"Get him away from here!" dad yelled as he motioned with a pistol in one hand and my dead dog held by the scruff of his neck in the other. He shot my dog through the head.

I cried just a moment before, begging dad not to shoot him.

"I'm gonna kill that damned dog!" he yelled and he ran into the house and returned in a flash with a pistol in his hand.

"Don't shoot him! Please, don't shoot him!" my mom pleaded also. I think the only thing I did at that point was scream.

I broke away from mom and rounded the corner just after the two shots were fired."Get him away!" Dad yelled again. That pistol waving me away. Was I next? What if I dug holes in the yard? Would he shoot me, too?

All I could do is run, screaming and crying. I didn't know whether to run away, or just run. I couldn't get the sight of my limp dog out of my head. Just a few moments before he was alive and so extremely happy to see me as we returned home from our vacation.

I ran in circles. I couldn't be consoled. I couldn't be touched. I ran, and I ran. I didn't have anywhere to run to. But running was the only thing I could think to do. I could only run in circles, and when I was blocked one way, I would go the other. Then I would double back and run straight past them. The sight of it all was just way too much overload for my six or seven year-old brain to comprehend and process. To this day, I'm not even sure exactly how old I was when it happened. Mom says I was "about six."

I didn't know what dad did with my dog. I saw the blood on his hand, but by the time I stopped running, it was as if everyone denied that it happened at all. They denied it! Damn them! I wasn't nuts! I know what I saw. I know it was real. I had a dog just a little while ago, and now he is gone. Killed. Shot in the head.

"Please, please, please don't bring this up again," mom pleaded with me. "It will just make him more angry at both of us. Please don't cry anymore. Please. Please don't cry....shhhhh, it'll be okay. Shhhhhh, be quiet now. Please, please be still."

And so that's how our family vacation ended that summer. Dad had other dogs, all them trained hunting dogs. At times, over a dozen. It was his hobby to raise dogs and go hunting. He humored me by allowing me to have what he referred to as a worthless dog that wasn't trained, whose only purpose was to spoil me. He hated that dog from the moment he brought him home. But he was being big-hearted, he concluded. My dog was yappy and lively and when he got nervous, he dug holes. He couldn't stand being put on a 50 foot chain. It just wasn't enough for him. He begged for freedom with every incessant bark. He was just like me.

The next morning I got out of bed and all I can remember was asking what dad did with my dog.

"I don't know," mom said, "but please don't ask him about it. Just let it go. Go outside and play. Okay?"

Play?

Play with what—the nightmares of what just happened? All I could do is avoid dad. Just stay the hell away from him.

And so I consistently avoided him at all costs. I rarely talked to him even when he demanded that I have a conversation with him. But it was all set up as I was born, this elaborate, terrible war zone.

Mom learned early after I was born that I could be her shield. When she had me in her arms, dad was less likely to attack. He despised me because of it. We were divided into two camps. Dad and my younger brother, and mom and I. Mom pushed my brother on to dad so he wouldn't keep coming after her. A distraction. The boy he really wanted. I was the whipping post. I was the one who caused every problem in their marriage. I was what stood between him and his wife. And I heard about it until I was nearly 20 years old.

Once I was in the bathtub with my brother. We were very young. Maybe four and five years old. Dad came in to pee. He glared at me with disgust. "Stand up," he demanded.

I looked away.

"Stand up, I said."

I took the wash cloth and covered myself. I didn't stand.

He grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me up out of the water.

"You skinny little fart. When are you going to put some meat on those bones? When?!!"

I looked down and wanted to cry, but couldn't. I was afraid he would hit me.

I never felt like I was a male growing up, and well into my adult-hood. I felt like an "it." My brother was the male, not me. It made us enemies for nearly 40 years.

Anger. So very, very much anger and even more rage. It's all I knew from dad as I grew up. What made him so angry? I learned as I grew older. It was gruesome and incredibly tragic. It was guilt for having lived when his younger brother didn't. It was about his mother too consumed with her own depression and grief to help the son who actually did survive. It was deep anger at the God who allowed all this to happen. It was the terrible guilt of feeling that way, and then trying to make up for it by becoming overly religious. He had to prove himself to this God he secretly hated. And dad became my iron-fisted, abusive god. God was right no matter what. If there was a God, dad was the model.

By the time I was 10 years old, I wanted to die. I was not liked in school. I was a loner. I would make friends and something would happen and I would melt down, or freak out, and that would end it. I always responded in my six-year-old maturity. I was emotionally frozen. I didn't know how to move forward. There wasn't a way to let go of what happened.

On the play ground one day after being ridiculed most of the day for peeing my pants (which didn't happen—a girl splashed water on me to make it look like I did) I flipped out and called a kid a "little son-of-bitchin' bastard" which promptly put me in detention and a phone call was made by my teacher. Every one was mortified that the Mormon kid would use such words.

"I'm just so shocked," said my teacher. "You supposedly being a good Mormon family and all. Makes the rest of us Christians wonder what really goes on in your house."

My brother and I fought all the time. Dad decided to put boxing gloves on us, and make us fight. I refused to punch. I couldn't do it.

"Punch him!" Dad screamed at me over and over while my brother thumped me.

I just stood there like a helpless little fool, crying. As long as dad stood there, I couldn't win no matter what. He would make sure of it.

"You little sissy!" he demeaned, "Punch him!"

But when he wasn't around we pounded on each other. No one ever won, really. It didn't ever resolve anything, obviously. But, thankfully, we did grow up. And we both learned harsh lessons. My very powerful, very confident brother learned what it's like to become frightened and unsure, and wonder if the world ran the way he always thought it did. And as that happened, I began to find my own power, my own confidence, and I learned the world is okay. It's just my perception that was most at fault. But I wouldn't come to that realization for decades.

I was often sick. In retrospect, it was the constant stress and trauma. I experienced so many things and was told they never happened. Complete denial. It was insanity. I knew in my head and heart what I experienced, but what I was told never added up. My mind obsessed constantly about the unrectifiability of it all. My body was hard wiring in all the wrong directions physically and mentally. I had stomach aches all the time. I had headaches that were completely disabling. And I still had my teen years to face.

At 14, I started to make suicide plans. I had a date and time, but when it came right down to it, I silently proved to myself dad was right. I was a coward and I couldn't go do it. And so that scenario would repeat itself over and over until I was 43 years old. I'm not sure at this point why I didn't go through with it because I had so extremely little to live for, it seemed.

This was my life. It isn't that there weren't happy times. That's not it. There were incredibly funny moments. Happy gatherings. But they were all so minimized with the trauma I lived through almost daily.

And so my life was insane. Insane and confusing. I didn't know what my feelings of being attracted to men meant. I knew I shouldn't tell anyone. No one. I was gay before the word was even invented. The word "gay" wouldn't even come along until I was in junior high. Until then they were just queers. I wasn't about to be queer. Not me. But as life continued, I would suppress those feelings along with my insane experiences. Suppress them for decades, until Christmas day when I was 42. Then flashbacks started, the first being my dad shooting my dog. And then I remembered. I found my dog in a big barrel used as a garbage can a few days later while I was outside playing. I was traumatized again. Inconsolable when it happened as a child and as I remembered it as an adult. I couldn't go to mom who had her own trauma to deal with. I couldn't go to anyone. And now over 35 years later, I just felt stupid and helpless and knew I must be nuts. I didn't know if I was imagining all this or if it really happened. When I talked to my wife, she couldn't believe me. It was too much for her to take in. Finally, I made a phone call home.

"Merry Christmas, mom..."

As we talked, I cried, and she cried with me. "I prayed and prayed and prayed that you would forget all this," she lamented. "I didn't know what else to do. I'm so sorry. I'm just so sorry."

It would get worse before it got better. It took such a long time, it seemed. It was such an incredibly long road from these beginnings to holding dad's hand as he bled from his eyes, ears, mouth and nose and took his last breath.

I called to my brother who was just in the other room, "Get mom. This is it."

As he woke Mom, my sister and yougest brother that night, and they collected themselves to gather in his room, I said so softly, "I love you, dad. You're free now. No more suffering. No more sorrow. It's okay. We're good. I love you."