researchingtoday

I have weird relatives.  My parents got divorced years ago.  It was the first divorce in my extended family of cousins, aunts, and uncles.  Before the divorce we were all very close.  After the divorce the relatives on my mother’s side sided with my father, who moved away, remarried and never saw any of them again.  Meanwhile, my mother lost the companionship of her cousins and her brother and sister-in-law because they excluded her from many occasions. That meant my sister and I were also excluded.  Although we always invited them, they rarely came to our events.  Recently, my mother’s brother died.  We found out he was ill when my mother made her weekly call to him.  A caretaker told her he had been in the hospital most of that week. When she finally got hold of one of his sons she was furious.  No one called her and he was dying.  They said it was because they thought he would be okay, but the truth was, they never considered my mother, even though she was his sister. We rushed over to see him before he died.  Shortly before his funeral I learned that a cousin of ours had died six months earlier. His family was at my uncle’s funeral.  I found it hard to believe they wouldn’t have called my mother to let her know about their father. They informed the other relatives, who all went to that funeral. But somehow we were missed.  Or I guess we weren’t.

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