Finding horrible things when elderly people die. ***Edited by MNHQ to add: TW: contains details some may find upsetting including details of CSA***

[Dappy777]

Has anyone else cleaned out a loved one’s home and found horrible stuff?

Last year my father in law died. He was 78, had lived alone for several years and died suddenly. After his death, we went through the house and found a hidden stash of pornography. It wasn’t illegal, but the magazines were called things like ‘Babyface’ and ‘Just 18’. In other words, the models were as childlike as it was legally possible to photo. We also found several pornographic books and stuff he’d printed off the Internet. Again, it was all young and underage girls. My partner was very upset. His dad had an old laptop but my partner smashed and burned it (he was venting his anger). He said he didn’t want to know what was on there and that it was best if his father took any secrets to the grave.

Anyway, a neighbour recently told me a similar story, only in her case it was even darker. After her partner’s dad died, they found photos he had taken of young girls playing in a nearby park. She said it looked as if he’d taken them from his car. There were a lot, apparently, and she and her partner burnt everything.

I wonder how common this is? When my own father died, I found a bit of pornography, but it was all pretty tame and adult. Even that upset me though. In all three cases the men died suddenly. I suppose people with a terminal diagnosis have time to destroy such things.

@Boomer50
I was born in a mother and baby home to my unmarried mother in 1966.
It breaks my heart to think she might have been treated so unkindly 😭

Lol

@ForeverTheOptomist This is an anonymous forum and the author and subject of that post are anonymous.

It therefore cannot be invasive. It’s merely a story told on the internet. For all you know, it might not even be true!

This also shifts with age of the beholder, though. When I was a teenager I would have been disgusted to discover any trace that my parents or any of their friends had sex lives in their 40s! I'm nearly that age myself now and feel very differently about whether it's too old to have sex toys, lingerie or condoms, and suspect that when I'm nearly 70 I might feel the same way about whether pensioners should have given that all up...

You need therapy.

But all the men in the public eye in recent years who have been revealed to be child sexual abusers and/or involved in viewing and seeking child sexual abuse online, had people they lived with and loved, who thought they knew them, and who had no idea they were pedophiles.

It's not like they walk around wearing terry towelling hats and shorts and coke bottle spectacles.

In that case I must leave work immediately to divorce my husband, disown my son and join a women-only commune where we punish the masses for the sins of the few (er) on an hourly basis, and dine on our spite.
It's the only way.

No. Maybe just don't be so smug and act as if you have not encountered these men by virtue of your superior choices. It may well turn out one day you find you are married to one.

Smug?
No. There's many dick-heads out there. I never said I'd never met them... ever worked night shifts in A/E?
I'm just not prepared to slag off half the population.
Because it is absolutely NOT all men.

It might not be all men but it is most men. To some degree or another.

You are revolting. I’ve had lots of therapy for the abuse I’ve suffered in my life thanks, I suggest you get some to bring a bit of humanity into yours.

You’re being ridiculous now. That many men chose not to take advantage of “opportunities” that present themselves during their daily lives is something to be valued in a loved one. But huge numbers of “respectable” men are capable, and do, indulge in extra-marital flings at the very best, and darker impulses at the worst.

I’ve been on enough work conferences in a boring scientific environment, and seen previously respected colleagues copping off with younger staff. Observed leaving their hotel rooms in the morning etc. They truly think that because it was abroad then none of their family will find out about it and that none of their colleagues will let on. I’ve travelled quite a bit for work and realised after a bit that many of the men I chatted to in the course of events were actually seeing if I was up for it, there’s a kind of unspoken code.

So maybe NAMALT, but enough of them are like that to keep a high level of scepticism about men as a sex class in general and what they are capable of.

Not me, but a friend of my parents. His mother died about 20 years ago, and in a delirious state in the last week of her life kept talking about a man, things like "i need to tell you about Ken." and "Ken will be in touch. You'll find out" etc.
The week after she died a man named Ken got in touch and it was his 'long lost brother' who'd been put up for adoption when he was a baby but that literally nobody in the family knew about. There were letters going back YEARS in the house that his mother had written to him, and him to her, various documents and keepsakes that were all hidden away at the back of a wardrobe.

I'm not sure why she never told her son sooner - her husband had died many years before so I don't know why she didn't just say. It would have saved a lot of trauma. This friend didn't want anything to do with 'Ken' which I've always found quite sad.

I agree. I have known at least five women in my life who were raped or sexually abused and none of them went to the police. So their abusers carried on with their lives, grew old, and probably died surrounded by loving family. For example, a friend was sexually abused by her step grandfather when she was six or seven. She never told anyone. No doubt people thought he was a sweet old man, and no doubt his old mates gave speeches at his funeral about what a great guy he was.

There was a documentary on a while back about rape cases being re-investigated using advances in DNA. The men they caught were now in their 60s or 70s and had committed the rapes 20 or so years before. One was living in a big detached house surrounded by photos of his grandchildren. He'd brutally raped a schoolgirl in woodland in his 20s! I often look at 'respectable' men and wonder what secrets they'll take with them to the grave.

Well it would have had his parents’ names on the birth certificate, and he would have recognised his uncle’s name.

If you mean why didn’t they keep it a secret, presumably someone else knew, and I can think of various reasons surrounding that.

Have you never watched Long Lost Family ?

You think women don't have extra marital affairs and sex for the hell of it?

Luckily she bounced back

Ah, the old “women do it too” gambit. Yes, some women do have affairs and flings. But proportionally, at a lot lower rate than men.

Male sexuality and female sexuality are very different in how they manifest. You’ve only got to look at the gay and lesbian scenes. You don’t get lesbians cottaging and having sex in the bushes on Hampstead Heath. And to make it clear, I’m saying that behaviour is a male thing, not a gay thing. If male sexuality isn’t moderated by the society accepted method of seek out consenting adult female partners, then it rapidly runs to extremes.

As one of the executors, she may have to!

This is one of those unknowables. I've been recently reading quite a lot about WW2 and women were not notably less cruel than men in many instances. Female Soviet army personnel encouraged and were amused by Russian soldiers raping German women, for example. And it was well known that the women guards in Ravensbruck, the majority-female concentration camp, were more brutal than the men.

Just as an addition to this, I was sexually abused by my Grandmother's husband... It started at their wedding reception and drew to an end when I got older, he tried it again and I threatened to kill him. I have told no one about this and it was me with him when he dropped dead and I was kind to him. My Grandmother kept his ashes and when she died I took them and tipped them over the wall at the local tip and recycled the jar there too. Yes he did die without being brought to justice, there must have been more than me but there was no one after me. My real coup here was I was the last face he saw and I was kind because I had a momentary thought that I could say something awful but more importantly and for my own peace of mind, I needed him to know he hadn't damaged me. I didn't go through his things, my Dad did and I don't want to know what was there because just logically there would be something horrible. He did get away with it though for sure but what could I do? By the time I had the wherewithall to threaten him what could I do? Break my Grandmother's heart? I did watch closely and there was no contact with any other children, I felt that was my responsibility. God knows what shit he had stashed as he died unexpectedly but my Dad has never said a thing.

When I cleared out my DF's belongings after he died I discovered that he had been interviewed under caution several times for the (physical) abuse of 21 boys in his care when he was a teacher. He threw one through a plate glass window. 21 boys had come forward separately when they grew up and complained about him. From reading the documents it was also obvious he was guilty. It was part of a wider scandal at the school he worked at where abuse, it turned out, was widespread. The sexual abusers were prosecuted but the physical abusers were left alone. He didn't get a gravestone after that. Abusers don't get to be remembered.

Maybe so, I have no knowledge of these things. But they were women who grew up in a patriarchal society, who were operating in a patriarchal society, who maybe felt that they had to prove themselves in a 'man's world', who felt like they had to measure up to the men. They also would have been brutalised by a war started by men and by political systems imposed upon them by men.