My Father died of heart failure; a violent seizing of the heart. But it was the madness that brought him to that end. I was unaware when he died; but when I found out, I plummeted into what seemed like a whole different world; a nightmare of unreality. Suddenly, Life became Death to me; with an all-consuming hunger not yet satisfied to return to Life again. I wonder now if that is what madness was like to him, this unreality. To a man who loves his family; seeing it disintegrate into Us vs. Them is heartrending and infuriating--the rift, the abuse that caused it, and the slander that surrounds it all.  It is no longer the thing he set out to create when before he married he envisioned his family. It is love, yes; but now it is not love alone. Now it has become something else in addition to love: War, and war is madness. Love earnestly desires a healing of it all; and my Father till the day he died held out his heart to forgive the abuser and those who slander him in regards to his response to the abuse, saying he is unjust in dividing she from me. Indeed, knowing him as I do; his heart would be toward forgiveness still if he was not dead. Yet, still these of whom I speak refuse to reason; they refuse the truth; they slander him still. I love them as he did--to this day; yet, what healing can take place, what relationship can exist between us if that love is trampled time after time by a persistent refusal to acknowledge the truth?And to continue to slander the one, driven to his death by this madness, who was honorable enough to tell it is, as they say, to merely dance upon his grave.