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Was He a Psychopath or a Broken Empath?
I used to think his unsettling acts were rooted in cruelty. Thirty years later, I’m not so sure.
“I take it away from the others before I kill it. It’s quick. They don’t know what’s coming, that it’s their time. Then it’s over. Rozumiesz?”
He was talking about the broke-neck rabbit in his hands whose time had come.
He often peppered our conversations with rozumiesz? — “Do you understand?”
I did, sometimes. I was raised bilingual, but I was only six, still learning both. And he mumbled, so language wasn’t our only communication hurdle.
Of all my grandparents, I knew him the least. Every summer, we’d return to Poland. But even after our 24-hour, door-to-door journey, he rarely came to dinner or spent time with us.
We’d stay at my uncle’s big new house on the 11-acre property where my grandpa’s old, weathered one-bedroom house stood, the place he often disappeared into. With age, I grew more aware of his alcoholism, and his absence didn’t need explanation.
I’d spot him from the swing under the big cherry tree — drifting through the fields, tending to the apple orchard, acres of berries, beets, and potatoes, the vegetable garden, the greenhouse full of tomatoes and…
