It’s been a while since my last update. I’ve been busy since releasing “My Fathers: Letters of Healing on a Quest for the Truth,” in September of 2023, mostly researching, investigating, writing, traveling, thinking, while doing the “heavy lifting,” the work of emotional healing, with the help of multiple “practitioners” along the way.
Many of you have asked me, “Is that it? What’s next? What now?”
Here’s your answer: the first pages of the sequel, my second memoir, “From Bayonne to Bali,” in which I share answers to the many questions I raised in the first book and the discoveries I unearthed—several in my subconscious and unconscious—on my journey of healing that began in the cold, murky waters of the Kill Van Kull beneath the Bayonne Bridge and ended in the welcoming warmth of the Bali Sea in Indonesia.
It was a frigid yet frightfully bright February 2024 morning in Secaucus, New Jersey, the long-awaited day—it’s only been 53 years, after all—when I was ushered into the waiting room of the New Jersy State Police Sex Crimes unit to provide the “official” statement of my sexual abuse. As an 11-year-old. I was offered one of the ten aluminum folding chairs symmetrically arranged under two rectangular panels of way too bright fluorescent lights. A polished white linoleum floor added to the antiseptic feel of the sparse room, which reeked of ammonia. Or was that bleach? Am I in an operating room? A morgue?
I was alone, my thoughts racing as I waited for the detective who would be calling me to the interrogation room in five or ten minutes or whenever he was done with his previous interview. Too long. Even though I told the police I wanted to file a report of sexual abuse of me, a 65-year old, six-foot-four-inch, 240-pound Caucasian male, I felt more like a suspect than victim. My stomach gurgled, reminding me that I should have eaten breakfast. My mouth was dry. I felt queasy, given the time to think about why I wanted to file this report at all. Everything I’ve done in the past half century to reconcile the one-time event of that sweltering August night in my childhood home in Bayonne, in my parents’ bed, has led me to this day. No turning back now.
The door clicked open. A well-dressed, well-groomed detective stood in the doorway, a small gold badge snug on his black leather belt. “Mr. Prazych, we’re ready for you now.” He led me down a hallway into a small room with a small table and three chairs. The interrogation room. A younger woman dressed in a grey business suit, white pressed shirt but no tie and a small gold badge snug on her black belt, dark hair in a tight bun, introduced herself as the detective’s partner and invited me to sit. I did. Then waited for them to begin.
“So why are you here? What statement do you have to make?” asked the female detective, eyes on me, all business.
“Everything you need to know is in here,” I said, as I pulled out a hard-bound copy of my memoir, “My Fathers: Letters of Healing on a Quest for the Truth,” in which I share a series of letters to my recently deceased father seeking answers to the questions that arose from the one-time incident of sexual abuse at the hand of our beloved Catholic priest, Father Wesley Duncanson, in my childhood home in Bayonne in 1971. In my parents’ bed. When I was 11.
Two hours later, the detectives finished my statement. I was free to go, again, feeling more like a suspect than a victim. But why? I was treated with respect, dignity and professionalism. The detectives said they would be in touch when they had something to tell me. I walked out of the police station with mixed feelings: shame, sadness, Catholic guilt, grief and anger, the “usual symptoms,” I’ve learned, of someone who’s been abused by a priest, but strangely buoyed by relief, courage and a new-found confidence to continue my quest for healing that would come with the answers to my many questions about the incident and its aftermath—50 years of denial, silence and gaslighting—that followed it. I drove to the New Jersey Turnpike and headed south, veering off at Exit 14A: Bayonne.