Ambushed at Mom’s funeral

My brother-in-law blocked my entry to my mother’s funeral ….

I’d just driven all night long alone, from Gallup, New Mexico to Austin, Tx … a drive of over 1000 miles …. met my son at a hotel at the airport where he had flown in at 6 am, coming in from San Diego. I tried to catch some wretched, uncomfortable sleep before we got up to dress and ready for my mother’s funeral.

I had my first episode of v-tach on that drive, just outside of Gallup. Just as I got onto I-40, I began to feel extremely faint and I barely managed to pull over in time before things went completely black. Hwy 40 was thick with eighteen wheelers, as is always the case. I took slow, deep breaths in an effort to recover my senses and sat in the car on the shoulder for a long time until my mental alertness returned. What the hell was that? I hoped it was just a case of nerves.

Once it felt safe again, I got back up on the highway and continued slowly until I reached the first exit where I got a drink and a snack and walked around until I felt myself again. There was no question in my mind that I had almost died in those few moments, I just didn’t understand why until 3 months later and the diagnosis.

For the rest of that day and night, I powered on, driving through the dark, empty desert, not at all looking forward to meeting with the family that I’d just left the summer before on completely unfriendly terms.

It was the first and only fight I’d ever had with my little sister in all my life, that I could recall. Until this disagreement in 2012, we talked on the phone a few times a week, on a regular basis, for years. All it took from me were 3 words to end the relationship. She has not forgiven me since, has told lies about me and used other family members to bully me in return.

My 3 words were truth. Her narrative is a lie.

There’s a difference.

My son and I didn’t realize how congested the traffic would be around the airport so we ran late for the -funeral and when we arrived and my brother-in-law saw us, he ran up to the entrance of the chapel and blocked my way, warning me not to make a scene, as if I’d ever made a public scene in my life.

This man, who at least three times that we know of has been snagged by police for making a public scene because of his inability to control himself and keep his penis in his pants, is angry at me because I know what he is, tried to block me from my mother’s memorial, accusing me of something he is guilty of and not I.

After this slap in the face, they then demanded that we come to a meeting, an hour after the memorial service to listen to a “reading of the will”. I was repulsed at the idea of discussing money so soon after Mom’s demise and declined but my daughter insisted that Lisa insisted that our step-father, Ray, had requested it.

So I went to the fateful meeting.

In a circle sat a family that I’d hardly spent any time at all with over the past few decades. First of all, to the right of me sat my big sister, Beth, a person who has a lifetime history of mental illness and, violence, and to whom I had not spoken to in years.

She had beaten me up the day after my little sister’s funeral, leaping on top of me as I sat on the couch, stabbing me in the head repeatedly with a sharpened pencil, and my step-father had to pull her off, pin her to the floor and call the police on her to calm her down while I sat on the curb across the street for hours, mourning my sister in silence and alone, her death not more than 24 hours from my mind, my first child in my belly.

Again, some twenty years later, Beth wrecked an entire restaurant in an effort to beat me up, after my older sister’s funeral, when she became enraged, imagining that she had been ignored at the coffee shop the day after Nancy’s burial. No one had said a word to her when suddenly she took her arm and swiped it across the restaurant table, knocking everything to the floor, cups filled with hot coffee, creamers filled with cream, dishes with breakfasts on them, everything. I ran out and never saw the rest of her violence.

So this time, at my mother’s funeral, I wasn’t taking any chances with her. I pretended to be her best friend for that day.

She was highly medicated, her head was flopping around on top of her neck as she moaned senselessly. She was gone. To the right of her sat my brother-in-law, not a beneficiary of the will, but for some reason was the only family member allowed to be in that room that wasn’t a direct beneficiary of the will. He was still angry with me from last summer and he quipped when I walked in, “Watch out! If you say the wrong thing around this one she’ll have a fit.”

It’s not me who has broken windows and puts holes in walls in fits of rage, I thought to myself. The rest of the room chuckled at his snarky bitch comment.

It’s not me who throws food at walls in peoples homes and in people’s faces, and cokes on top of their heads in restaurants.

Not me who jumps on top of people and stabs them in the head with a sharpened pencil.

Not me who writes suicide notes with lipstick on mirrors and walks out of the house with a gun, to leave his girlfriend sick with fear through the night, one whose already experienced the loss of suicide.

Nope, can’t think of a single thing I’ve ever done to compare with any of them that sat there laughing at me and accusing me. I smiled and sat down without a word, accepting my role as the family scapegoat. It was a position I’d learned to live with.

I was operating on no sleep, no fuel, not even a drink was offered to me that day and it was afternoon by then. My head was spinning and my heart was sickened that this is what they had been doing since Mom’s death. Like flies on a carcass, they had picked the spoils clean, and couldn’t wait to get their hands on every last piece of flesh.

My little sister’s best friend was the person selected to read the will and then explain to us what it all meant. Our mother had left everything to her husband in the form of a life estate, except for a small portion of property rights that came from our great grandfather.

The best friend slickly told us that they needed us to sign over our property rights, which our mother had left to us, to our stepfather in the form of a life estate. She explained in detail what she wanted us to do to make this happen and we all agreed to look at the papers she would be sending us.

My only comment was that I was disappointed our mother had not mentioned Nancy or her daughters in her will, although she did mention the names of her two other deceased children.

It would be a few weeks after that that my little sister, in a fit of rage, told me that I was the worst daughter and sister in the world. She told me that the other family members agreed with her. I would find out a decade later that that part was a lie. She was enraged that I didn’t love our mother in the same way that she loved her.

I begged my mother not to leave Nancy in the last hour of her life. She left my sister to struggle for the last breaths of her life alone!!!! How many times do I have to tell her that story for her to understand there is a splinter in my heart, a permanent wound that can never be healed. I watched my whole lifetime as she made the most innocent person that I have ever known, suffer for reasons that were never deserved.

I do not ask for anyone to feel for her what I feel. Of course I love my mother and there were decades when i would have stood in front of a truck for her. To accuse someone of such base values is the lowest thing that I can imagine and I’m so disappointed that my little sister is so small and so petty that she can cause this much damage, and use dishonesty in order to accomlish it. All because she was angry that I got my fair share of the inheritance.

Ray screamed at my 9 year old son at 5 a.m., for not putting his shoes away in a house where there was no designated spot for him to place his shoes.

Ray burst into Marilyn’s room where she sat naked on her bed, grabbed her around the waste and yanked her off the bed in a fit of rage.

Marilyn’s room was a hallway beneath the stairs, the pathway to the only restroom in the house, the pathway to Lisa’s large full floor bedroom. Ray treated Marilyn like an unwelcome house pet.

When Marilyn wasn’t living like a housepet underneath Lisa’s stairwell, Ray and Mom were shipping her off to Chicago, Albuquerque, Carlsbad, Texas, anywhere they could find a place to get her out of their hair. She suffered profound neglect and abuse at their hands, the very people she punishes others for not worshipping.

Ray abused Johnny and caused him to be held to the floor and placed in a straight jacket when he was told that the cancer treatments had stopped and everyone had given up on him.

Ray stole Nancy’s best cooking pot and abandoned her after her chemotherapy treatments. He left Nancy’s home, as she lay sick upstairs, unable to walk downstairs on her own, leaving her with the feeling that she had been an inconvenience and a burden. On his way out the door, he took her favorite cooking pot that she had used for years.

Ray made Marilyn, Johnny, me and my children all feel unwelcome in the family.

I don’t have to feel about Ray the way that Lisa feels about Ray.

And by the way, I did love Ray and it was rejected. There was a time when I thought the world of Ray. That respect was his to lose and he lost it.

For reasons I will never fully understand, my little sister lied to me and about me and stole from me, dishonored my mother’s last wishes and bore resentment against everyone she ever interacted with, keeping a smile on her face the whole time.

I suddenly feel incredibly sorry for her. She had an empty, faithless husband to protect.

When I found out about the 3rd affair I was livid. i realized he was willing to leave my sister and her 3 year old child because he had fallen in love with a visiting country western singer, broken into her trailer and written that he loved her on her mirror, in lipstick, his favorite MO.

When I found out that the police took him in and had to convince him to go back to his wife. I remember that day. I drove 150 miles to rescue my sister, only to find her on the side of the highway with her baby, her husband and the police. She had been trying to get away and he was chasing her in his truck on the very same winding country road where our mother was killed.

She was angry that he had been out all night drinking. The police let me take my sister and niece back home with me and Dean was frantic. I assured him that his wife and daughter would return and it calmed him.

When I realized, 20 years later, that he’d actually tried to leave my sister and their toddler the night before and that the entire community had known about this their entire lives, after my sister had worked so hard to whitewash the truth about her family. I have to confess, I was extra livid when those 3 little words came out of me.

Had she not been at my doorstep, again and again, devastated by his cheating, perhaps I would not have reacted so strongly.

In many ways she punished me for his crimes and for hers.

You’d think I’d be given some credit for keeping silent about it for 3 decades, instead I am punished with a life sentence for letting 3 words slip out.

I might as well try and explain my side at this point. This is not a family I need to be around at any rate, not one little bit. I’m sorry I was never able to get to know my grandchildren or my nieces and nephews.

Of course it aggravates me that I know people are telling false tales about me. Since I’m not around, it’s so easy for them to get away with it. I keep thinking there will be descendants of mine who are equally shat on by crappy relatives. Perhaps when they read my journal, they will feel less alone.

I didn’t enjoy that that is how it had to be, but I also did not try to do harm or complain or interfere. I’m pretty sure I kept it to a minimum. I tried to stay out of her life.

I did give it over to a higher power a while ago. I support my grandchildren and hope to continue. My daughter is in far better financial conditions that I was at her age. There’s no reason she should not be able to manage on her own at this point. She was given a better head start than anyone else in the family, other than Lisa, so if she can’t make it, who can?

She has two grown children who need help now, more than she does. She seems to think there is a limitless supply.

Once I got past my brother-in-law and stood at the back of the chapel, it just so happened that my daughter was standing and speaking. “Grandma is the only person who ever believed in me.” she was saying to the crowd. She was insulting every relative in the room with that statement, not to mention me. When did I not believe in her? I wondered to myself.

After the service, I went to my daughter’s house. The first thing she said, after plopping down on the couch was, “Grandma never believed in me enough to help me start a business.” I was speechless. She didn’t know I had been in the chapel and heard her other, contradictory statement. The manipulation was right there in my face, but I said nothing at the time, and never said anything about it until now.

The following year, I suggested financing a batting range for her, something easy to maintain, possibly affordable. No, she said she wanted to start a recreation center that was even larger than the one in Kerrville that was very popular already. It had two large pools with large slides and a large patio with large umbrellas, a couple of gyms, a sprawling complex. She had not concept of the funds that were available. What I offered her was, once again, not nearly enough.

Fast forward, eleven years later, she continues to express her desire to own her own business. She’s also been taking dance for a few years now. She was always good with dance, so I suggest to her having a small dance studio. I’m thinking I could help her with that. ‘No, she says. She’s thinking more about an entire school with music classes, science classes, the whole kaboodle.’ still having no understanding of what the funds can cover and continuing to let me know that what I have to offer isn’t good enough.

A few years ago, I offered to give her the down payment on a house in the same place where she lives and she said no thanks, she’s planning on buying a motor home and travel the country. To me, that’s not the same kind of offer. Your home will always appreciate. It’s an investment. A motor home is an indulgence and a ridiculous expense. I was offering her a chance to get her foot on the ground in a sensible way.

I’m just done. So done.

I wanted to know if she really wanted me to get my granddaughter out of the Dallas home, against the orders of CPS and the medical doctors, because it sounded like she did on the phone call. I was trying to get clarity from her. Was there something that horrible going on there, or was she just passing the buck onto me, so that my granddaughter will blame me for her incarceration. Why would she tell her daughter that the only way for her to get out is if grandma gets her out?

I had finally accepted that my granddaughter has chosen not to include me in her life, finally made peace with it, when I receive the news that her life is in danger from an eating disorder. Her EKG is abnormal. her life is hanging in the balance. This is not a sudden condition. It’s been going on for some time, and no one has told me.

Just like the time by the river.

I still have no information. They choose not to share with me as she always has. That’s what they’ve been taught. I stayed out of her life as she wished, and this is the result.