer. “URGENT PRODUCT RECALL,”
Before Grandma put me to bed she’d sometimes serve me this really rich hot chocolate that looked oily and thin. And when I woke up it would be 24 or even 72 hours later. Three or four times we rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night because I was having trouble breathing.
Maybe the author is exaggerating, or misremebering, or is cherry-picking memories and events. But that's not your criticism, which is so simple and underinformed that I have to think that you didn't even read the article, or perhaps, you worked for INSCOM.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:05 PM on October 27, 2014 [13 favorites]
I think the passivity is the point of the piece. It is less about killer grandma than about the way their whole skewed family narrative did a number on him. He didn't protect his wife, no. His own mother didn't protect him. Because according to family narrative, grandma couldn't possibly have poisoned the people she loved (except maybe you shouldn't eat her cookies?)
it sounds like a massively disorienting way to think, to believe both one and the other. I imagine it's hard to free yourself of that.
The last sentence encapsulstes the message. The author was trying to make readers feel this dissonance in him: grandma almost killed him - grandma couldn't have because of the special bond between them. It sounds like he's only just waking up to the craziness of this way of thinking.
I think it's a really good piece.
posted by Omnomnom at 1:07 PM on October 27, 2014 [46 favorites]
it sounds like a massively disorienting way to think, to believe both one and the other. I imagine it's hard to free yourself of that.
The last sentence encapsulstes the message. The author was trying to make readers feel this dissonance in him: grandma almost killed him - grandma couldn't have because of the special bond between them. It sounds like he's only just waking up to the craziness of this way of thinking.
I think it's a really good piece.
posted by Omnomnom at 1:07 PM on October 27, 2014 [46 favorites]
I don't think the tone is strange. The writer seems to love his grandmother even now and wouldn't want to villainize her beyond recounting what he thinks the truth is. It can also be impossible to figure out what is normal to you because things have always been that way, and what is normal in general. This has always been his grandma, how can he even tell what's strange about her? It's really tough to get enough distance from loved ones to assess things like that.
I feel terrible for the writer's uncle. Sounds like he had a painful life, and a horrible death.
posted by rue72 at 1:09 PM on October 27, 2014 [1 favorite]
I feel terrible for the writer's uncle. Sounds like he had a painful life, and a horrible death.
posted by rue72 at 1:09 PM on October 27, 2014 [1 favorite]
Also, the author says they did go to the cops after the last boyfriend died, and the cops weren't in the slightest interested.
posted by tavella at 1:10 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by tavella at 1:10 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
Now what I don't get is how googling "canned beets" and "sunflower seeds" would give you URGENT RECALL messages?!
posted by Omnomnom at 1:13 PM on October 27, 2014 [6 favorites]
posted by Omnomnom at 1:13 PM on October 27, 2014 [6 favorites]
I don't have an opinion about whether this story is true or not, but cases of suspected poisoning are extremely difficult to deal with. If all you have is suspicion and vague symptoms, there is really no way to test all of the potential contaminated substances for all of the potential poisons. I'm one physician who, granted, takes care of a high proportion of people with mental illness and criminal behavior; this question has come up a half dozen times in my career which leads me to think the police probably hear these reports a lot. You can test and investigate as much as is practical, but it is astronomically more likely that the accuser will turn out to have a history of paranoia than it is that you can prove it was Vitamin A in the oatmeal cookie that sent your cousin to the hospital 6 months ago. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen, it's just that you can't prove a negative and the positive is pretty freakin hard to catch. So the accuser is either crazy or has to learn to live with some truly awful mixed feelings.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 1:26 PM on October 27, 2014 [11 favorites]
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 1:26 PM on October 27, 2014 [11 favorites]
I think what strikes me as odd about the tone is that it lacks the sort of emotional hindsight I expect from someone who suspects a beloved relative of murdering several family members. Even if Grandma's behavior was waved away at the time, looking back at it as an adult, presumably he'd at least acknowledge the gravity of her (suspected) actions? I guess there's just a certain "WHAT THE FUCK???" that's missing from the piece, and that's why I get such a weird vibe from it.
I can relate somewhat to that tone, since I've told people about incidents from my childhood that I thought were amusing anecdotes, only to be met with horrified gasps rather than the expected chuckles. But here, the author clearly understands that Grandma was fundamentally and terribly sick, yet relates this story of child abuse and murder with an almost jocular, Reader's Digest attitude.
"Hey, remember that sack of dead animals Grandma kept in the backyard?" "Oh yeah, I forgot about that time my wife and I lost our baby well into her pregnancy, very likely because Grandma poisoned her -- crazy, huh?" The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that this is deliberate.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 1:28 PM on October 27, 2014 [11 favorites]
I can relate somewhat to that tone, since I've told people about incidents from my childhood that I thought were amusing anecdotes, only to be met with horrified gasps rather than the expected chuckles. But here, the author clearly understands that Grandma was fundamentally and terribly sick, yet relates this story of child abuse and murder with an almost jocular, Reader's Digest attitude.
"Hey, remember that sack of dead animals Grandma kept in the backyard?" "Oh yeah, I forgot about that time my wife and I lost our baby well into her pregnancy, very likely because Grandma poisoned her -- crazy, huh?" The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that this is deliberate.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 1:28 PM on October 27, 2014 [11 favorites]
Drugging kids is something people did a lot back in the day. My great-grandfather was a doctor and I've heard tons of stories of his crusade to get people to stop giving alcohol to babies and laudunum to toddlers. Probably some people on this board had their gums rubbed with booze when they were teething. It's not so hard to see how that evolved into this grandma "managing" people by doping them up. Most kids would think it was weird to sleep for 24 hours unless they are told it's a good thing. It probably happened quite a lot in her generation, in a fairly benign manner. You get a woman who is pathologically cheap and she starts taking it a little further and getting rid of people who are a burden to her.
I can understand why it's all only obvious in hindsight.
posted by fshgrl at 1:40 PM on October 27, 2014 [8 favorites]
I can understand why it's all only obvious in hindsight.
posted by fshgrl at 1:40 PM on October 27, 2014 [8 favorites]
"We visited her just before my wife miscarried, and even though my wife knew to stay away from her food, everyone slips up a little from time to time."I'm reminded here of one my favorite poems:
"There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink."
Luckily for our author, tho, having lived so long with a poisoner was likely to his benefit and, like Mithridates and Westley, he can probably count on dying old.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:45 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
Also, grandma was abusive in other ways, too (threatening to set a twelve year old's penis on fire, wtf?!). The whole family treated this as normal. AskMe-posters from abusive households often say how long it took for them to see how utterly abnormal and hoffific their upbringing was. This reminded me of that.
posted by Omnomnom at 1:46 PM on October 27, 2014 [24 favorites]
posted by Omnomnom at 1:46 PM on October 27, 2014 [24 favorites]
This is a great article - regardless of the facts provided. My Gran was like this - though I'm certain she didn't poison anyone. She did feel her version of the world was more real and more important than anyone else's, and she did act accordingly. If she'd had the idea to poison folks, she would have done it. She did loads of other harmful things, though.
And for reasons I can't explain, I loved her and still love her and cared for her till her last moment.
posted by mumimor at 1:48 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
And for reasons I can't explain, I loved her and still love her and cared for her till her last moment.
posted by mumimor at 1:48 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
I don't think the tone is especially strange, or the suspicion for that matter. If a lot of people died around grandma I would be suspicious too. And, of course, it's also possible that some of those deaths were actually from disease or accidents while others were murders: it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
But the list of evidence is all over the place and sounds like it ought to go along with an article titled "My Grandma the Witch".
posted by Pyry at 1:49 PM on October 27, 2014 [1 favorite]
But the list of evidence is all over the place and sounds like it ought to go along with an article titled "My Grandma the Witch".
posted by Pyry at 1:49 PM on October 27, 2014 [1 favorite]
Drugging kids is something people did a lot back in the day. My great-grandfather was a doctor and I've heard tons of stories of his crusade to get people to stop giving alcohol to babies and laudunum to toddlers.
From the number of people I know who have been desperate to get kids to go to sleep or behave on an airplane, I think these practices continue but have been replaced with things like benadryl and melatonin. (There's a reason that benadryl bottles now say in the instructions, "Don't give this to children to make them sleepy.") It's easy for me to see how this desire to control family members or give a particular impression of your family can extend into other kinds of scenarios (like mentioned in this article).
posted by SpacemanStix at 1:49 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
From the number of people I know who have been desperate to get kids to go to sleep or behave on an airplane, I think these practices continue but have been replaced with things like benadryl and melatonin. (There's a reason that benadryl bottles now say in the instructions, "Don't give this to children to make them sleepy.") It's easy for me to see how this desire to control family members or give a particular impression of your family can extend into other kinds of scenarios (like mentioned in this article).
posted by SpacemanStix at 1:49 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
"canned beets" + "sunflower seeds" + recall = [].
Just sayin'.
posted by Dashy at 1:50 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
Just sayin'.
posted by Dashy at 1:50 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
octobersurprise: another Housman fan! ...and here I thought I was the only one under 80. My favorite:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:50 PM on October 27, 2014 [6 favorites]
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:50 PM on October 27, 2014 [6 favorites]
You get a woman who is pathologically cheap and she starts taking it a little further and getting rid of people who are a burden to her.
"The gentleman died because he drank some wine with poison in it. Now, I don't know why you're making such a big deal over this, Mortimer. Don't you worry about a thing!"posted by octobersurprise at 1:52 PM on October 27, 2014 [15 favorites]
If this story weren't true, it would make for an awesome sitcom.
"Grandma, I'm not buying you any more animals until you get rid of all those sacks of dead animals in the backyard!"
"But I'm saving them for that stuff you told me to make!"
"I said you should make potpourri, Grandma, potpourri, not PET-pourri!" *LAUGH TRACK*
"John, there's some kind of mysterious powder on this lox..."
"Just scrape it off, honey. That's Drano, it's how they eat lox in Russia."
"That's not how they eat lox in Russia!"
"It isn't? Wh-- GRANDMAAA!!!" *LAUGH TRACK*
"Boy, this bacon is almost as burned as Cousin Norman's dick!" *CHUCKLES*
"Hey, where is Norman anyway?"
"Didn't you hear? He passed out while he was diving and drowned!" *AUDIENCE GASPS*
"But why did he -- GRANDMAAA!!!" *LAUGH TRACK*
*GRANDMA SHRUGS, LOOKS AT CAMERA* "I just luff to poison!" *SAD TROMBONE*
*UPROARIOUS LAUGHTER* *FREEZE FRAME* *END CREDITS*
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 2:17 PM on October 27, 2014 [21 favorites]
"Grandma, I'm not buying you any more animals until you get rid of all those sacks of dead animals in the backyard!"
"But I'm saving them for that stuff you told me to make!"
"I said you should make potpourri, Grandma, potpourri, not PET-pourri!" *LAUGH TRACK*
"John, there's some kind of mysterious powder on this lox..."
"Just scrape it off, honey. That's Drano, it's how they eat lox in Russia."
"That's not how they eat lox in Russia!"
"It isn't? Wh-- GRANDMAAA!!!" *LAUGH TRACK*
"Boy, this bacon is almost as burned as Cousin Norman's dick!" *CHUCKLES*
"Hey, where is Norman anyway?"
"Didn't you hear? He passed out while he was diving and drowned!" *AUDIENCE GASPS*
"But why did he -- GRANDMAAA!!!" *LAUGH TRACK*
*GRANDMA SHRUGS, LOOKS AT CAMERA* "I just luff to poison!" *SAD TROMBONE*
*UPROARIOUS LAUGHTER* *FREEZE FRAME* *END CREDITS*
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 2:17 PM on October 27, 2014 [21 favorites]
Dear Penthouse,
I never thought it would happen to me...
posted by IAmBroom at 2:19 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
I never thought it would happen to me...
posted by IAmBroom at 2:19 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
If this story weren't true, it would make for an awesome sitcom.
It made an awesome historical drama. As I read this article, all I could think about was Livia Drusilla.
posted by charlie don't surf at 2:22 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
It made an awesome historical drama. As I read this article, all I could think about was Livia Drusilla.
posted by charlie don't surf at 2:22 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
it would make for an awesome sitcom.
That's creepy and it's kooky.
posted by octobersurprise at 2:26 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
That's creepy and it's kooky.
posted by octobersurprise at 2:26 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
I too was struck by the casualness of the tone. But people are right, when you're on the inside, it's hard to see how wrong it is. I've mostly cut off contact with my family because of the abuse and the complicit behavior of those that weren't overtly abusive. Nothing like granny who poisoned the family. But infinitely scarring. And I often feel like I'm the one that "escaped". My whole adulthood has been this slow evolution of my thought pattern to realize just how broken my family was. Even now, I tell trusted friend about certain events from my childhood, and couch it in the "but it wasn't really that bad." to wide eyes and deep concerns. Okay, yeah, maybe it was. And yet, the rest of the family is completely in denial of it all. My mother, whom I have a very complicated relationship wants to know why can't I get past it and forget about it (and in the same conversation complain about some awful thing my father has done and that she should have divorced my father when we were growing up, as if it's off the table now for some reason.)
I'm certain there is a level of self protection in it as well. A friend was assaulted by an aquaintance some time ago. And when she told me, she didn't call it assault. It hadn't really processed. It wasn't until she was able to talk about it with an outside person that was shocked by it that it became clear just what had taken place.
The author is probably at that place now, really coming to terms as the rest of us are saying "uh, that's not normal." And the long list of people complicit are because they to are in denial. Though I do wonder how publishing it for the world, and not the slow reveal of a few close friends, will do.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 3:15 PM on October 27, 2014 [11 favorites]
I'm certain there is a level of self protection in it as well. A friend was assaulted by an aquaintance some time ago. And when she told me, she didn't call it assault. It hadn't really processed. It wasn't until she was able to talk about it with an outside person that was shocked by it that it became clear just what had taken place.
The author is probably at that place now, really coming to terms as the rest of us are saying "uh, that's not normal." And the long list of people complicit are because they to are in denial. Though I do wonder how publishing it for the world, and not the slow reveal of a few close friends, will do.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 3:15 PM on October 27, 2014 [11 favorites]
Re: the recall. I wonder if it wasn't specific brand and lot. Which could have been coincidence, but also, why is grandma always having these weird coincidences?
posted by [insert clever name here] at 3:18 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by [insert clever name here] at 3:18 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
OK, if my kid were sleeping for 24-78 hours and had to be taken to the hospital *several times* for slowed breathing in the middle of the night— and this only happened when visiting Grandma— I don't care what anything thinks, Grandma wouldn't be getting no more visits from me.
I couldn't work out whether this was his maternal or paternal grandmother, but the partner who was not related should clearly have intervened to protect the kids, even if the one whose mom it was didn't agree. Lots of people die around this woman and you bring your kids there but don't let them eat the food any more, um, what?
Moreover, once even I had this suspicion, even if my parents didn't protect me when I was a kid, after a few experiments of not eating the food and being OK and eating it and getting sick—nope, not taking my kids anywhere near her. This is a seriously intense level of denial— I hope he's getting help and that his wife will put a stop to these visits. Not a safe person to have around children.
posted by Maias at 3:22 PM on October 27, 2014 [6 favorites]
I couldn't work out whether this was his maternal or paternal grandmother, but the partner who was not related should clearly have intervened to protect the kids, even if the one whose mom it was didn't agree. Lots of people die around this woman and you bring your kids there but don't let them eat the food any more, um, what?
Moreover, once even I had this suspicion, even if my parents didn't protect me when I was a kid, after a few experiments of not eating the food and being OK and eating it and getting sick—nope, not taking my kids anywhere near her. This is a seriously intense level of denial— I hope he's getting help and that his wife will put a stop to these visits. Not a safe person to have around children.
posted by Maias at 3:22 PM on October 27, 2014 [6 favorites]
W/r/t the recall, I have no problem thinking that a cheapskate like the writer's grandma would see all these "perfectly good" cans of beets being thrown away or sold for pennies and think "I can't pass up this deal!" or "this would feed [grandson's] family for a month!" or something, and think she was actually doing him a *favor* by getting him the extra food. Imo, it's probable that a lot of the poisonings were her trying to use old or bad food because it was cheap and she "couldn't bear" to let it go to waste. I also doubt that she had modern ideas about food safety even in the best of times. It wasn't necessarily nefarious. It sounds like she actually did love her family but had off-the-wall ideas about nutrition and, worst of all, was a *total* control freak.
I found the stuff she did w/r/t her son way worse than any of the poisonings, frankly. Threatening to burn off her own twelve-year-old's dick? Favoring her gentile-looking grandson over her son because her son looked "too Jewish"? Forcing her son to eat and then telling him he was hideously fat? That's all very cruel. And unlike the poisonings, there's not even a delusional practical benefit to any of it, either (let alone a real practical benefit).
posted by rue72 at 3:31 PM on October 27, 2014 [12 favorites]
I found the stuff she did w/r/t her son way worse than any of the poisonings, frankly. Threatening to burn off her own twelve-year-old's dick? Favoring her gentile-looking grandson over her son because her son looked "too Jewish"? Forcing her son to eat and then telling him he was hideously fat? That's all very cruel. And unlike the poisonings, there's not even a delusional practical benefit to any of it, either (let alone a real practical benefit).
posted by rue72 at 3:31 PM on October 27, 2014 [12 favorites]
Canned beet recalls: 2004, 2011
Sunflower seed recalls are too numerous and frequent to list, but they appear to be mostly be for allergic contamination.
Still, if he was googling when the recalls were active, it's easy to see how they could top the search results then and not now.
And yes, there are many legitimate reasons that grandma may have had them, but it might just be one too many "coincidences." Which is kind of what the article is about.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 3:41 PM on October 27, 2014 [8 favorites]
Sunflower seed recalls are too numerous and frequent to list, but they appear to be mostly be for allergic contamination.
Still, if he was googling when the recalls were active, it's easy to see how they could top the search results then and not now.
And yes, there are many legitimate reasons that grandma may have had them, but it might just be one too many "coincidences." Which is kind of what the article is about.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 3:41 PM on October 27, 2014 [8 favorites]
And they were really awful, but you still have some weird longing for it.
Sort of how I feel about winter every summer.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 3:44 PM on October 27, 2014 [4 favorites]
Sort of how I feel about winter every summer.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 3:44 PM on October 27, 2014 [4 favorites]
As somebody who had a grandparent (and possibly parents, man...) who have a frightening amount of extremely, EXTREMELY expired food and additives laying around, that's not a bad guess.
There have been several times that I almost ate something that, in the context of the whole meal, might not have been obviously spoiled to me. Tabasco from 1994? Wonder how that would have went.
This grandma definitely poisoned people though, if the article is even half true.
posted by GreyboxHero at 3:44 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
There have been several times that I almost ate something that, in the context of the whole meal, might not have been obviously spoiled to me. Tabasco from 1994? Wonder how that would have went.
This grandma definitely poisoned people though, if the article is even half true.
posted by GreyboxHero at 3:44 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
she was actually doing him a *favor* by getting him the extra food. Imo, it's probable that a lot of the poisonings were her trying to use old or bad food because it was cheap and she "couldn't bear" to let it go to waste.
I'm not sure that would account for all of the things that happened in the story.
One of the streams that seems to cross in this story that isn't outright stated is that both hoarding and compulsive buying are often connected to a fear of loss of control. This is more typical I think for people who experienced the Great Depression. You stock up on life in ways that get silly and ultimately unmanageable, but were reasonable in an earlier time. A connection to hoarding has also been connected to serious losses in life also, like divorces or deaths of family members. Shopping and getting a good deal are deeply connected for some people to the well being in our psyche.
The second stream is that the author suspects that the possible poisoning happened perhaps at the weird interface of providing for family (even in a twisted health sense) but also wanting to control people. He seems to suspect that it could have been used to keep people around the house longer when they would pass out. If you experience loss in life already, it can create a weird interface between wanting to provide yet also keep people on a short leash.
Totally armchair here, but I think that if you have a scenario in which you experience significant pain of loss, live in fear of losing even more, and desperately desire to have people stay in your life to help ameliorate that loss (or perhaps desire attention via the grief over sick or dying family members), it could create a scenario of emotional desperation in which the above details could attain in a twisted sort of symbiotic relationship. Control of people and things, perhaps due to prior loss, seems to be a common theme that could realistically tie everything together.
posted by SpacemanStix at 3:58 PM on October 27, 2014 [9 favorites]
I'm not sure that would account for all of the things that happened in the story.
One of the streams that seems to cross in this story that isn't outright stated is that both hoarding and compulsive buying are often connected to a fear of loss of control. This is more typical I think for people who experienced the Great Depression. You stock up on life in ways that get silly and ultimately unmanageable, but were reasonable in an earlier time. A connection to hoarding has also been connected to serious losses in life also, like divorces or deaths of family members. Shopping and getting a good deal are deeply connected for some people to the well being in our psyche.
The second stream is that the author suspects that the possible poisoning happened perhaps at the weird interface of providing for family (even in a twisted health sense) but also wanting to control people. He seems to suspect that it could have been used to keep people around the house longer when they would pass out. If you experience loss in life already, it can create a weird interface between wanting to provide yet also keep people on a short leash.
Totally armchair here, but I think that if you have a scenario in which you experience significant pain of loss, live in fear of losing even more, and desperately desire to have people stay in your life to help ameliorate that loss (or perhaps desire attention via the grief over sick or dying family members), it could create a scenario of emotional desperation in which the above details could attain in a twisted sort of symbiotic relationship. Control of people and things, perhaps due to prior loss, seems to be a common theme that could realistically tie everything together.
posted by SpacemanStix at 3:58 PM on October 27, 2014 [9 favorites]
Grandma had a reputation at the grocery store. They apparently saved shark livers for her. How is it difficult to believe that she'd come home with a case of recalled beets? And when a Depression-era Grandma ends up with a case of beets the government says *might* be bad, do you think she's going to throw those canned beets away? Hell no, she's not.
Granted, giving 15 cans of recalled beets to her grandson as a Congratulations on Your New Baby gift isn't really the most intuitive choice, but come on -- Grandmothers.
One year at Christmas, UPS delivered an ENORMOUS box for me, from my Grandma. It was, like, literally table-sized. It sat there for a couple of weeks before the 25th arrived, and I was dying to open it, because biggest Christmas present ever was surely going to amount to bestest Christmas present ever.
It turned out to be a set of patio furniture.
I was 11.
I'm not batting an eye at the case of recalled beets.
posted by mudpuppie at 4:01 PM on October 27, 2014 [17 favorites]
Granted, giving 15 cans of recalled beets to her grandson as a Congratulations on Your New Baby gift isn't really the most intuitive choice, but come on -- Grandmothers.
One year at Christmas, UPS delivered an ENORMOUS box for me, from my Grandma. It was, like, literally table-sized. It sat there for a couple of weeks before the 25th arrived, and I was dying to open it, because biggest Christmas present ever was surely going to amount to bestest Christmas present ever.
It turned out to be a set of patio furniture.
I was 11.
I'm not batting an eye at the case of recalled beets.
posted by mudpuppie at 4:01 PM on October 27, 2014 [17 favorites]
I have had an unfortunately large number of extremely dangerous bad people in my life who also happen to be a nice family member to someone or other who is in total denial of it. I
My grandfather was a jovial, genteel southern gentleman with impeccable manners, an excellent skill at storytelling (and whimsical hyperbeloe) and a serious drinking problem. He wrote for a living and captained planes in WWII. He was loving and loveable and fantastically incapable of handling his finances. He also (probably) murdered a black man in Mississippi in 1946 and got away with it . We didn't find out until six years after he died, but when the story came to light (at his brother's/my great-uncle's funeral) it turned everything upside down and, in some pretty meaningful ways, my family has never really been the same since. And the worst part is there is no closure, no resolution, because I can't ask him why and none of us can bring back the guy he killed no matter how many books my aunt writes about it. And what is the appropriate response? How do you fix it? At least seventy-five percent of my family refuses to even talk about it, and the other twenty-five percent? Well, we have vastly different opinions about whose story it is to tell. At the end of the day, it's another shitty, awful, unreconciled chapter in the history of Mississippi during the Jim Crow era and my grandfather was evidently, not just a typical 1940s southern bigot, but a murderous one.
Drugging kids is something people did a lot back in the day. My great-grandfather was a doctor and I've heard tons of stories of his crusade to get people to stop giving alcohol to babies and laudunum to toddlers.
My great-great grandmother on the other side of the family, infamously quipped to my great-grandmother (in earshot of my nine year old grandmother) during the worst part of the Great Depression that she either had to stop having children or start feeding the existing ones arsenic and broken glass "as a kindness." Said great-great grandmother would, a couple of years, later, kill her one of her daughters and her daughter's lover in an argument involving either the immorality of living outside of wedlock or not getting a fair cut in the bootleg liquor business or both.
posted by thivaia at 4:06 PM on October 27, 2014 [37 favorites]
My grandfather was a jovial, genteel southern gentleman with impeccable manners, an excellent skill at storytelling (and whimsical hyperbeloe) and a serious drinking problem. He wrote for a living and captained planes in WWII. He was loving and loveable and fantastically incapable of handling his finances. He also (probably) murdered a black man in Mississippi in 1946 and got away with it . We didn't find out until six years after he died, but when the story came to light (at his brother's/my great-uncle's funeral) it turned everything upside down and, in some pretty meaningful ways, my family has never really been the same since. And the worst part is there is no closure, no resolution, because I can't ask him why and none of us can bring back the guy he killed no matter how many books my aunt writes about it. And what is the appropriate response? How do you fix it? At least seventy-five percent of my family refuses to even talk about it, and the other twenty-five percent? Well, we have vastly different opinions about whose story it is to tell. At the end of the day, it's another shitty, awful, unreconciled chapter in the history of Mississippi during the Jim Crow era and my grandfather was evidently, not just a typical 1940s southern bigot, but a murderous one.
Drugging kids is something people did a lot back in the day. My great-grandfather was a doctor and I've heard tons of stories of his crusade to get people to stop giving alcohol to babies and laudunum to toddlers.
My great-great grandmother on the other side of the family, infamously quipped to my great-grandmother (in earshot of my nine year old grandmother) during the worst part of the Great Depression that she either had to stop having children or start feeding the existing ones arsenic and broken glass "as a kindness." Said great-great grandmother would, a couple of years, later, kill her one of her daughters and her daughter's lover in an argument involving either the immorality of living outside of wedlock or not getting a fair cut in the bootleg liquor business or both.
posted by thivaia at 4:06 PM on October 27, 2014 [37 favorites]
Yikes, what a story. Someone should tell this guy to get his liver (at least) checked out.
posted by CrazyLemonade at 4:46 PM on October 27, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by CrazyLemonade at 4:46 PM on October 27, 2014 [1 favorite]
This is just a horrible story, not sure who comes out of it worst. I sincerely hope the girlfriend who ate the cookies while everybody watched and didn't try to stop it, left this family behind a long time ago.
It's really bothering me, and the image of the big old house choked with useless junk, and choked with the stench of the toilets that are never flushed for moneys sake, just seems like a big old stifling metaphor.
he was chunky and Jewish-looking, so Grandma, with her blue eyes and blond hair, found him repellent. In sharp contrast to Norman, the fleshy failure, I was a natural athlete with Gentile features and, therefore, her favorite.
That's just so nasty I feel sick. I mean even more than I've been primed to do so in the article by the description of the house and dead animals and the food. So good article, I suppose it's working the way it was intended. It's so overwhelming, the sensory triggering, any doubts about unreliable narrators etc are swamped. Wish it wasn't working. Wouldn't like to be him.
posted by glasseyes at 4:55 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
It's really bothering me, and the image of the big old house choked with useless junk, and choked with the stench of the toilets that are never flushed for moneys sake, just seems like a big old stifling metaphor.
he was chunky and Jewish-looking, so Grandma, with her blue eyes and blond hair, found him repellent. In sharp contrast to Norman, the fleshy failure, I was a natural athlete with Gentile features and, therefore, her favorite.
That's just so nasty I feel sick. I mean even more than I've been primed to do so in the article by the description of the house and dead animals and the food. So good article, I suppose it's working the way it was intended. It's so overwhelming, the sensory triggering, any doubts about unreliable narrators etc are swamped. Wish it wasn't working. Wouldn't like to be him.
posted by glasseyes at 4:55 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
It's really bothering me, and the image of the big old house choked with useless junk, and choked with the stench of the toilets that are never flushed for moneys sake, just seems like a big old stifling metaphor.
I dunno. I used to go with a friend to visit his grandmother, who lived in the rural Texas farmhouse that had been in the family for generations. Everytime we went we stopped at the Dairy Queen on the way into town to use the bathroom (he told me not to go in his grandma's; I never did, so I'm not sure why), and he told me not to eat anything that didn't come straight from the garden. She also had literal stacks of newspapers lining every wall. I don't think she ever threw a newspaper away.
So it might sound metaphorical, but I've seen it with my own eyes. (Twice, actually. Former hoarder neighbor.)
posted by mudpuppie at 5:32 PM on October 27, 2014
I dunno. I used to go with a friend to visit his grandmother, who lived in the rural Texas farmhouse that had been in the family for generations. Everytime we went we stopped at the Dairy Queen on the way into town to use the bathroom (he told me not to go in his grandma's; I never did, so I'm not sure why), and he told me not to eat anything that didn't come straight from the garden. She also had literal stacks of newspapers lining every wall. I don't think she ever threw a newspaper away.
So it might sound metaphorical, but I've seen it with my own eyes. (Twice, actually. Former hoarder neighbor.)
posted by mudpuppie at 5:32 PM on October 27, 2014
Tabasco from 1994?
Corned beef from 1958?
posted by sneebler at 5:37 PM on October 27, 2014 [1 favorite]
Corned beef from 1958?
posted by sneebler at 5:37 PM on October 27, 2014 [1 favorite]
I didn't really doubt that this was true, based personal experience. My own father died under very suspicious circumstances that pointed to being poisoned by his second wife. Everybody in our family had the same suspicions, including one very experienced law enforcement officer. And we all came to the same, sad conclusion: we had no evidence to go on, just suspicions, it happened in a 3rd-world country where it would be nearly impossible to investigate or get law enforcement involved, and we'll probably never really know the truth.
It happened almost twenty years ago, and I feel guilty about it every time I think about it, which is often. We're fed popular culture fantasies of justice and revenge every day, and part of me feels I've deserted my father by not upturning my entire life to find the truth. But more and more I suspect that the real miserable truth is that, as that author knows, the only people who care are the people affected. And it's really hard not to think, maybe just maybe, you're wrong.
posted by ga$money at 5:40 PM on October 27, 2014 [9 favorites]
It happened almost twenty years ago, and I feel guilty about it every time I think about it, which is often. We're fed popular culture fantasies of justice and revenge every day, and part of me feels I've deserted my father by not upturning my entire life to find the truth. But more and more I suspect that the real miserable truth is that, as that author knows, the only people who care are the people affected. And it's really hard not to think, maybe just maybe, you're wrong.
posted by ga$money at 5:40 PM on October 27, 2014 [9 favorites]
Really? Is that your takeaway? Let's look at the article:
....
Maybe the author is exaggerating, or misremebering, or is cherry-picking memories and events. But that's not your criticism, which is so simple and underinformed that I have to think that you didn't even read the article, or perhaps, you worked for INSCOM.
This is an oddly vehement reaction to a perfectly reasonable suggestion... Mold can cause the fatigue, the asthma, general malaise, and based on the description of the house it seems likely that there were mold issues going on. Sure, there are some things in the article that make it seem like it was deliberate poisoning, but it's not exactly a fact based article that we can take a sure stance on.
Anyway, this was a good read and I enjoyed it. The tone struck me as a little odd, too, but it's a pretty popular tone to have in memoirs of horrific families. What struck me as odder than the tone were the actual actions of the characters, especially, like others have mentioned, the pregnant wife eating the food and then the couple not connecting that to a miscarriage until years after the fact.
But it seems very possible that the family mindset, especially earlier on, was not exactly "don't eat the food at grandma's cause she's a MURDERING POISONER," but rather "don't eat the food at grandma's because she's bad at cooking and her cooking will make you feel sick."
posted by geegollygosh at 5:51 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
....
Maybe the author is exaggerating, or misremebering, or is cherry-picking memories and events. But that's not your criticism, which is so simple and underinformed that I have to think that you didn't even read the article, or perhaps, you worked for INSCOM.
This is an oddly vehement reaction to a perfectly reasonable suggestion... Mold can cause the fatigue, the asthma, general malaise, and based on the description of the house it seems likely that there were mold issues going on. Sure, there are some things in the article that make it seem like it was deliberate poisoning, but it's not exactly a fact based article that we can take a sure stance on.
Anyway, this was a good read and I enjoyed it. The tone struck me as a little odd, too, but it's a pretty popular tone to have in memoirs of horrific families. What struck me as odder than the tone were the actual actions of the characters, especially, like others have mentioned, the pregnant wife eating the food and then the couple not connecting that to a miscarriage until years after the fact.
But it seems very possible that the family mindset, especially earlier on, was not exactly "don't eat the food at grandma's cause she's a MURDERING POISONER," but rather "don't eat the food at grandma's because she's bad at cooking and her cooking will make you feel sick."
posted by geegollygosh at 5:51 PM on October 27, 2014 [2 favorites]
I think to me the most striking thing other than, you know, all the poisoning and death, is the incident the author recalls where she threatened to burn off a 12-year-old's junk in front of other people. It makes me wonder what she was doing to this kid when she was alone with him.
posted by bile and syntax at 5:51 PM on October 27, 2014 [8 favorites]
posted by bile and syntax at 5:51 PM on October 27, 2014 [8 favorites]
Tabasco from 1994? Wonder how that would have went.
I recommend the Table Of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad.
Tabasco, 2-5 years.
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:34 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
I recommend the Table Of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad.
Tabasco, 2-5 years.
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:34 PM on October 27, 2014 [3 favorites]
I think to me the most striking thing other than, you know, all the poisoning and death, is the incident the author recalls where she threatened to burn off a 12-year-old's junk in front of other people.
I have at least two primary times in my life where adults in positions of authority threatened to harm me in ways that were totally unexpected and disproportional to anything that was happening. It was really hard as a child to reconcile this in a way that identifies it as abnormal, because we are born with an innate trust, I think, in those who take care of us, and we trust their moral authority to navigate the world. I suspect it's connected to how attachment works when we are quite young (it generally requires trust in a predictable and consistent caregiver who reliably helps us resolve emotional tensions), and why we have such a hard time working it out on a different moral plane when we get older. It "feels" like it's our fault when we are younger, because our authority figures are almost like god-figures to us.
Although we can recognize the wrongness of it objectively when it gets older, we've learned to carry the affective nature of the memory with us. Much of good counseling, I think, is learning how we can talk to our younger selves (who I think travel along with us in some real sense at a stunted point of growth) and get them up to speed on how to properly view things. Some of the WTF responses to the author of this article seems to be at his attempt to navigate the tension between his younger view of the world and a growing sense of how wrong it was, with a bit of uncertainty thrown in. It's probably hard to take decisive action at times when his emotions haven't quite caught up to the data and he is essential working on a probability argument anyway. I'm going to guess, though, that writing this article by itself was probably very therapeutic at putting these points in tension as he's working them out.
posted by SpacemanStix at 7:16 PM on October 27, 2014 [14 favorites]
I have at least two primary times in my life where adults in positions of authority threatened to harm me in ways that were totally unexpected and disproportional to anything that was happening. It was really hard as a child to reconcile this in a way that identifies it as abnormal, because we are born with an innate trust, I think, in those who take care of us, and we trust their moral authority to navigate the world. I suspect it's connected to how attachment works when we are quite young (it generally requires trust in a predictable and consistent caregiver who reliably helps us resolve emotional tensions), and why we have such a hard time working it out on a different moral plane when we get older. It "feels" like it's our fault when we are younger, because our authority figures are almost like god-figures to us.
Although we can recognize the wrongness of it objectively when it gets older, we've learned to carry the affective nature of the memory with us. Much of good counseling, I think, is learning how we can talk to our younger selves (who I think travel along with us in some real sense at a stunted point of growth) and get them up to speed on how to properly view things. Some of the WTF responses to the author of this article seems to be at his attempt to navigate the tension between his younger view of the world and a growing sense of how wrong it was, with a bit of uncertainty thrown in. It's probably hard to take decisive action at times when his emotions haven't quite caught up to the data and he is essential working on a probability argument anyway. I'm going to guess, though, that writing this article by itself was probably very therapeutic at putting these points in tension as he's working them out.
posted by SpacemanStix at 7:16 PM on October 27, 2014 [14 favorites]
Yeah the whole thing is making me nuts. What kind of person completely ignores the fact that somebody is (possibly... or probably) a serial killer? That she uses poison instead of a knife doesn't seem all that important. And then claim that nobody would care? That only people in the movies and ER docs care?
I think the author is messed up in the head and was badly warped by his upbringing and I hope he seeks professional help.
posted by Justinian at 10:20 PM on October 27, 2014
I think the author is messed up in the head and was badly warped by his upbringing and I hope he seeks professional help.
posted by Justinian at 10:20 PM on October 27, 2014
Except I think people don't care, when it's poison. There's such a lot of plausible deniability with poison, and if you try to report it, they'll just think YOU'RE the crazy one the way we did to our poor uncle, whose wife really did try to poison him. Fortunately, he got proof before it was too late. Also, she's not too bright. No, no one went to jail- he needed her health insurance plan.
posted by small_ruminant at 10:56 PM on October 27, 2014 [5 favorites]
posted by small_ruminant at 10:56 PM on October 27, 2014 [5 favorites]
It's not just the grandmother who is a serial killer in this family-- her first husband Irving worked for the mafia and was the victim of an attempted contract hit. Grandma said of Irving, “The kinds of things he did all day, you can’t come home and be Mr. Nice Guy, no way.” She seems to have been incredibly abusive to her son Norman, who then threatened the writer with knives and set him on fire just like his mother threatened to do to him. Yeah, the Great Depression turned an entire generation into hoarders, but it seems more likely that a lot of this violence is because the author came from a crime family full of sociopaths, not because Grandma was pathologically cheap.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 2:51 AM on October 28, 2014 [10 favorites]
posted by moonlight on vermont at 2:51 AM on October 28, 2014 [10 favorites]
Somewhere, David Lynch is reading this and taking frantic notes.
posted by Erasmouse at 3:04 AM on October 28, 2014 [7 favorites]
posted by Erasmouse at 3:04 AM on October 28, 2014 [7 favorites]
It occurs to me that the seeming indifference on the part of authorities he reports isn't so much different than what individuals who have been sexually assaulted experience, when alleging a crime down at the station (or the ER). Because in the eyes of law enforcement/medical professionals, teasing out "criminal poisoning vs. other cause" must seem just as maddening as "consensual sexual contact vs. assault." This after re-reading (medical doctor) Slarty Bartfest's comment above:
I don't have an opinion about whether this story is true or not, but cases of suspected poisoning are extremely difficult to deal with. If all you have is suspicion and vague symptoms, there is really no way to test all of the potential contaminated substances for all of the potential poisons. I'm one physician who, granted, takes care of a high proportion of people with mental illness and criminal behavior; this question has come up a half dozen times in my career which leads me to think the police probably hear these reports a lot.
posted by blue suede stockings at 4:12 AM on October 28, 2014 [1 favorite]
I don't have an opinion about whether this story is true or not, but cases of suspected poisoning are extremely difficult to deal with. If all you have is suspicion and vague symptoms, there is really no way to test all of the potential contaminated substances for all of the potential poisons. I'm one physician who, granted, takes care of a high proportion of people with mental illness and criminal behavior; this question has come up a half dozen times in my career which leads me to think the police probably hear these reports a lot.
posted by blue suede stockings at 4:12 AM on October 28, 2014 [1 favorite]
Oh, mudpuppie, I'm sure the description of the house is literally true: and it echoes and reinforces what's happening mentally and emotionally. Strong stuff.
posted by glasseyes at 4:32 AM on October 28, 2014
posted by glasseyes at 4:32 AM on October 28, 2014
What kind of person completely ignores the fact that somebody is (possibly... or probably) a serial killer?
In general, this article is a wonderful description of what happens in families when any kind of secret abuse is going on. Lots of people are, amazingly, capable of ignoring lots of things in families.
posted by anastasiav at 6:51 AM on October 28, 2014 [7 favorites]
In general, this article is a wonderful description of what happens in families when any kind of secret abuse is going on. Lots of people are, amazingly, capable of ignoring lots of things in families.
posted by anastasiav at 6:51 AM on October 28, 2014 [7 favorites]
I'm deeply uncomfortable with the blase tone of this article. Not because I don't believe that people can't be gaslighted into thinking all sorts of abusive behaviors are okay, but because Vice made the publishing decision to release the article. Regardless of the dysfunctional mental state behind the author's perspective, it reads to me like an article by a woman justifying why it's helpful for her husband to beat her and her kids if she burns dinner. It's sick and it's not okay, even if there's a deep-seated psychological explanation somewhere in there.
posted by fermezporte at 7:58 AM on October 28, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by fermezporte at 7:58 AM on October 28, 2014 [1 favorite]
I think the blasé tone is the author anticipating the accusation that he's overreacting. Which is reasonable, considering he grew up in this situation and nobody else seemed to mind.
posted by tel3path at 8:40 AM on October 28, 2014 [8 favorites]
posted by tel3path at 8:40 AM on October 28, 2014 [8 favorites]
Also consider how many AskMes are posted as "how do i learn to live with my partner's little quirks?" but those little quirks include not allowing the OP to leave the house for weeks at a time or something. When you live in a seriously fucked up situation for long enough, it becomes the new normal.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:21 AM on October 28, 2014 [14 favorites]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:21 AM on October 28, 2014 [14 favorites]
"My great-great grandmother on the other side of the family, infamously quipped to my great-grandmother (in earshot of my nine year old grandmother) during the worst part of the Great Depression that she either had to stop having children or start feeding the existing ones arsenic and broken glass "as a kindness." Said great-great grandmother would, a couple of years, later, kill her one of her daughters and her daughter's lover in an argument involving either the immorality of living outside of wedlock or not getting a fair cut in the bootleg liquor business or both."
Heh. My Indiana Gothic story is about how when my great great grandfather left his two girls at an orphanage so he could be an alcoholic circuit preacher, my great grandmother shot her sister and killed her. The familial gloss was, "Oh, back then you'd just give 10-year-olds guns to play with, no big deal."
posted by klangklangston at 9:37 AM on October 28, 2014 [1 favorite]
Heh. My Indiana Gothic story is about how when my great great grandfather left his two girls at an orphanage so he could be an alcoholic circuit preacher, my great grandmother shot her sister and killed her. The familial gloss was, "Oh, back then you'd just give 10-year-olds guns to play with, no big deal."
posted by klangklangston at 9:37 AM on October 28, 2014 [1 favorite]
"...relates this story of child abuse and murder with an almost jocular, Reader's Digest attitude."
That sensation may be due to reading relativity. Many article authors in our modern times have adopted a strategy of over-the-top hyperbole, and this author's decision to avoid exaggeration in favor of level-headedness makes it appear emotionless in contrast. There is plenty of emotion, it is merely understated, which I personally prefer.
This was an excellent article, thank you for sharing it.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 10:10 AM on October 28, 2014 [3 favorites]
That sensation may be due to reading relativity. Many article authors in our modern times have adopted a strategy of over-the-top hyperbole, and this author's decision to avoid exaggeration in favor of level-headedness makes it appear emotionless in contrast. There is plenty of emotion, it is merely understated, which I personally prefer.
This was an excellent article, thank you for sharing it.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 10:10 AM on October 28, 2014 [3 favorites]
From what I've observed, people who are faking stories like this tend to be literally jocular! Like really jolly hockey sticks! While recounting the most harrowing stories lol!
This author is more like, it was weird and gross, and we think maybe she was poisoning people? Yes? No? I think this was weird, was it weird?
posted by tel3path at 10:14 AM on October 28, 2014 [3 favorites]
This author is more like, it was weird and gross, and we think maybe she was poisoning people? Yes? No? I think this was weird, was it weird?
posted by tel3path at 10:14 AM on October 28, 2014 [3 favorites]
I have been reading about baby farms lately. This were sort of private orphanages, and they were sort of common around the turn of the 20th century. Often the parents would still be alive, and were the ones paying for the children's care -- they might be single mothers, or they might be parents who were too hard up or too unsettled to care for their children.
And a lot of the babies died. It was often kindly old women who did these jobs, and sometimes the deaths were based on pure incompetence, but I have found more than a few examples of criminal trials, where it is obvious the kindly old ladies were just offing the kids, who knows why. But there are always people who say, no, it's just queer coincidence, she's too sweet, she's just a harmless eccentric.
Hey, that reminds me. I once wrote a poem about Nanny Doss, a poisoner. And now I realize I am a morbid human being.
posted by maxsparber at 12:04 PM on October 28, 2014 [3 favorites]
And a lot of the babies died. It was often kindly old women who did these jobs, and sometimes the deaths were based on pure incompetence, but I have found more than a few examples of criminal trials, where it is obvious the kindly old ladies were just offing the kids, who knows why. But there are always people who say, no, it's just queer coincidence, she's too sweet, she's just a harmless eccentric.
Hey, that reminds me. I once wrote a poem about Nanny Doss, a poisoner. And now I realize I am a morbid human being.
posted by maxsparber at 12:04 PM on October 28, 2014 [3 favorites]
I thought the tone of the piece was an intentional choice so that you the reader were just as unsure as he was the whole way whether Grandma was really a poisoner, until you get to the end and you look back and see lines like:
"Grandma was always a good time, but when she wasn’t the host, wasn’t responsible for the food, it was like a weight was lifted from her, like she could really be free."
Which is put before he even mentions her odd cooking (or the fact that they started bringing their own food to Grandma's house). I can't believe that he would put that line in there without realizing it, I think he wanted you to look back and experience the feeling of connecting the dots yourself. Maybe she was relieved when she was cooking because she didn't have to think about whatever she was doing to others with her cooking?
posted by DynamiteToast at 1:59 PM on October 30, 2014 [1 favorite]
"Grandma was always a good time, but when she wasn’t the host, wasn’t responsible for the food, it was like a weight was lifted from her, like she could really be free."
Which is put before he even mentions her odd cooking (or the fact that they started bringing their own food to Grandma's house). I can't believe that he would put that line in there without realizing it, I think he wanted you to look back and experience the feeling of connecting the dots yourself. Maybe she was relieved when she was cooking because she didn't have to think about whatever she was doing to others with her cooking?
posted by DynamiteToast at 1:59 PM on October 30, 2014 [1 favorite]
What a good piece, thank you for linking it. This article connects so strongly to a particular very poignant feeling of uncertainty about family past. I've been doing some family history stuff, and surprisingly often come to a similar question of "wait, did so-and-so do a terrible thing?" that's just... unknowable, forever unsettleable. It's funny to think, for all the records we have of the last 100 years of family stuff (photos, home movies, paper trails better than any in the past), in many cases we're not much closer to pinning down the real truth about people/events of our past.
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:23 PM on October 30, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:23 PM on October 30, 2014 [2 favorites]
Threatening to burn off her own twelve-year-old's dick? Favoring her gentile-looking grandson over her son because her son looked "too Jewish"? Forcing her son to eat and then telling him he was hideously fat? That's all very cruel. And unlike the poisonings, there's not even a delusional practical benefit to any of it, either (let alone a real practical benefit).
All of these things are indeed cruel and terrible. However, they don't actually strike me as being particularly outlandish or unusual, given when they took place.
This story sent chills up my spine, because it seems entirely believable that the grandmother's behavior flew under the radar. Lots of small details resonated with stories I've heard about the older generations of my huge/complicated extended family.
My grandmother grew up during the depression, and raised a family of 5 almost entirely by herself, which led to all sorts of unusual behaviors and mannerisms. I'm pretty sure she never deliberately poisoned or killed anybody, but we dismissed all sorts of things for "grandma being grandma," "grandma's drafty house," "grandma cooked expired meat again," or "she's getting old."
posted by schmod at 10:45 AM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
All of these things are indeed cruel and terrible. However, they don't actually strike me as being particularly outlandish or unusual, given when they took place.
This story sent chills up my spine, because it seems entirely believable that the grandmother's behavior flew under the radar. Lots of small details resonated with stories I've heard about the older generations of my huge/complicated extended family.
My grandmother grew up during the depression, and raised a family of 5 almost entirely by herself, which led to all sorts of unusual behaviors and mannerisms. I'm pretty sure she never deliberately poisoned or killed anybody, but we dismissed all sorts of things for "grandma being grandma," "grandma's drafty house," "grandma cooked expired meat again," or "she's getting old."
posted by schmod at 10:45 AM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Also, reading this story brought back memories of TAL 175 Act 3, which has more or less been burned into my memory, as it perfectly captures the essence of a horrifically dysfunctional family that can't bear to let go of each other. Even after the people gain perspective of how horrible their relatives are, they essentially choose to ignore that perspective...
posted by schmod at 10:49 AM on November 4, 2014
posted by schmod at 10:49 AM on November 4, 2014
Baby farming, lord. When I was googling hard for photos of Italian wetnurses in the 30's, a site popped up whose premis is "The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken." (Lloyd Demause, Foundations of Psychohistory.) I won't quote a lot from the horrifying and graphic examples he cites except that this: "His account of how he watched her do away with the other babies she received provides a picture of the emotional reality behind all those centuries of infanticide we have been reviewing" prefaced an extract from Cradle of Life: The Story of One Man's Beginnings by Louis Adamic, (New York, 1936) who was apparently sent away to the country as an infant in the hope that he might thus fortuitously cease to be an inconvenience to his parents.
I've no way of knowing whether Lloyd Demause is a reasonable scholar or a crazy person on the internet, or whether his sources are correct but his conclusions somewhat idiosyncratic. I rather hope the latter.
posted by glasseyes at 7:51 AM on November 6, 2014 [2 favorites]
I've no way of knowing whether Lloyd Demause is a reasonable scholar or a crazy person on the internet, or whether his sources are correct but his conclusions somewhat idiosyncratic. I rather hope the latter.
posted by glasseyes at 7:51 AM on November 6, 2014 [2 favorites]
« Older Begun, the Wallet Wars, have. | OK Go won't let you down Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by nadawi at 12:00 PM on October 27, 2014