My father: ‘He and my mum were living like hippies and screwing around instead of tending to the business.’
My grandmother: ‘Albert was constantly getting into political and philosophical discussions. Someone would ring our door bell and he’d be off debating them for hours, instead of to the business.’

So what killed my grandfather’s business, a very large flower business that came with a modern villa, fields, greenhouses, etc?

That, in my father’s words, ‘he humped anything in a skirt, even a Scotsman would have been at risk’? Or my grandmother’s version of someone sucked into interesting conversations that had nothing to do with business. My father couldn’t forgive his father’s infidelity, which destabilized the home and am sure took attention and energy away that should have gone to my father. My mother told me one of his lovers didn’t want him to see my father and his sister, and Albert told them not to visit anymore. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if it was quite so blunt. I also know that my father told me when I was a small child that you could murder a person without physically murdering him. He was describing ‘ghosting’ before there was a word for it.

That made a big impression on me. I remember thinking: ‘Oh wow, my father can be ruthless once he decides something.’ I greatly admired him. At the same time I also had doubts. My father described how his father once tried to reconnect by putting on Paranoid by Black Sabbath in a bar with jukebox. My father refused to acknowledge the gesture. He said: ‘It was too late by then.’ My father never admitted: ‘The way my father was really hurt me and I deserved better treatment and more stability growing up.’

It was clear to me that my father had loved his father as a young boy, because for example he admired that even in the 1960s his father read magazines in several different languages and had all kinds of subscriptions to Der Spiegel and others. Not common in Belgium at the time, especially before the internet. This then points to my grandmother’s theory: a man obsessed with thinking and intellectual exploration while likely neglecting his business. He didn’t stay on top of trends, didn’t grow the flowers that became fashionable one year, I don’t know which, and the business failed.

The family likely went from well to do middle class with connections to even wealthier people to working class with little opportunity. My father got sucked even deeper into intellectual pursuits, glorified free love and unconventional people, but combined it with a stable factory job. Business scared him, because he saw what happens when it fails.

And yet it constantly pulled on him, because he repeatedly tried to push me or my mum into business. I ended up selling stuff fairly regularly at flea markets when I was 11 or so. When I told him he could do it, he said: ‘No, no, I will give you stuff, you do the selling.’ And when I refused eventually, at 15, he for once in his entire life called me an ‘idiot’ or at least some word in Aalstian dialect that means just that.

I suppose I was kinda being an idiot. You could make a fair amount of money at flea markets in Belgium in the 1990s. Not anymore now. (People started literally dumping their vinyl records and all kinds of things and at the same time others were hunting for those things, it was part of an economic boom and a cultural shift, that process is over now.) My grandmother didn’t really have the intellectual thirst, she was more drawn to intensity. Having affairs, art, drinking too much. My father loved Fawlty Towers and Absolutely Fabulous, maybe because his mum is like some of the characters.

A marginalized woman who for the rest of her life pretended to still be a rich young woman in the sixties. My father’s sister married a rich guy who terrorized her and messed up their two daughters. My grandfather killed himself, according to my mum over losing some lover, according to others because the business failed. My father’s sister killed herself in a bizarre way. But my grandma is still alive and has lovers in a third rate nursing home for the elderly at 91 now.

I haven’t spoken to her in 15 years or so, because my wounds are different again. I blame her for not making sure my father went to college. If I had the full story on that it might not look quite so simple. But I have seen enough professionally to know that some mums will fight till they are all frazzled to make sure their children don’t undersell themselves. And for me she failed the person I have loved the most in my life. The love I feel towards my father is not common.

An ex brimming with empathy once said: ‘I have never seen anyone look like a person the way you look at your father.’ It also angered me that my grandma was sexually attracted to one of my uncles AT HER SON’S FUNERAL. And so my father murdered his father, but not physically, and I murdered my grandmother, but not physically. Ghosting doesn’t quite capture the intensity of the wound.

The scariest part for me is how I live like Albert, my mind goes into all kinds of things that do not support my business at all. I have a lot in common with a man I never met who killed himself with a hunting rifle one year before I was born.

My energy does indeed go into things that lead to no money, I am indeed mesmerized by women. But I know have a son I have named after my father and I do not abandon him the least bit. In fact, today’s father’s day and he’s told me that what he likes best about me is that I let him do what he enjoys the most and the way I lift him up.

So I fear the same things plague me that plague Albert, and I do think I am at a serious risk of killing myself in ten years if I can’t integrate what is haunting me so much, but I overcame my father’s fear of business, I have been self-employed for 12 years now, and I am giving the same fatherly love and stability to my son I got from my father, and this without the horror stories.

My father shared his entire psychology and all the horrors of the world with me from the time I said my first words. I think that’s how family traumas evolve. Some things are shaken off, some things are overcome, some are improved upon, and some things take one more generation to get rid off.

Maybe my son will have a better business than mine, will be an even more fun father and will not have a drive for suicide when life doesn’t bring the rock and roll intensity the men and women in my family demand every second of every day.

Look at your wounds.

Don’t pass them on.