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Wow. That’s all I can say. Wow, wow, wow. Oftentimes in life you have to expect the unexpected. This morning was quiet until my sister and brother-in-law (I’ll call him John to make it easy so I don’t keep saying ‘brother-in-law’) arrived, for the second day in a row, around 10:30am. I greeted them in Dad’s room and then Mom and I left them alone with Dad. The kids didn’t come this time and I felt grateful for that.
In the other room Mom and I chatted for a little and then I went downstairs to do my thing. Maybe half an hour later I decided to go back upstairs. First thing I saw was Mom and John talking outside on the deck. That struck me as a little strange. I walked over. Mom said, “John asked if you were angry at he and your sister.” (We’ll call my sister Mary.)
This was a shocking statement because John and Mary (my sister) have never had a genuine conversation with me in my life. (With the exception of John after my niece’s car crash.) My sister is an incredibly walled-off human being. She is Captain Superficial; always has been. Even after her daughter—my teenage niece—tried to end her life via car in 2021, necessitating an entire rebuild of her pelvis, Mary remained haughtily distant, stoic and aloof. We’re half-siblings; we share a mother but have different dads. Mary was the result of clueless, emotionally unstable, mentally ill teenage parents. My dad raised her since she was 3, in 1973. (She’s 53 now.) I’ve never felt seen/heard/known/understood by my sister; I’ve always felt supremely judged by her, as if I were the black-sheep alcoholic fuckup that always did things wrong. (Largely true until I got sober in 2010.) Mary is a woman who holds everything inside, who doesn’t get vulnerable even for a second, who uses bullshit chitchat as an inoculation against getting deep/real/honest/raw.
John, my brother-in-law, has always been a little more open, less walled-off, but still overall a very shallow, superficial person. (You’d have to be to marry my sister, I suppose.) And yet: After my niece’s suicide attempt in 2021 he and I had a series—perhaps half a dozen—of deep, authentic, highly vulnerable conversations over the course of a couple weeks. But that was two years ago now. The whole 23 months of this cancer journey with my father has been me and my mom; only after my mom sent an angry, scathing email to John and Mary did they start paying attention and coming up more often to see Dad. In fact, the worst thing they did: They gaslit us constantly by claiming, indirectly using hints, suggestions, tone, that we were exaggerating how bad things were and that Dad wasn’t really that bad. Can you imagine that? There my mom and I were, on the front lines of the trenches, and John and Mary are saying we’re not even fighting a war at all. Brutal.
“I don’t know,” I said, stammering out a response to John. “I mean…yes…I have my issues with you guys…but this probably isn’t the time to talk about this stuff.”
And yet we did talk about it.
Mom walked away. Great. Now it was just me and John. Having this tense, tired, uncomfortable chat at the completely wrong time.
“I just honestly started accepting that this was happening two weeks ago,” John admitted.
He’d been sending my mom books on cancer miracle cures and memoirs by cancer survivors for months, despite the hospital stays and ER trips and the stage 4 Melanoma ravaging Dad’s lungs and the increasingly loud warnings Mom had given he and my sister that Dad was terminally sick and dying.
“I know,” I said.
“The thing is,” John continued, “Your mom is very strong with her words, with her letters. She’s a powerful writer. And that’s fine. But she can cut with those words. She really hurt your sister with that email she sent. And actually, there’s been a few of them. I know she means well. But our therapist told Mary to cut your mom out of her life for a while.”
“Cut my mom out of her life? Really?”