Hello all!
Just wanting to vent really. Bit of background info, my grandad left my grandmother about 8 years ago for a younger woman, randomly announced one morning he was leaving and moving in with her in the middle of nowhere about 10 miles away where the village is predominantly Welsh speaking (the only word he knows or knew was banana).
My GM passed away earlier this year suddenly from complications due to a cancer she didn’t know she had and my GD’s sister passed away suddenly and young at the end of last year. Since then GD’s GF has been phoning me regularly stating how he’s not himself (assumed it was depression and grief), had been hallucinating (seeing envelopes fly out of car windows and saying it was ghosts), loosing his mind through forgetfulness, wandering off/walking back to our house and had become aggressive (he’d never hurt a fly previously). I’d regularly provide advice and support, visiting when able etc, assuming the death of his wife and his lack of coping mechanisms due to our emotionally unattached descendants, possible guilt over leaving her causing him to become unhappy in their relationship.
A few weeks ago she phoned me ‘GD has gone walkies again, I can’t go and find him as just had surgery. I normally find him in X village on the way back to yours, can you go find him please as I can’t drive.’ My brother and I got straight in the car to go find him and by chance he happened to be on the first road we tried, literally the last road I would normally have gone on to get to their house but I think it was meant to be.
He got in the car, he sounded confused and delirious which isn’t surprising the distance he had walked. He was adamant he didn’t want to go back and he was coming home with me to live with my mother. Brought him home and on the way he kept saying how she’s unpredictable, he never knows which way she’s going to turn, he never seems to do anything right. Got home and my brother goes home, GD comes into our house to see our baby, cuppa tea and me attempting to get him to eat. When it was just us he showed me his eye, he said ‘she did this to me because fireworks night she made me drive and I can’t drive at night anymore, she knows that but she wouldn’t drive, said I had to.’ He’s got bad eyes, had to have an op for glaucoma last year which I’ve recently found out can be caused by continued trauma.
My partner didn’t know what to think as we had one story from her and another from him, I instantly took my GD’s side where as DP was much less biased and read up on side effects from his medication etc. It has since come to light a friend of ours saw her ‘beating seven bells’ out of him in a local retail car park a few months prior which he didn’t know how to tell us also thought it wasn’t his business to say. So there’s a witness to the abuse.
Several weeks on, my GD is 100% more with it, seems himself, happier, talkative etc. Yet he’s going back up to her house pretty much daily to ‘do work’. Since then he has said to me we got the wrong end of the stick and it’s all his fault for why she did that to him, attempting to explain why it is his fault to me, I have tried explaining when someone lays a hand on you, regardless of circumstances, you are never to blame but at the same time I want him to keep talking to me as he hasn’t spoken about any of this to anybody else so I don’t want to keep pushing or I’m going to push him away. He has started becoming less talkative again since going back to her house, I’m just grateful he is still living with my mother and I’m checking he’s home before dark nightly.
I know I’m his era domestic abuse wasn’t talked about let along being a male victim, it’s hard enough these days for men to come forward. I guess I just want to have a rant about the whole situation.
She’s also a nurse so I am so tempted to report her but obviously would need my GD’s consent and statements etc for that but if she can do that to someone who she apparently loves, what might she be like with patients?!