Absentee Relatives

It's my last day in work today before the Christmas break, meaning I don't have to go back until the 4th January 2006, hurrah!

With the morning being relatively quiet, I take the opportunity at lunch time to take a walk to our local DIY store (which is just around the corner from the office - working on an industrial estate has it's advantages sometimes!) to pick up a timer switch for the christmas lights. I also discover some rather nice suede canvasses with a rather abstract Japanese maple design that has been embroidered onto them, and so buy them as well because I think they'll look nice somewhere in the house, I just haven't decided where yet :)

I also notice that a new store has opened on the industrial estate, a place called Dreams, which sells beds and things. "This is quite handy" I think to myself because the nearest such place to our house post today was in Oxford, and considering we need a new mattress at some point it may well be worth going to have a look to see what they've got in the January sales.

My venture out only takes up about 30 mins of my lunch break, so when I get back to the office I decide to give my sister a ring to see how shes doing. She's fine, though it appears that my Great Aunt is in the final clutches of pancreatic cancer.

Hmm, I'm a little confused about how I should feel about this whole scenario, you see I've not seen her in over 15 years, and the parting of the ways (so to speak) wasn't exactly on friendly terms. The story goes something like this:-

When my family lived in Lincolnshire my Great Aunt and Nan from my Dad's side of the family still lived in the Welsh Valleys and they were getting to the point where they couldn't look after themselves at all well. So my parents built them a granny annexe (that's not the right way to describe it really, it was more like a small luxury bungalow to be precise) onto our house for them to move into. They paid for everything, right down to the carpets and crockery. Moving them next door had a 2 fold effect:- a) they still maintained their independence and b) they were close enough to get help in an emergency and have a friendly eye cast over them on a daily basis.

My memories from all those years ago are vague now, but I distinctly remember that whilst the first couple of years were ok, everything then got a little bit strained. You see my Nan suffered from depression (and looking back on it psychotic episodes as well), quite bad it was too, but under the right medication she managed to keep a level threshold.

The problems however evolved when my Great Aunt neglected to / withheld my Nans drugs and lied constantly about the well being of my Nan to everyone - saying she was fine, when in fact she had been bed ridden for days and having a considerable downer. And of course the my Nan didn't need those drugs at all, they weren't helping her one iota, oh no the side affects of the drugs far outweighed the benefits. The problem was here you see that my Great Aunt knew best and no one would be able to intervene without a tirade of verbal and sometimes physical abuse, let alone the vicious rumours she'd spread against anyone who would doubt her say so on matters concerning my Nan. Their bungalow was off limits, no one could go in there unattended or without explicit permission, and in all honesty the place ended up as a health hazard, it was in a terrible state. I even remember my parents having to pay for my Nan and Great Aunt to go on vacation for a week so that they could break into the bungalow and fumigate it, things really got bad.

Eventually, after one particular severe incident which ended up in a crescendo of knife throwing and battering all aimed at my Mum, and the revelation of a rather sensitive family matter in front of an inappropriate audience, my parents decided that enough was enough - my Nan needed to be in a home where she could get proper medical attention. That in itself was a feat, but after a couple of months of complaints, both my Nan and my Great Aunt realised the benefits of having laundry done, a clean place to stay and having food cooked and put on the table for them.

It was at around this time my parents decided to retire (or that was the intention) and so we moved to Wales. My Nan and my Great Aunt had the opportunity to come with us, but they decided to stay in Lincolnshire. Of course my parents sold our house and moved away. My Nans health was faltering at this point and it was precisely then that my Uncle who had not even bothered with my Nan or Great Aunt for many many years suddenly showed up on the scene again. And with him he brought his own bad intentions and filled my Nan and Great Aunts heads with ideas of grandeur relating to them getting a percentage of the proceeds of the sale of our house because they lived in the bungalow that my parents had built and paid for. He even got them to change their wills, and by no leap of the imagination he became the sole benefactor of the entire estates. It was as if he'd never neglected them at all, he was once again the apple of everyone's eye and boy did he have a really big stick to stir the shit up.

And that's exactly what he did, the result of which ended up in civil law suits between my family and the "extended family". As you may well imagine, all of the above lead to some considerably sour grapes, the consequences of which lead to a blockage of silence between all parties concerned.

Luckily for my Nan (who, IMHO was just a puppet controlled by my Great Aunt and Uncle in this whole charade) she passed away shortly after all of this began, by my Great Aunt carried on however - up until about now.

So you see I don't feel any remorse that she is dying, and nor do I feel remotely happy about the fact - more than anything I feel sorry for my Dad who because of his brothers greed and manipulative prowess, and his Aunts conniving dexterity, has not had ANY family for the last 15 years, and the only one who was worth anything died of a heart attack probably brought on by the stress created by his brothers desire to inherit everything.

And I may well be biased in my opinions here, but there are defined by what I first saw through the eyes of a 13 year old and later understood as an adult. I'm not a believer in forgive and forget (I think its an idealised naivety postulated by those who dare not face up to facts) but I do presuppose to the idea that what is done is done.

You can take that how you like, but for me it provides a substantive answer to most things - you accept something has happened, you can't change it but at the end of the day you learn from the experience, you certainly don't forget it ever happened, after all, what on earth would you learn if you forgot the misdeeds of others, you might end up repeating them yourself.

Posted by Abi on the December 22, 2005 9:58 PM

sjon at December 23, 2005 7:19 AM