Dean Godding, born in 1953, was my mother's high school sweetheart. He dropped out of high school his junior year because he was sick of it and went off to do bigger and better things, as he put it. He was born and raise at 606 Lynn Street in the Forth Ward district of Janesville. After he had a steady income, his parents bought a new house near where Laury lived and gave their house to Dean where he would live until he married my mother. He spent his life at a metal working corporation in downtown Janesville where he worked up until his death in 1997.

He entered my life when I was four-years-old. I met him in the morning of a weekend. My friend Samantha had spent the night, and when we woke up he was there. He was a tall man with a cast down his entire right leg. He had broken it was work after being pinned down by a several ton piece of work. He was a bright and happy man, and he was very nice to me. I liked him. He made us eggs, which I remember Sam hated.

After living in the apartment on Centerway Avenue for about a year, we moved in with Dean to his house. For the first while, I slept in the living room downstairs where I would watch Comedy Central each night. Mind you, I didn't like Comedy Central. I also remember totally freaked out by the TV because it would randomly turn on and off. The TV is older than I am, and it still works. I have it in my room these days. It's a 32" =D

I eventually gained the room in the second floor would I swear was haunted. One day, while sleeping, I felt a hand rouching my leg. I looked out through a tiny slit of my eyelids and saw nothing. It felt like the hand was moving and gripping my leg. When I got up, the feeling went away and no one was there. That scared the crap out of me to no end.

Next door lived the Schumochers. I became great friends with Johnathan Schumocher, and eventually brought him into my way of destruction. Johnathan and I would ALWAYS cause problems because there was just so much wrong we could do in the area. No one really cared, as far as our neighbors go. It was Forth Ward; violence and naughty acts are common.

Dean became more involved in my life and tried to be a step-father, but he didn't know how to handle my ADHD and OCD very well; but he tried. Every day he would pick me up from Laury's and play with me like any father or step-father should do. But somewhere along the line, things changed.

My fifth birthday was probably the only big birthday party I had ever had in my life. Matt, Samantha, Johnathan, my cousins Chris, Jenny, and Eric, and my entire family were there. Oh it was such a blast! At one point, I told myself that at the age of five, I must know everything there is to know [about the rules of life] and that was that. Such innocense at that age, isn't it?

I also remember my one Christmas spent there. My mother and Dean got me a train car set which I absolutely loved. It had a customizable track that was a few meters long, and Could play with it for days. Oh how wonderful it was!

Dean would always play with me. Lift me into the air with his feet and make funny noises, tickle me, and more. It was such a fun time for me, but at the same time I was complete unaware of my problems with ADHD and OCD. So I always thought that Dean liked me, and I always loved him because of it, so much so that I called him "dad." One day that all came to a crashing hault. While in his truck, Dean and I were driving to somewhere in town for whatever reason. I had been thinking about how my last name was Frank, and how his and my mother's last name was Godding. So I asked him, "Can I take on your last name?" His response ended my entire comfort and care for him. He said to me, "No, you could never have my last name. It would be a disgrace and a dishonor to my family to let you have it." The rest of the truck drive was silent.

So there it began. What began was a long and painful struggle leading up to a climax in 1997.

Dean didn't like me and hadn't liked me for awhile. Why? He couldn't handle my ADHD and OCD. He didn't know how to handle it. So to handle it he would scream, yell, and get mad at me. No matter what I would say, he would give me a cold response. No matter what I did, he would give me a cold response. Any mistake that any and every child would make, he'd treat it as if only I were the one who would do it. So he'd scream and yell at me, and never be kind to me.

For years this went on, and for years my mother just quietly let it happen. She never let him hit me, but hitting didn't involve shoving me into my bed or up against a wall. On top of all of the fights between Dean and I, I would hear arguments between my mother and him. She would fight with him because of how he treated me, and she would scream and yell. I hated it, I couldn't stand it, and it made me depressed.

Around 1995, Dean began complainign about back and hip pain. He was a juditsu master who had ascended so far in the ranks that even the black and red striped belt was not worthy of him. If you know anything about martial arts, black-belts come in degrees 1 through 5. Once you ascend past 5, you get a black belt with red striped. If you manage to ascend past that, you recycle the belts back to the begining and get belts with red striped through them. Dean had worked 43 years to get to where he was, and he could no longer teach juditsu. This started a long and painful process that would lead up to his death.

Little did I know it, but Dean had a biological child with another woman, but she divorced him and took his son away. One thing I didn't know about my mother and Dean was that despite family counseling and personal counseling for me, my mother and Dean also were getting marriage counseling from the same doctor. At one point in early 1997, Doctor Brown said to Dean, "You have to either learn to handle Graham or leave this marriage. You have damaged Graham beyond any level possible, and it shows every time I speak with him." My mother then told him, "You need to be the adult, or I will divorce you."

My mother tells me that at that moment he knew what he would do months later on December 27th, 1997. The fighting simply continued, and Dean didn't do anything but get worse. I became a vent for him to unleash all of his rage and fury at.

On December 23, 1997, family friend and co-worker with my mother, Kim Schneider, came to visit with my mother and Dean. I had no idea the problems within our household that had been going on, and the absence of a Christmas tree didn't really bother me. Kim had come over to give us a Christmas tree as a gift so that we would have one for the year. She knew that my mother had told Dean that she had decided to divorce him. A couple months ago I got the chance to speak with Kim and her husband Ed about Dean, and Kim told me something about that day that I never knew. Dean was never a touchy-feely person, and he never gave hugs to anyone but my mother. Furthermore, he was never really involved with conversation. That day, he sat down with my mother and Kim and drank wine with them for the whole three hours she was there. When Kim went to leave, Dean gave her a big hug. Kim says to this day she feels partly responsible for the events on the 26th and 27th of December because she knew it was going to happen simply by how he acted.

On December 26, 2005, Dean and I had a falling out. Dean got mad at me for some reason that I cannot recall, and we got into a very loud fight. At its climax, Dean slammed me against a wall in a hallway attached to the kitchen and just stared at me nose-to-nose. I remember smelling the wine on his breath, and I made a noise to him. At that point, my mother did something which she had never done before: she stepped in between Dean and I and told Dean to back off. The look on his face was that of complete disbelief, and he stormed out of the room and into the living room where he continued to drink his wine. To ease the tension, my mother took me to go get a game from Toys-R-Us. When we returned, Dean was gone.

On the dinning room table there was a note left on a brown paper bag. It read, "It is tyme to go." I saw his misspelling of "tyme" and said, "Maybe he went to the Tyme machine?" My mother said no. Then I said he probably went to the juditsu school since it was a Wednesday night and judo was held on Wednesday nights. My mother called around asking if anyone had seen him, and no one had. When she told herself that he would be back that night, she stopped calling people. To this day, she regrets it. Dean's close french Jim Hendrickson, had seen Dean's truck out by the Rock River on Pearl Street near his old house. My mom had went to call him but decided not to.

The next morning, Dean wasn't around and he didn't show up to work. It was the first time in 30 years he hadn't shown up to work. So my mother went to work and I stayed home because there was no school that day. I was eleven-years-old at the time. At around 11:30AM, two men with guns showed up at the house. I didn't know who they were, and I was totally freaked out, so I called my mother. My mother called back and told me they were detectives from the Janesville Police Department. She came home thirty minutes later to speak with the men. What they had to tell my mother would eventually shock and sadden some 30,000 people.

Dean had committed suicide by an overdose on cocain at Pearl Street on December 27, 1997, at around 3AM. He was found dead by a local fisherman who went to ask Dean if the fish were biting well that day.

Dean was dead.

That day and for the following several months, our family and friends kept a close eye on my mother, myself, and the house. Everyone in our family took over my mother's chores for the first six months. My Grandmother Polly cleaned, my Aunt Cara cooked, and other members of my family helped out. Both my mother and Kim were devastated. Both knew it was going to happen, and both feel guilt to this day for not doing anything about it.

At Dean's wake, a line of people over a mile long came to give their final farewells. A juditsu chamionship in Northern Wisconsin was called off so that the members of the National Juditsu Foundation could come and pay their respects. One thing that was ringing throughout my family and close friends was, "Graham doesn't seem too upset?"

I wasn't upset, at the time I was happy that he had died. I was happy that the horror he had given me had finally come to pass. It was just my mother and I again, and were the closest any mother and her child could be! To me, everything was perfect.

I was wrong.

My mother's grief for his death became her depression. She changed, and she became cold. For years after his death, she didn't trust men and she hated me because of it. As much as she denied it, I would later come to find out that she blamed me for his death. She always said that his death was because he couldn't handle another divorce. Recently, she yelled to me that the divorce was because of me.

Dean was gone, and my close relationship with my mother was torn to shreads because of it.

Submit a Comment

There are no comments for this blog entry.