Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World

Prologue

A little Italian boy about nine, with wild and curly hair, rushed along the tenement streets of Harlem to meet his father at his fruit and vegetable store. This little boy admired his father, Carmelo, who seemed special to him with his beautiful red mustache and bright blue eyes. None of his Italian friends had a father so handsome. He hoped he would grow up to look exactly like Carmelo. As the little boy came around the corner near the store, he saw a huge crowd of people gathered around the boxes of grapes and oranges. They were not buying anything but were shouting fearfully in Italian. He pushed through the thickening crowd. In front of the vegetable boxes he found his father lying on the ground, with blood the color of his mustache pouring down his face. He had been murdered . The boy would never know by whom. A few years later when the boy was thirteen, he contracted meningitis. The illness did not kill him, but it did impair his vision so badly that he was declared legally blind. Shortly thereafter his mother died. These were tragic losses, but what was remarkable was that as he grew up, the boy chose not to let these events rob him of the joy of life. He owned a bicycle shop in Harlem and did everything a sighted person could do. He married and raised four children . He built a sailboat and sailed it around City Island. He repaired and drove cars, and lived life with such delight and vigor that his children were hardly aware of his past pain. Instead, they grew up hearing stories about a grandfather with a big red mustache and developed a strong visual appreciation of the world passed down to them by a man with limited sight. This extraordinary man was my father, Frank Mollica, son of Italian immigrants, and the way he lived his life taught me many valuable lessons about reality. From my father, I learned that we create our own reality, and often there is more than one to choose from. In some ways my father made my family, our friends, and our relatives all forget that he was nearly blind. Only when he declined to drive at night or when he asked to use my stethoscope to listen to a car engine—almost always making the correct diagnosis—was I reminded of his limited vision. He loved drawing and painting and helped my siblings and me make the most beautifully designed and colorful projects for school. His automotive garage was more like an artist’s loft than a repair shop, his tools arranged on color-coded boards. There was a harmonious arrangement to the usual automotive riffraff: barrels of oil and grease were placed just so; old mufflers were organized by make and size. My father was obsessed with “seeing,” and this obsession extended beyond the visual world. As he always told us, “See reality clearly, but never give up your dream.” No matter how terrible our life might become , we could always do something valuable with it. Years later, when he was failing from cancer of the lung that had spread to his brain, in a rare lucid moment he said, “Son, I want you 2 Prologue to know that the saddest thing that ever happened to me was the death of my father. I have missed him my entire life.” He cried gently, a few hours passed, and he died. Although my father’s early life was full of tragedy, he always approached his adversities with a sense of humor. One of his favorite expressions was, “Don’t worry, it’s going to get worse.” I never appreciated the extraordinary irony of this comment until I shared it with some Indo-Chinese colleagues, all of whom had experienced extreme violence. Their universal reaction to my father’s wisdom was to laugh. Later they inscribed his words in Khmer on the wall of the health clinic in a Cambodian refugee camp. My father fashioned a hopeful reality out of tragedy that most traumatized persons can relate to. Such people have a choice about how they want to see the world and construct a life for themselves out of their hurt and pain, and about how much of their pain they will share with others. More and more the individual trauma stories of ordinary citizens are being reconfigured into...