Photo: Heidi Ross
Allison recounts this tragedy and the years surrounding it in her new bookBlood—a story about love, intergenerational trauma, and the healing power of music.
“Everyone loved her. So he shrank her,” Allison, 47, writes of her father, Vernon Franklin Moorer, and his abusive treatment of her mother, Laura Lynn Smith Moorer. “He shrank her until she almost disappeared. She decided that she didn’t want to disappear anymore. Then he disappeared her for good.”
Vernon, a school teacher, abused alcohol and his young family on a regular basis, Allison explains. She was 4 or 5 when she started lulling herself to sleep with a prayer she’d repeat over and over.
“Please God, don’t let Daddy hurt Mama,” she would say, according toBlood.
“I think he just broke,” AllisontoldCBS This Morningco-host Anthony Mason in a recent interview.
In the decades since her parents’ deaths, Allison has tried to make sense of her father’s decision. For the past few years, she’s researched her family and even requested her parents’ autopsy reports. (To this day, Allison doesn’t know what transpired between her parents before the murder-suicide.)
“I wanna know why,” she told the outlet, “so that I can come to terms and say, ‘Okay, well, what I’m really trying to do is forgive.'”
In her book, Allison explores the memories and mementos she has of her family. She also goes over the possible scenarios that could have led to her mother’s death. Was it an accident or did Vernon intend to kill Laura?
The Moorer sisters.Invision/AP/Shutterstock
Allison also feels “nothing but love” for her father, she toldCBS This Morning.She reached this point after a lot of time and having a son of her own.
“I got to see and experience a little boy,” she told the outlet, “and know that my daddy was one at one time.”
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One of Allison’s biggest hopes is that she’ll be able to change her “legacy.”
“I can’t repair the broken days that set me up to be afraid of life, so afraid that I felt like I had to attack it back at every turn so that it wouldn’t just happen to me anymore, so that I might have some say,” she writes. “But maybe I can start to see it as something kinder than I was shown. That’s my task now, to unlearn, to let down walls, to reject the fear so that I don’t pass it on.”
Bloodison salenow.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or go to suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
source: people.com
