The Pale-Faced Lie, David Crow

This book is so hard to take in as something whole. Like all things, it’s how he saw it, remembered the spoken words, his life bubbling in his mind. Even if only half is true, it’s still quite a remarkable life that he’s still alive and somewhat sane mentally. He grew up on a Navajo Indian reservation with his siblings idolizing his father, a Cherokee who enjoyed telling his kids about WWII feats of strength and bravery. But as he grew, he learned the many dark sides of Thurston Crow, an ex-con with his own code of ethics that justified cruelty, violence, lies, and murder. Ultimately, along with the beatings, David was coerced into doing his criminal bidding. David’s mother in all this? Well, she was mentally ill and couldn’t care for the kids. He had to learn his his fifties that he could not change his childhood memories, he had to learn to let them go. He had placed so much blame on himself for everything. If only he’d saved his Mother, his father. If only he was a stronger person. He so wanted to know on his father’s deathbed whether or not his father had regrets for all the terrible things he did to him and his family. The only true way for the author to be free was to forgive them and forgive himself. We’ve all heard it before, but it’s so difficult to do. He didn’t want to carry around the burden of longing guilt and shame anymore. In the end, he learned the truest pale-face lie of them all. And for me, this was not surprising… it was expected. A world of lies is just that, and one builds and breeds on all the others.