When the children have the last word

Ken Herman

Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013 | 2 a.m.

I’ve joked for a long time that among the reasons to be nice to your kids is that they’ll pick the nursing home you’ll be in and you’re always in jeopardy of winding up in Bedsore Manor where a “60 Minutes” crew will drop by to ask questions such as, “Have they fed you this year?”

Here’s another reason — powerfully driven home recently by two siblings — to be nice to your kids: There’s a good chance they’ll write your obituary.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the recent Reno Gazette-Journal obit for Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick that said she “died alone” on Aug. 30 and is survived by the “children whom she spent her lifetime torturing in every way possible.”

“While she neglected and abused her small children, she refused to allow anyone else to care or show compassion towards them,” the obit said. “When they became adults she stalked and tortured anyone they dared to love. Everyone she met, adult or child, was tortured by her cruelty and exposure to violence, criminal activity, vulgarity and hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit.”

The obit said her children “celebrate her passing from this earth and hope she lives in the afterlife reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty and shame that she delivered on her children.”

It ended with a call for “a national movement that mandates a purposeful and dedicated war against child abuse in the United States of America.”

The backstory about the deceased woman is that six of her children wound up in a Nevada orphanage after being removed from her home. The children had been estranged from their mother for 30 years.

News stories about the obit mentioned Katherine Reddick, the dead woman’s daughter, who was identified as a psychology consultant for a Texas school district. I tracked it down to the Pflugerville district but was told she has not worked there in more than a year. I was unable to get a working phone number for her.

Patrick Reddick of Minden, south of Carson City, told me his sister Katherine, who worked with him on the obit, did not want to talk about it. But he did, telling me, “We wanted to focus on child abuse more than our whole story; however, the whole world seems to want to cut us up into bits and pieces and sensationalize certain things.”

Each of us can have our own thoughts about the obit. Patrick Reddick said the attention it’s drawn is proof of its success. Chalk him up as the latest addition to the growing list of people surprised by how far and fast news travels in the digital era.

“It went so much huger than we thought it would go,” he said. “We got the message out worldwide. We expected to get it out in the local area and maybe the state of Nevada.”

He’s pleased with the impact.

“Even people who weren’t abused said they went home and hugged their children and said how much they loved them. And they told their mom, ‘Thank you for being a good mom,’” Reddick said.

Odd, isn’t it, how such negative words can have such a positive impact?

Those of us blessed with good parents probably (and thankfully) never will understand the challenges faced by the kids of uncaring, abusive parents. It’s hard to even imagine that there are uncaring, abusive parents. So many of our world’s problems are caused by those kinds of people. There ought to be a law ...

Along those lines, I was struck by a prayer I noticed in the new prayerbook used in my synagogue this year for the recent High Holy Days.

The prayer, written by Rabbi Robert Saks of the Washington, D.C., area, is included as an option in the memorial service for deceased relatives. It’s offered “in memory of a parent who was hurtful” and stands in stark contrast to the other prayers on those pages.

“The parent I remember was not kind to me,” the prayer says. “His/her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and of dismay that a parent could hurt child as I was hurt. ... Help me, O God, to subdue my bitter emotions that do me no good, and to find that place in myself where happier memories may lie hidden, and where grief for all that could have been, all that should have been, may be calmed by forgiveness, or at least soothed by the passage of time.”

Saks told me he wrote the prayer more than a decade ago after a congregant who was a therapist told him she had patients who struggled with saying the traditional mourner’s prayer for a parent “because they don’t have good feelings about their parents.”

Saks also said his prayer had particular resonance when he became rabbi at Washington’s Bet Mishpachah (House of Family), a congregation of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Jews. The prayer, Saks said, was particularly relevant for congregants — especially older ones — whose parents never accepted their child’s sexuality.

“Of course it’s sad,” Saks said of the need for his prayer, “but we all know not everybody has wonderful parents.”

There are many prayers rooted in sorrow, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one any sadder than that one.

Ken Herman is a columnist for the Austin American-Statesman.