"That was war," he says. "I used to say in
my misery, `I want to go home,' meaning to the
nonexistent place that I'll never have."
For the first few years after the divorce, Stallman
found the tranquility that eluded him in the home of
his paternal grandparents. Then, around age 10 his
grandparents passed away in short succession. For
Stallman, the loss was devastating. "I used to go and
visit and feel I was in a loving, gentle environment,"
Stallman recalls. "It was the only place I ever found
one, until I went away to college."
Lippman lists the death of Richard's paternal
grandparents as the second traumatic event. "It really
upset him," she says. He was very close to both his
grandparents. Before they died, he was very outgoing,
almost a leader-of-the-pack type with the other kids.
After they died, he became much more emotionally withdrawn."
From Stallman's perspective, the emotional withdrawal
was merely an attempt to deal with the agony of
adolescence. Labeling his teenage years a "pure
horror," Stallman says he often felt like a deaf person
amid a crowd of chattering music listeners.
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