Lost and Losing
I lost yesterday. One minute I was up making breakfast and trying to take my morning meds. The next minute I was down and in the bed. Felled by a quickly fleeing stomach virus. In the bed the entire day, able to crawl out around bedtime yesterday for toast and tea.
Today started better, at least stomach wise. Jim was just getting under my skin, asking me again and again to go to church even as Costa Rica had 1,200 new COVID cases the day before. I said I was not returning until the rates dropped and I meant it.
Still sorting through phone calls and messages much of the day. Around dark Jim asked me to come out and help him by holding the stems straight on the birds of paradise he was replanting. It didn't go well. Pouring down rain, thunder and lightening, mud everywhere including my hair and enough bug bites to use an entire tube of Benadryl cream.
Stumbling back inside the water pressure was so weak, making showering off the mud a difficult task. The temperature kept changing, getting hotter and hotter. I came out of the shower madder and itchier than a wet hen that has escaped the heat of the boiler.
I discovered shortly thereafter that one of my cousins had reached out to me to let me know their mother had died. My least favorite aunt, my father's sister.
What a strange week! I've been thinking a great deal about my father. This was after all the 15 anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans and many of my relatives scattering to the four winds from both sides of the family.
I had to tell my beloved cousin who I visit whenever I roll through town that I was not coming for the funeral, and not just because I could not abide her mother, the COVID and not being able to return being the biggest blocks.
People who'd known me for years can tell you I've ranted insanely about this particular auntie for the last twenty one years. My childhood I loved her like all my aunts. I didn't start to realize she has issues until I was 13 and she made a big production about some strange man looking at her too long at the grocery store. She spent weeks going from relatives house to house and not going home. By that time she's worn out her welcome and went home.
I noticed a pattern with her, starting back then. Her life was so dramatic always, everything was a huge deal and revolved around her and her wants. I started actively avoiding her when I was 16 because even then I just didn't want to be around that. It was emotionally exhausting.
At the time I knew very little about mental illness, but with the benefit of hindsight there was something undiagnosed very clearly going on.
Through the years when I'd talk to my dad he'd laugh and tell me what the latest crazy thing was with her. Strange car wrecks, dramatic boyfriend happenings after her divorce, drama with her children, it was always something. A circus of chaos.
She did show up at my wedding wearing a fancy white brocade dress, very wedding dress like, and trampled some of my bridesmaids to catch the bouquet. Her and my momma in her revealing red dress made odd bookends to the wedding.
Then my father died, felled by a massive stroke. I had to rush down from Virginia to Louisiana and give permission along with my step mother to turn off the machinery and let him die. There's no coming back from brain death.
Auntie decided at that moment to make my life hell. I found out upon arrival that she'd showed up that morning at my father's house, accusing him of stealing money from their father, shrieking and pummeling him so badly that the cops had to be called. Thirty minutes my father had his stroke.
She'd been trying for ages to get custody of my grandfather. At one point there had even been a fight in court over it, and my grandfather testified he'd given her large amounts of money and he was physically afraid of her. See why I avoided her?
Things went from bad to worse. She started nagging and haranguing me at the hospital about my father's will, and ended up calling me a 'ghoul' after I signed the paperwork to withdraw life support and I sat in my father's room holding his hand as he lay dying.
She behaved disgracefully at the visitations and funeral. My father was well known and beloved in his community. We had to hold two separate days of visitation to accommodate everyone and the church ended up with people standing in the parking lot during the service there were so many. My aunt wore a fancy pink party dress to the visitations, and another burgundy revealing cocktail dress to the funeral. She insisted on riding in the lead limo with myself, my stepbrother and step mother. She laughed and acted like it was one enormous party.
The other thing she kept doing was asking me about the will, about a dozen times. The final time happened as we were closing the lid on the casket to go out to the church. I remember turning to her and saying the only mean thing I said the entire service, I said "If you don't shut up about the will you're going to be riding around in a pine box.." I had just had enough at that moment.
At the post funeral reception and lunch she whipped out a set of legal papers and informed everyone in the family that she'd gotten legal control over my grandfather. We sat there, in shock, mere days after Dad's death, holding wilting paper plates of potato salad while she discussed her plans for him.
She quickly ran through all of his money and assets, selling my grandfather's house without my knowledge or permission even as I had inherited a quarter upon the death of my father. And then things got worse. She came after my father's estate, tying up myself and my step mother in court for ages. Literal years. Her claim was that I wasn't my father's child and should not inherit. Wasted time and money.
I eventually had to block her phone number, and insist she only contact me through my attorney after we got a restraining order. It got that bad, and it just made my father's death harder, every single time I started to feel like I was healing here she came to try and rattle me.
Crazy family members is huge crazy Southern families where money is involved.
During all of this her daughter, my cousin and I bonded over how nuts she was. She'd made her daughter's life a living hell too in many ways. About seven years ago my cousin was forced to put her in the nursing home, in the memory care part because of Alzheimer's.
I'm feeling sorry for my cousins today. They lost their mother, no matter how difficult she was that is incredibly hard. I'm sad and sort of angry at the same time. So much wasted energy and potential. She wasn't a stupid woman, and was quite attractive. What a waste.
This is the damage that highly narcissist people do in families.
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