May 10th 2014
email from me
Aunt Mary died last night. She had this Guillain-Barre syndrome thing, which my dad emailed me about, and she’d been hospitalized, but she was in a rehab center and that’s all my dad told me for months, so I didn’t think it was a dire situation. I thought she was getting better. I painted her a card, and mailed that and some fuzzy socks to my dad to give to her a few weeks ago. I hope he gave them to her.
I’d not had any interaction with her since I moved out.
I was wondering if you were interested in going to the funeral, if my dad bothers to tell me about it. You interacted with her more than anyone else in my life, since I was in grade school at least.
(Also, I’m sort of dreading being around my entire family. I’ve no idea what kind of things she said to them as I lived there, but I’m sure it wasn’t good. It would be a lifesaver to have someone there who was on my side.)
I know you’ve got some fucked up health stuff at the moment, so I get it if you aren’t really up for this kind of thing. I just figured it was the right thing to do to let you know.
May 11th 2014
email from Stefan
That’s awful. I Don’t know much about that condition. Like… Nothing about it. I hope she didn’t suffer. Not that Im comparing, but Im still grieving over Abby’s death. I had to put her down last week.
She had cancer. She was showing signs of aging. Thinner, dehydrated often, and eyes completely blue from cataracts. But last week.. She became so fatigue I literally had to shake her awake. I thought she died on my carpet.
That night she laid next to me, periodically letting out a strenuous sighing exhale out of her cracked dried nose (another sign off dehydration from the cancer). That morning… She started dragging her back legs and urinating blood. She kept dropping and was in awful pain. I wrapped her in a towel. She looked like a baby ewok, and rushed her to a vet. They said right there. “I’d suggest a surgery, but she won’t make it thru, and the cancer is so advanced, just being alive is hurting her”. She was all boney and pissing all over. There was nothing I could do.
My point is, her death has affected me more than the many family deaths this year. As well as my first girlfriend (that polish girl Paulina) from when I was 14 and stayed casual friends with.. Aside from the few times she got weird cause one of her relationships didn’t work, and tried using me to fill a void by talking about how we once were…and.. who still lives two blocks down from my folks. Who called me out of the blue, and said…”hey, would you mind coming by, I really need to talk to you”. I was like…”yeah.. I’m driving, I’ll get back to you”. I totally didn’t. Four days later… Her mom found her dead in her room. Her mom asked me to go to The wake. So I went with <Chick Friend>. They were friends. Anyway… It’s all over. Death, and always in bad ways.
And it’s hurts walking with my fuckin cane. I just had another cat scan… now I need an MRI… Then finally they’ll send me to surgery. Which will make me cripple all over again, at least for a while. I’m in constant pain. It basically just make me an angry son of a bitch.
My lawyer officially started talks with the insurance company of the asshole who fucked my life up. I’m aiming to drain every penny out of his insurance.
Anyway… Yes, I’m going thru lots, and have appointments left and right between docs, my lawyer, and done sparse freelance work.
When is the funeral/wake?
I haven’t been to a funeral in so long. My family all gets cremated and just has a wake… My friend/ex was cremated too. Just there in a box.
Are you… Affected by aunt Mary’s death? Are you… Okay?
email from me
I am…. ok.
It’s weird. I think that the whole experience feels more of a loss of potential than anything else. Like, now I guess Aunt Mary and I really won’t ever be cool again. That potential is gone. I ended up feeling quite betrayed over the whole Ocean Grove eviction, and then with the Lyme Disease or whatever it was, I was really really fucking ill, and she treated me like I wasn’t even there. I think I turned off most of the last few strong emotions I had for my Dad’s side of the family at that point. I don’t really feel very much about Aunt Mary at all right now. But then sort of fall into an egocentric hole of recursion, wondering if I’m a horrible person for not feeling more, that I must be a horrible person because I’m thinking about my fear of being horrible while I should be thinking about Aunt Mary. I don’t know.
I’m sorry you deal with death so often.
I’m sorry this email isn’t better, but I was up all day doing yard things, and I’m very tired and my evening sleepy pills are kicking in. So I will write something better later.
Sorry about that. I took the sleepy pills I usually don’t, because I have to wake up early tomorrow and I needed to kick my sleep schedule into super normal human hours.
Anyway.
Christ, I’m sorry about Paulina. And Abby.
I didn’t think my dad would bother telling me about the wake. But he did. It’s Thursday, 4 – 8 in Summit. And the funeral is the next day in New Providence, but I’m sure she’ll be buried in Fair Lawn where the rest of my family is. Am I supposed to go to all of it
I’m loathing the notion of seeing my family. God knows what Aunt Mary told them towards the end of my living there.
I’m so super broke right now, for a whole lot of really frustrating reasons, and having to shell out NJT train fare is really not something I need right now.
See? I’m a horrible selfish person.
Maybe I’ll be upset when I’m actually at the funeral. I did start getting terrible chest pains right at my sternum shortly after I found out she died. I suppose that’s how most negative emotions manifest in me, perhaps? More physical ailments.
I hope you sue that guy to fucking kingdom come. Lifetime pain changes everything. Make him pay.
PS. I hope you have a nice day with your mom. By the way, if she’s still wanting migraine botox again (which has been amazing for me, in conjunction with quitting all opiods), there’s lots of clinical trials that offer it.
http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/search
May 15th 2014
email from me
Well, just in case you woke up early and feel like being generous, I’m about to leave and head there. I’ll probably not get there til after 6, which really sucks. I’m shaky and nervous and my insides are a mess. A friend would help. If you do….
email from Stefan
Been up. At my lawyers office. Good luck. Hopefully everyone just pays their respects and moves along.
May 19th 2014
email from me
I was wrong. I’m not ok. Once I got home, I started crying, and I keep crying.
She had shoeboxes she’d been filling for all her neices and nephews. Mine was the biggest. Not the photographs and childhood drawings that the others got. I got emails printed out of the whole back and forth between me and my dad and her and <stepmom> when I was getting kicked out of Ocean Grove. And also my parents’ divorce papers.
At the funeral, all her coworkers recognized me and were happy to meet me. I was one of the only people they knew. Aunt Mary talked about me a lot to them.
I think most of my family thinks I’m an asshole.
I think I’m an asshole.
email from Stefan
Why think that you’re an asshole? Anything you said to criticize was born out of you being ignored, abused verbally, or generally ostracized when it came to family… stuff.
It’s easy to ruminate now, and come to the conclusion that not everything was as it seemed. Bit that doesn’t change the fact that she stood there as you cried, practically begging for comfort, (or just general acknowledgment) to no avail.
Aunt Mary wasn’t a bad person. But she did take you in, be sorta affable at times, and made you feel both welcome and unwelcome enough for you to keep you on the defensive.
Don’t feel as though all your feelings are evil or without a reason. All the emails you’ve written to me about your trials with her were screaming of a lady who has the same problem almost everyone I know suffers from. She had no idea how to convey her emotions. And went about telling you little things the wrong way.
Its not like you told her you hated her and wasn’t able to say sorry.
I’m sorry she’s gone. She knew you appreciated her in whatever way you did. And she knew you butted heads on certain things.
But don’t beat yourself up over it.
The important thing is that she’s not suffering anymore.
That’s how I see at least. Just my opinion.
email from me
Thanks.
That helps.
You were actually witness to it, so ….. it helps.
Thank you.
Here’s the long tale I wrote if you are interested. I am freaked out about my Dad. I’m really fucked up. I’ve got a pile of my childhood. I took the train back to the city with <the boyfriend> carrying a huge framed photo of me as a one year old, a doll that she and my gramma made for me (and matching ones for my friends), and a box of heavy life shit. I can’t seem to stop crying, and I don’t want to get out of my pajamas and I can feel myself slipping into depression and I feel like I deserve it.
____________________________
I’m a mess.
My Aunt Mary. I don’t even know how to handle everything. I haven’t seen any of my family, aside from a cousin who invited me out a few months ago, in three or four years. I haven’t gone to Fox Fest (our annual family reunion since 1983), hadn’t been by for Thanksgiving or Christmas, nothing. I had been living with my Aunt Mary, as I’d been dumped there (by when my stepmother ousted me from their spare apartment). It didn’t go well. I got Lyme Disease, I got really sick, she didn’t believe me, I was broke and trapped with no way out. She stopped speaking to me, left me up in my room and didn’t tell me when family stopped by. I freaked out a lot from the isolation. It was pretty bad. When I finally got out of there, I just left. I told her I was leaving, I borrowed her minivan and moved myself out all by myself. That was it. I stopped by a year ago to get my bicycle, but it was late and she was asleep. No contact.
When someone doesn’t believe me about my health stuff, I just… cut them out. I don’t know how else to handle it, I guess.
My Dad emailed me the day after Christmas to let me know that Aunt Mary had been in the hospital for two weeks. When I asked him where I should send things, he told me she was going to a rehab facility until mid January. I figured she was getting better. Meanwhile, I was having constant migraine, and couldn’t even go leave the house most weeks. I got spinal injections, which made everything horribly worse for a few weeks before it got better. I sat upright through the perpetual migraine to paint her a card, and forced myself out in the world to get her some fuzzy socks. It took me a few weeks to have both the oomph and the money to send them out. Nobody told me that she got pneumonia on top of things. Nobody told me she was getting worse. Nobody knew how sick I was, either.
All she knew was that she was slowly dying, and I didn’t bother to visit her.
My Dad emailed me the funeral information. I’d not had anything beyond terse email interaction with him in five years, I think.
So I went to the wake, alone. My Dad is one of eight, and aside from spinster Aunt Mary, they all have had at leave two kids. We are a big family. I got there late because I’d woken up at 2:30am with liquid intestines which continued until the afternoon. I was terrified.
My relatives all told me how skinny I looked; (I am)
The childhood best friend of my dad’s who tried to get down my adult pants tried to hug me;
three people commented at how the picture of her when she was young and smiling looked so much like me!
Aunt Mary wrote a book, and looking for advice as a young writer, she corresponded with John Stienbeck – the letter from him was amongst the photographs;
a quarter of the photographs in the video slideshow of Aunt Mary included me;
I was surrounded by a gaggle of Aunt Mary’s old co-workers who all knew who I was because of how much she talked about me, oh how happy they were to meet me!
Kill me.
I was brought back to my Dad’s with him, my stepmom, and my two (half) sibs. They talked about how Paula Deen was railroaded, and I felt like an alien. We ate take out with a view of the Christmas tree that they’d kept up for Aunt Mary to have a Christmas do-over when she got out of the hospital.
I crashed in a room with photographs of long dead relatives, three crucifixes, and framed pages of the Constitution on the walls. I took my sleeping pills, but still woke up at 4:45am from stabbing brain pains.
After the funeral, my sister and I both broke and ended up having a hugging sobbing moment, which was… We aren’t like that. I wasn’t expecting that. It made me feel like I have a sister.
After a huge Polish meal, most of us headed back to Aunt Mary’s house, which is the same house she and all her siblings grew up in. She lived there since she was 5 years old. When my parents separated when I was 2 until I was 7, my Dad and I lived there. I used to wake up early and crawl into her bed. From age 7 until puberty, I still went there almost every weekend, and spent a few weeks every summer until I was 17. After both my grandparents died, Aunt Mary kept the house, and I lived there again when I was 21 and I had nowhere to go, until I first moved to New York. It’s home.
During the car ride there, it was evident that my Dad was weird drunk. He doesn’t get messy, he gets wierd. He and Aunt Mary were the last two siblings in New Jersey for decades, spending every holiday together, every family function.
At Aunt Mary’s house, I called my boyfriend. He’d never met any of my family, and I thought maybe he could come by, see the house I grew up in filled with family and kids like it was when I was little. He could help me carry some things. My Dad didn’t stay long. Everyone crowding in was too much for him. One of the in-law Aunts had started organizing things and was trying to get people to take things, which I understand, but I think it was too much for my Dad to handle. He left. He apologized for not staying long enough for my boyfriend to arrive. I invited him to go out with my boyfriend and his dad some time.
There was a pile of Christmas presents Aunt Mary never got to give. One was for me.
Seriously?
She’d also started a project of filling shoeboxes with stuff for most of her nieces and nephews. Photographs of us as kids, of our parents, etc. Mine was the biggest. Drawings, photographs, sure. But also… a print out of the entire email exchange between she, my dad, my stepmom, and I when I was getting kicked out (so that was a whole emotional betrayal flashback wound ripped open, great).
And also….. the paperwork from my parents’ divorce.
I’ve not seen my mother for longer than I’d not seen Aunt Mary.
Recently, on Mother’s Day, she emailed me and told me she agreed to have my boyfriend there if we could have lunch. I said yes, and we picked a date for the beginning of next month.
Looking at the legal statements from the divorce, I really don’t know that I can handle being in her presence. It’s not that I didn’t sort of know most of it, but having it written down changes something. Things like: my mom tried to slit her wrists when she was in highschool; she clearly started seeing my future-stepfather while married to my Dad who was often away on business; once they separated, she dropped me off with my Dad just to go out and party; that she accused my Dad of beating me; how there was already a weird inappropriate sexual stuff going on at my Mom & future-stepfather’s house when I was 4 years old.
Meanwhile, my Dad was working, and was living with his Catholic parents and childless sister. AND THEY GAVE ME TO HER ANYWAY. My whole childhood was over sexed and I don’t know where the abuse part starts. I ended up being a fucked up person with a Mom who lost interest in me when I became a teenager. By the time I moved in with my dad during highschool, he already started a new family, and I just didn’t fit. I wasn’t like them, and I wanted the emotional support of my friends that I’d learned to rely on.
I could have had a family.
When I was little, I made Aunt Mary presents on Mother’s Day because she was like my second mother. She took my friends and I on outings all the time, made tents in the back yard, brought us on walks in the woods and pretended to be Robin Hood and we were all princesses. She paid some of the bills in collections that were coming for me in my early twenties, without me asking. She drove me to Bed-Sty in the 00’s and we witnessed a guy getting beaten by a bicycle chain. She is who I would drive with and bunk with at Fox Fest for years. I was the only family member in front of whom she smoked.
Everything is fucked up. Everything has been fucked up for so long that it all keeps being fucked up. And I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know how to save it from happening again and again and again.
I only cried a bit at the funeral, but since I’ve come home, I just can’t stop thinking and I keep breaking into tears.
Aunt Mary was the closest thing I had to a real mom.
If things were different….
And I don’t want to see my mother. And I don’t want everything to be weird. And I don’t want anyone else to get sick. And I don’t know when I’ll be able to stop thinking and crying.