Rainn Wilson (4:04)
I remember a high school teacher telling us, at your age, you never think about death. But I've thought about death every single day of my entire life. My family came to the United States in 1897. There's a lot of, like, mythology and lore. My great great grandpa came here by himself when he was about 17 years old. His family was German and they had lived in Russia for a while. And from the outside, it kind of looks like he achieved the American dream. This is where it starts to feel kind of weird. There's a pattern that's kind of undeniable in the men in my paternal line, starting with that first guy that came over from Germany. On paper, it looks like he found his own version of the American dream. He took a job with a farmer, married the farmer's daughter, started a farm of his own, and had a bunch of kids to help him with the work. But those of us in the family know that there's a lot more to that story. I don't know what happened in Germany or if the curse started here in the United States. All I know is the pattern. No man in my paternal line dies of sickness or natural causes. We die because something kills us. And it's always our kids who find us first. My great great grandfather was the first domino to fall. He didn't come home for supper one night and his kids went out to look for him. If I remember right, it was his daughter who found him. She went back to the barn, the back of the property, opened up the door and saw him hanging in there with a rope tied to the rafters. This kind of thing wasn't too uncommon back then. A lot of older folks, especially in immigrant families, had a lot more fear of dementia than of dying. And so maybe that's what happened to him. But then it comes to my great grandfather. He had polio as a kid, and he. Even though he had polio, he was put to work just as hard as his siblings. He took up a family farm, had a bunch of kids of his own, kept it moving, whether it was the struggle from polio or his dad's suicide or something else. My family always describes Byron as a cruel man and you can still see it with the older guys in my family. They all look like they've been through things they shouldn't have. When I hear stories about my great grandpa, I don't hear fond memory stories. I hear how scared his kids were of him. The curse found Byron when he was out working with some farm equipment. He was driving a skid loader, one of those things with the interchangeable buckets that they use to move pallets and dirt and farm equipment around. He had the bucket raised up high and he decided he needed to get out. But he left the machine running. As he was standing up to get out, one of the straps of his overalls caught the steering hands and he fell forward head first. The big metal bucket came down and it crushed him there. His daughter came out to the field looking for him and found him like that. In 1986, the curse found my grandpa. By then, the family enterprise had expanded and he and his brothers were running operations from farming to beekeeping and trading equipment. They had all grown up in the Seventh Day Adventist tradition. But my grandpa had veered pretty far into one particular vein of that religion. If you've ever seen Andrew Garfield's under the Banner of Heaven, you probably get the idea. He was the kind of guy that believed that taxes were a theft. My grandpa was also a mechanical genius. He was the first in our family to go through college. He got a degree in agriculture and he pioneered all kinds of really cool biological systems for grafting plants and that kind of stuff. He owned a lot of land and even learned how to pilot a little family sized plane. He kept one of those planes on his property. But my grandpa was also a very dominant and secretive man. Every contract and deed and piece of business that he dealt with was private to him. And he didn't share those things with his wife or his family or anybody else. When the feds finally showed up to arrest him for tax evasion, he was already packed up with his second family and flying them down to Brazil, where he had paid somebody for a new plot of land in cash. The trouble was, there were people living on that land already over the years. A lot of poor people in the area had built shacks on that land and they weren't too happy about the idea of moving. So my grandpa, being who he was, fired up his equipment and started bulldozing down everything they owned in the world. I don't know how many enemies he made doing that, but I know it was enough. The people pooled together the little money that they had and they Paid a man to go after him. The way I heard it, he and his new wife and their three little kids had parked at a gas station to go to the bathroom someplace, and grandpa stayed in the car. They heard a gunshot from inside and ran out to see what happened and saw him there bleeding out on the road. The story gets a little fuzzy here. What people go through when they die and what they do with bodies in different countries is pretty different from the US So local authorities came and they took his body, and the family never saw him again. My dad was only 19 years old, and he had just finished up high school here in the States when he got the call that his dad had been killed. He still has nightmares about it. I'm still fairly religious, so I don't know how closely I believe in this. But I can't deny that the pattern has some unbroken threads. My family curse always happens in the same way it always happens to a man in my direct bloodline. We're always killed and we're always found by one of our kids. Part of me really believes that when my dad dies, it won't be from sickness or age. And part of me has always believed the same about myself, that my life will be cut short by something unexpected. Neither of us have ever believed that we would live long enough to see old age. But the other part of me feels a little bit invincible while my dad is still around. Like, if the curse is real, somehow he'd have to go first. I think the scariest thing about it are all the questions I have about my dad. It's horrible to think about losing a parent, but there's another layer to it. If the curse is real, does that mean I'd find him? My relationship to my family has been a rocky one. I still reject a lot of things that are so deeply tied with their identities. I would describe my family as, you know, blood comes before anything else. So even if you have problematic members of the family, I think I'm probably the first generation willing to distance myself from those kinds of things. But it's very tight knit. It's very mafia. If you trace the paternal line of my dad, it was his dad and his dad's dad and his dad's dad's dad. There's always some tie between their death and the decisions that they made. And so in a weird way, it's like these people who were kind of awful to the people around them were met with, like, untimely deaths. Yeah, I try to not be that type of person, and hopefully it changes for me, when you look at the ties between each death, the first man that we can trace in this curse killed himself by choice. The second man used a bulldozer to kill himself by accident. And the third man earned his death by bulldozing, by destroying people's lives with a bulldozer. And then they destroyed his. Even within a more Christian framework, curses, even if you look back in the Bible, they're very present. A lot of times what goes with the curse is it'll happen to generations after the person who did it one day. I'd love to be a dad myself, but when I think about all the history of our family, I just really hope that we have a daughter.
