Our mother was born into wealthy in 1966 around Northwest Indiana, being the only member of her family who is legally blind with a congenital form of nystagmus. Having a disability was considered shameful to your social status during that generation- especially to her politically motivated household. Her family carried many secrets and scandals behind the façade of Christianity and politics. Our grandfather, Frank A.J. Stodola, had once been a respected attorney and judge who ran for Congress before being indicted under the RICO Act in 1987. After his incarceration, the rest of her family continued to deny our mother's disability and obvious mental health decline out of personal shame for her condition. Instead of suggesting mental healthcare services or helping her to acquire disability support, they ignored her very serious issues.
Because of this, my brother and I were bounced around from ghetto to ghetto, the most popular area being Gary Indiana, one of the murder capitals of the United States where survival of the fittest is a daily battle. We lived in apartments that were so infested with cockroaches they would crawl all over us at night. There were so many roaches, they chewed the ends of our hair and eyebrows off as a food source- we would wake up screaming when they crawled in our mouths. My brother and I both remember being abused by daycare workers and babysitters- the first time I saw someone get shot I was five years old.
Our mother's family had the means to help us but chose to do nothing, they just watched us endure the consequences of living with a mentally ill person, while they enjoyed privileged lives. Our grandmother watched her own daughter unravel from the day she was born. For whatever reason, she allowed us—her grandchildren—to suffer because of it. Year after year she observed it happen every step of the way, while my brother and I were left to suffer the consequences.
By the time I was eight, my own mother was calling me a whore because of the hatred she had for herself. She often told me of her regret that she didn't have me aborted when she had the chance- she was a very angry, very sick woman. As a child, I often wondered why the other poor families in the hood at least had love for each other. Everyone was poor, angry and desperate trying to make it, but I saw so much love when I would visit my friend's homes. It left me so confused for many years.
Our childhoods were basically stolen from us— we raised ourselves as best we could with no food or money to survive. My brother spent years trapped in his bedroom, isolated by his blindness. My earliest memories of my brother are haunted with our mother regularly screaming in his face, “YOU CAN SEE, YOU CAN SEE! STOP ACTING LIKE YOU'RE STUPID!”- as if yelling at him would magically give him the ability of sight. I believed her when she said that he could see just like everyone else, because I was a child and she was my mother. My brother, the victim, believed her too because he never knew any different- he was born that way. The family secret carried out for decades. It was the greatest lie we had ever been told.
In high school, Dan never had any friends and was tormented so badly he wanted to kill himself, but the gun in the house had no bullets. I fought bullies for him the best I could, but I was so emotionally and physically weak at the time that I couldn’t stop them all. I was also persecuted by most of the kids at school and considered suicide many times during that part of my life. In 2002, at sixteen, I left home with one promise to myself: one day I would go back and get him out of there. That I would save him and get him the help he needed so he could live as independent of a life as possible despite his malady.
Then twenty years later in November of 2022, I was finally able to keep that promise after I had to leave him behind. When I found him, the living conditions my brother had been subjected to were beyond inhumane. The place that our family dumped him off at shook me to my core. How could anyone do that to anybody? Let alone a disabled family member.
I got him out of there and brought him back to my home in Atlanta, to a clean and safe environment. Then I took him to the eye doctor where I finally learned the truth—his vision is far worse than I ever knew or that he understood. I broke down crying in the doctor’s office, grieving all the years he had been forced to suffer. My brother now walks with a white cane, a tool that would have been incredibly useful throughout his entire life.
He had been abused so badly that I thought he was intellectually disabled as well as being legally blind. The reality is that he is a high-functioning autistic and incredibly smart. All he needed was to be freed from our toxic family, free from their neglect and abuse. My brother and I have suffered from physical and emotional abuse for more years than we have been free from it. For the first time, my brother talks openly, laughs and enjoys life in ways I never imagined for him. Dan is a completely different person now and he's living his best life too, with me. I am my brother's keeper.
Getting out of the hood and building a life for myself so that I could get my brother was not even close to easy. There were many times throughout this battle that I thought the day would never come and Dan would die there, trapped and covered in cockroaches like when we were kids. But I never gave up and I never surrendered because I couldn't, my soul would not allow it. I've saved a lot of people in my line of work throughout the years, but being my brother's hero is without a doubt, the greatest accomplishment of my entire life.
