My aunt E passed away last night. Alone. In a nursing home she ASKED to be moved to.
When she married the A**H*** who should have been with her last night, she was itching to get away from a dad who didn’t have a clue what to do with his youngest daughter. So at 17 she headed north, a spit fire of a girl following a man so crazy in love he couldn’t stand to have her out of his sight.
E worked hard. Beyond hard. She was a practical nurse and a two-time mom to daughters 15 years apart. The so-crazy-in-love man by that time had grown into an often unemployed, nervous, twitchy man, that I best recall for his ability to bellow across their tiny house when he didn’t get what he wanted. His last stretch of gainful employment was as a truck driver. E quit her job, at his demand, to travel with him.
There were other women. There are, I learned today, other children.
About 20 years ago E had the first in a series of strokes. A lifelong smoker, connoisseur of all things fried and unfortunate enough to inherit my grandfather’s circulatory system, she seemingly had every vein, every artery scoped, stented, whatever, two or three times over.
Not too long after that first stroke, her four sisters began putting the puzzle pieces together. The A**H*** was getting even meaner now that he had a disabled wife to care for. There was a ‘gun incident’. She declined to press charges.
The eldest daughter — one I sense might actually be the only other lesbian in the family — stayed far away from the tiny Indiana town where her parents lived. The second married, then divorced, then lost herself, happily so, in Chicago.
They knew. On the rare occasions of a full family reunion, they were as twitchy as their father, taking turns keeping him occupied while their mom spent time with her sisters. She never said much. And he never left her sight.
As I’ve heard from my own mom about the hell her sister’s been living through lately I tried to get her to take some sort of action, to help her sister, finally, find a way out. I talked to her, and another aunt, about how they might connect her with local agencies or services that knew how to deal with elder/spousal abuse. They tried, somewhat, to intervene, offering her a place to stay, to heal from her latest medical challenge without him making it worse.
But Aunt E said no. She didn’t want her family around for fear he’d come around. The spit fire had been tamed. She was embarrassed, quiet, alone.
This whole episode makes me so, so angry. I’ve had friends, co-workers, acquaintances who’ve been survivors of domestic abuse. There are countless organizations that can help. But the bravery required to get that help, sadly, sometimes just isn’t there.
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