...your worst critic is dead. I called the nursing home yesterday and was told "Oh, she's long gone" but nobody would tell me the date she joined you in the hereafter ~ in a decidedly different location, I'm sure.
Your beloved younger brother went through hell on earth after he married this woman (I can still hear a faint shotgun echo...) and then she gave birth to two children, first a daughter and then a son ~ my first cousins, older than I was but always adored and loved by me. I became extremely close with the boy cousin, who left us too early in 1993.
And given the family history of Alzheimer's Disease ~ grandmother, all of her aunts, and mother ~ who knows how long the daughter has until she, too, descends into that terrifying netherworld we cannot possibly comprehend? Last I heard, she was living in a permanent state of panic that she, in all likelihood, will be next in line.
Karma is a very mysterious thing.
It wasn't until we moved into your brother and his wife's building in the early 90s that I came to know some very unpleasant things about your brother's family. Disgustingly racist, utterly ignorant if not downright stupid, vicious gossips, and disrespectful to the MAX, they came and went, eating their mother's meals (and YOUR home-baked cakes) giving her every conceivable job to do, be it sewing, cooking, whatever, and never really appreciating anything at all. Very classy, treating your own parents like that. Not to mention how they "forgot," year after year, their parents' birthdays.
Why I expected anything more from them toward you remains a mystery, but after your brother died in 1995, their true colors really came flying out, and they were UGLY. I'm glad you caught on and went your own way after years of insults and disrespectful behavior.
It was only after you were gone that I discovered something I had never known before, and remembering how ultra-sensitive you were about your looks, I too left them in the dust...but not before telling them what a truly despicable group of people they are.
When I heard that Girl Cousin and her cockeyed husband had been mocking your looks for as long as they were married (told to me, and tolerated by, your first-born daughter for her own selfish reasons) my brain froze with white-hot anger. I sent them a blistering message, accompanied by this beautiful picture of you from 1944, and told them to slap it up against their own mothers' pictures and then get back to me.
Of course, they never did. How could they? Their own late son (lots of death in that family...) once told me he had "never seen an uglier family than his maternal grandmother's."
Daddy always told us "Don't make fun of nature, people cannot help the way they're born" and so it pains me to even repeat words like "ugly" when describing another human being. I don't judge people by their "looks" ~ I look into their hearts, their souls, and then decide what kind of person they are.
And now that their Matriarch is finally gone, I can honestly say that looking into this family's 'heart' was like a glimpse into hell itself. As for their soul, they don't have one.
