I didn't learn of my paternal grandfather's (and grandmother's) savage, relentless, bestial, physical cruelty to my father till I was a grown man--His sisters, my aunts, eventually told me about it--

But I always detested the son of a bitch nonetheless, from my earliest childhood, almost as much as if it had been I who had endured his sadistic abuse; and I was as cold to my grandmother as if it had been me whom she betrayed to him, and delivered into his hands.  I see now, looking at records from the cemetery where he is buried, that I was just ten years old when he died at the age of 82, but I recall the taunting sarcasm with which I refused to attend his funeral, and was allowed, without comment, not to. When the mourners came back from the funeral in the late afternoon, I greeted the few cousins of approximately my age with a mocking, deliberately disrespectful smirk and a smart-ass question, as if they'd come from a sporting event, "So how was the funeral?"  They seemed visibly shaken, but not sad or grief-stricken. My cousin Raymond said, "Grandma cried and yelled and tried to crawl into the coffin with him."  Passing adults shushed us at that point, but I could tell by looking at Raymond that the horror of the indecent spectacle that our grandmother had made of herself still gripped him; he looked as if he might puke, or faint. We stared at one another aghast till the adult presence had passed, then in a voice half a whisper, he added, "Uncle Marvin had to pull her out."