Making Tough-Minded Decisons
My Aunt Julie died on January 5. My cousin Betty gave her a quiet, private funeral. She didn't tell anybody--just me, last tuesday, two days after the burial.
It doesn't bother me, really. I hadn't seen Aunt Julie in over 15 years. She was pretty much out of her mind, even before Uncle Joe, her husband, died roughly 8 years ago. All I remember of her is as some crazy lady with weird orange hair, always muttering things, very nasty things, under her breath, about people. Joe would keep her under control, but she wasn't ever really in control.
She never saw a therapist. Joe's mother had been brain-damaged from electro shock treatments and he feard that would happen to Julie, so he kept her unmedicated, uncared for, and under his control. She was schizophrenic--or had some other disassociative, schizo-affective disorder.
She was under his control until he died. Then, she lost any grip on reality--saying he ran off with someone, that Betty was keeping him prisoner, that she saw him on TV.
She was the last of my Mother's sisters. And, quite frankly, I feel a great deal of peace about her death. All those family secrets have gone to the grave. There is no one left to worry about whether or not those secrets will be spilled to successive generations.
Secrets in a dysfuntional family, are power. If someone knows The Secret, he or she has the upper hand and can blackmail whomever the secret is about, and torture those who don't know with statments like "oh, if you only knew the truth."
So, now starts the struggle over whatever meager posessions she had. My sister writes me an email and tells me not to sign off on any legal documents, and that Betty denied her the ability to properly say goodbye to Aunt Julie by not calling.
My sister, though, never went to visit Aunt Julie. She never helped with her care. As a matter of fact, all she had to say about our Aunt was some very negative things, usually in unison with my mother. Why my sister all of a sudden feels the need to get all self-righteous about being denied the saying goodbye to A.J. is hypocritical--and also maipulative.
As I said, the vultures are circling, and there's something in the wind that there might be some money somewhere in A.J.'s house. So my sister, who never cared about our Aunt, is now circling the wagons with the others in some attempt to get something because she doesn't want anyone else getting anything.
As I said to her in an email: why should you care? When was the last time you saw Aunt Julie? When did you care for her? If you really cared, you would have went to see her when she was alive, not worried about missing her funeral.
And me....I just don't care. Money from a crazy person, who suffered so much, could only have bad karma. Dirty money in the worst sense. Call me superstitious, but since I've been spending down my father's Weird Money Gift of a few years back, my own money karma's been changing around.
I thought more about my decision not to have children. I told a friend the other day that one of the reasons I decided not to have children was because I didn't want to have to explain the crazy family--I didn't want to bear a child who would have to deal with all sorts of nonsense and possibly shame because he/she did not have the family that other kids had. I didn't want to expose an innocent life to so much sickeness and illness--like my mother did to me--because I *had* to have a child.
He looked at me with such kindness in his eyes and said "you made an honorable decision. you put someone else's welfare before your own needs. not too many people think that way. perhaps more should."
But I know alot of people can't. It's the same way that, if it was me, I wouldn't really care so much about my cousin, who drank himself into a coma. I wouldn't have paid several times for my drug-addled, theif of a son to go to rehab. I wouldn't care.
Honestly. I'm that tough-minded. If I could walk out on the one person I ever loved in my whole life, and never look back, nor regret it, I know I'm tough minded. And know that suffering for love doesn't make one a martyr--it just makes a woman a masochist.
It's not easy to be this way. People think I'm a ball-buster, or cold, or lacking in some essential humanity. No, I think more about how someone else's cruelty will affect the quality of my life (my husband) and that I don't need to fall on a sword for toujours, l'amour, tojours. I think more about how a self-destructive individual should be given exactly what he might want (my cousin and my nephew)--self-destruction and not attention. And I think about how the secrets, lies, genetic defects, and lack of adequate social skills can ruin an innocent life--an innocent life best left unconceived.
So I'm glad the last of the Secrets is in the grave. But I'm not looking forward to the Estate War that's now brewing on the horizon.
I hate family. Correction. I hate *my* family. Because they are not family at all.
It doesn't bother me, really. I hadn't seen Aunt Julie in over 15 years. She was pretty much out of her mind, even before Uncle Joe, her husband, died roughly 8 years ago. All I remember of her is as some crazy lady with weird orange hair, always muttering things, very nasty things, under her breath, about people. Joe would keep her under control, but she wasn't ever really in control.
She never saw a therapist. Joe's mother had been brain-damaged from electro shock treatments and he feard that would happen to Julie, so he kept her unmedicated, uncared for, and under his control. She was schizophrenic--or had some other disassociative, schizo-affective disorder.
She was under his control until he died. Then, she lost any grip on reality--saying he ran off with someone, that Betty was keeping him prisoner, that she saw him on TV.
She was the last of my Mother's sisters. And, quite frankly, I feel a great deal of peace about her death. All those family secrets have gone to the grave. There is no one left to worry about whether or not those secrets will be spilled to successive generations.
Secrets in a dysfuntional family, are power. If someone knows The Secret, he or she has the upper hand and can blackmail whomever the secret is about, and torture those who don't know with statments like "oh, if you only knew the truth."
So, now starts the struggle over whatever meager posessions she had. My sister writes me an email and tells me not to sign off on any legal documents, and that Betty denied her the ability to properly say goodbye to Aunt Julie by not calling.
My sister, though, never went to visit Aunt Julie. She never helped with her care. As a matter of fact, all she had to say about our Aunt was some very negative things, usually in unison with my mother. Why my sister all of a sudden feels the need to get all self-righteous about being denied the saying goodbye to A.J. is hypocritical--and also maipulative.
As I said, the vultures are circling, and there's something in the wind that there might be some money somewhere in A.J.'s house. So my sister, who never cared about our Aunt, is now circling the wagons with the others in some attempt to get something because she doesn't want anyone else getting anything.
As I said to her in an email: why should you care? When was the last time you saw Aunt Julie? When did you care for her? If you really cared, you would have went to see her when she was alive, not worried about missing her funeral.
And me....I just don't care. Money from a crazy person, who suffered so much, could only have bad karma. Dirty money in the worst sense. Call me superstitious, but since I've been spending down my father's Weird Money Gift of a few years back, my own money karma's been changing around.
I thought more about my decision not to have children. I told a friend the other day that one of the reasons I decided not to have children was because I didn't want to have to explain the crazy family--I didn't want to bear a child who would have to deal with all sorts of nonsense and possibly shame because he/she did not have the family that other kids had. I didn't want to expose an innocent life to so much sickeness and illness--like my mother did to me--because I *had* to have a child.
He looked at me with such kindness in his eyes and said "you made an honorable decision. you put someone else's welfare before your own needs. not too many people think that way. perhaps more should."
But I know alot of people can't. It's the same way that, if it was me, I wouldn't really care so much about my cousin, who drank himself into a coma. I wouldn't have paid several times for my drug-addled, theif of a son to go to rehab. I wouldn't care.
Honestly. I'm that tough-minded. If I could walk out on the one person I ever loved in my whole life, and never look back, nor regret it, I know I'm tough minded. And know that suffering for love doesn't make one a martyr--it just makes a woman a masochist.
It's not easy to be this way. People think I'm a ball-buster, or cold, or lacking in some essential humanity. No, I think more about how someone else's cruelty will affect the quality of my life (my husband) and that I don't need to fall on a sword for toujours, l'amour, tojours. I think more about how a self-destructive individual should be given exactly what he might want (my cousin and my nephew)--self-destruction and not attention. And I think about how the secrets, lies, genetic defects, and lack of adequate social skills can ruin an innocent life--an innocent life best left unconceived.
So I'm glad the last of the Secrets is in the grave. But I'm not looking forward to the Estate War that's now brewing on the horizon.
I hate family. Correction. I hate *my* family. Because they are not family at all.
posted by Tish Grier at 12:47 AM
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