Aunt Scapegoat Has Died

                                         picture by me....a sad desolate winter one.

It's sad. I wondered why her?

Aunt Scapegoat

My brother called this morning and told me she died yesterday. The details of her death seem fuzzy. Can I call a hospital and find out how she died? I was told it was a combination of things something to do with a hernia and she had a recent car wreck last month, but I don't know if the car wreck caused the hernia or what happened. Even the relatives who are on Facebook have been mum and no one has posted that she has died.

 I asked my brother if she lived in a nursing home or her trailer and he told me she still lived in her trailer. I was RIGHT about my mother holding power of attorney over her. Remember I had suspected my mother had grabbed guardianship over her.  What happened to her? Can someone advise me in finding out? Well that may be another dead end. I have to wait a day to even ask the cousins because I don't want to be the first one who informs them.  My brother seemed kind of like he only got what my mother told him.

I feel some guilt in that I had gone NC with her though more informally, I never made any formal pronouncements of it to her. Here I feel some huge regrets and was crying earlier, because I had thought of trying to call and contact her again and obviously I waited too late. There's no going back.

I tried for years to reach out to her though before. It was painful and because she was so controlled by my mother, and earlier on my grandmother, I failed multiple times before, and didn't want to go down that track. I had been hurt multiple times and didn't want to keep opening myself up to more pain. That's why I didn't try again. So the last time I saw her was in 2010 or 2011 when she was recovering from a heart valve surgery replacement and was at my mother's house recovering.  My husband reminded me, "You tried with her many times. She was so shut down."

At times it seems this world sucks, it seems the narcs raise their hands in victory while the narcs celebrate. They win, and their victims always lose. I had imagined reconciliation with Aunt Scapegoat, or something changing in the wind, where I could have reached her. Now it will never be. I feel helpless and hopeless. Why couldn't I do more? Why did I always have to be so broke? So empty-handed?

 I feel like the earth will close over someone and she will be forgotten. My brother told me she will be cremated unlike other relatives who got their $12,000 dollar coffin and a place in the family Catholic cemetery. No burials and tombstones for her like the other relatives, her memory will be wiped away. It is interesting to notice the different treatment of her in death then other relatives who got the big affair, even other relatives of limited financial means. I suppose this tells me her "importance" in the scheme of things, and I am creeped out because I said to my husband before, that if she died, they probably would cremate her and not give her a huge funeral like other relatives. {not that I agree with those either but hopefully you'll see what I mean}  My brother told me it's because she rejected Catholicism, in her case as an atheist. He told me they plan a memorial service in the spring. My mother is states away in Florida after all.

I googled her obit, and all that was written about her personally besides other relatives that had died, was this  "******** loved animals including her cats. A memorial service will be held later." It was one of the shortest obits in the history of mankind. I can tell my mother wrote it. That's how she summed up a sister she has had for 60 years. A life summed up in one sentence. She liked cats.

I got into it with my brother and reacted emotionally and told him one reason I went NC with our mother is because of what she said about Aunt Scapegoat. I talked about this in the Queen of Darkness article if you want to read the sordid details.

I cussed more on the phone then I have cussed in five years. I told him "You better take one real look at what your mother really is!" When I told him about what my mother said about Aunt Scapegoat, he was in shock. I don't know if I got his eyes opened or not. He said "Why didn't you tell me this before?" I said, "Because it seems you didn't believe me!" He then said, "But they never say things like that in front of me. I said "Of course not, why would they?" You think they want us allying together knowing what pieces of crap of they are?"

Then I went on and lost it, I'll edit out a few of my worse curse words I said. God forgive me for my language but I got emotional....."They treated this woman like shit her whole life".  They tortured her and treated her like she was nothing. They put her down and we spent our entire childhood to when I got away hearing about what a loser she was and they never let up!" There's a reason why she got sick so young just like me. Don't you get that one reason I walked away was I didn't want to be her, crushed by a pair of sociopaths?" He didn't argue with me on this stuff he saw the same thing.

He wants me to go to the memorial service, supposedly it will be in the spring. I went to see nephews and a few cousins and yes I know it could be a danger zone I have to seriously think about. I don't know....My life has very few trustworthy people in it.

I was very close to Aunt Scapegoat earlier in life. I have a lot of carried pain because of what happened to the relationship I remember. We were very close and could talk about many things and cooked meals together and told jokes. Back then we were a source of support to each other. In my 20s I spent entire weeks visiting with her, and remember talking with her. During those days she had a spark of energy and a spirit that took an interest in many things.  She loved music and I could share art with her. There was even one time she saw my comics and laughed and laughed. She cooked me tasty stir fry and introduced me to the music of the 1970s including Pink Floyd. I will never understand what happened to her. Even my brother admitted, she followed her own drummer. These were the years before they crushed her. He said today, "She was a black sheep too."

In later years as she started to close me out, I couldn't even figure out what happen it took me so by surprise.  She got sick and then got divorced. Her life imploded under severe disabilities, needing dialysis and other pressures. I tried to keep contact even via Chicago years and others and then the time came when she threw my painting in the closet.

They really did do what they could to destroy the relationship. My grandmother told me lies, before I could see out of the fog, "Aunt Scapegoat doesn't want to talk to you" In 1991 I remember driving home and crying wondering what had happened? I tried calling her when I was down there, and knocking on the door and she did not respond.

My mother said the same. I was told by my GC sister, "Aunt Scapegoat doesn't like you. I would see her at family gatherings and then she started to avoid me. One time I got a smile when we exchanged some Christmas gifts but that was a rare moment in time. The time she got mad at me for expressing beliefs in 2005, was a mistake on my part. She called me a "Christer" [angry that I had a Christian viewpoint of the topic--I never was a Republican] and was angry. I think the relationships was forever severed at that point despite my best efforts.

And then there was the last time I saw her sitting on the couch recovering from that surgery and she was so beaten down. Her head down and shamed by my mother as usual after she shouted at her for not being clean enough and when she went upstairs, I said to my mother "Why are you bothering a sick woman about being clean?" but I didn't do enough which shames to me this day. I saw no physical abuse or anything reportable, but I should have said and done more. Here is what I wrote on the Queen Spider article about what transpired that day:

"3. Said of her sister who by the way who is more physically functional then me except for her dialysis who she played martyr around and brought into her home to heal from her heart valve surgery--"She needs to stop getting these surgeries and needs to just go die". During this conversation she acted "put upon" for Aunt Scapegoat's care. I thought to myself, "Why not just leave her be? Why offer care only to play that game?" She complained to me about how much Aunt Scapegoat's colostomy bag smelled right in front of her. "She stinks!" Leave it to a super-sniffer sociopath to torture the world and a severely ill woman for every wayward smell.

I ask myself when my mother told me she wished my aunt would die, why didn't I say more, why didn't I confront? Why did I just say "Everyone wants to live" and something about "God wanting them to live?" I shouted at my brother, "That's the day I knew I was going to walk away it's time for you to get a clue and wake the hell up. It's the day I knew our mother was EVIL."

Why God Why? Doesn't even explain the emotions I am having.

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Post Script 2/25/16: I talked to a cousin on Facebook PM last night, this is one of my nice cousins. He told me very recently that he had told my aunt, I thought she was mad at me. She told him she was not and had shared fond memories of me with her. She even showed him a painting that I did for her, I had forgotten about giving her. This was a different one from the flower one my mother told me was put into a closet into a box and was a landscape. I told him I was happy to hear this. One commenter below wrote "I'm sure they told your aunt that you didn't like her just like they told you that your aunt didn't like you." This was exactly what happened. My aunt was very poor and denied a phone, only given phone cards or disposable cell phones that only called out. There were years I was sending her cards and presents, where I didn't even know her phone number or was given phone numbers that just rang and rang or there was no way to respond or leave a message on. My mother held her guardianship and I think she was afraid to reach out to me and of course this was complicated by illness and her own withdrawal from people.

I was told by my mother "She doesn't want to talk to you" and by my sister "She doesn't like you, you bother her, she disagrees with you on things." and by both my grandmother and mother when I was sending her paintings and boxes of books, she loved to read, in the early to mid 2000s, "Don't send her anymore things, she does not want them." I was denied her phone number at various times and my grandmother told me at least twice, during the years I was trying to call about once every two months and there was a number, "Stop bothering your aunt."

The depth of evil of what I have faced here is very severe and has given me a new realization of what has been done to me and others. My cousin lost contact with her for years and only reclaimed it in the last two moving very close to her area. Even he would try to contact her to be turned away but because he lived so close was able to reclaim a relationship with her. It makes me glad there was someone around her who loved her around her during the last months of her life.  It does relieve me to find out how she really felt.