Blue Eyes
It’s been almost three years to the day since my Auntie passed away. She was killed in a car crash while driving home from visiting my Grandma’s house one Sunday afternoon.
It would be an understatement to say that my Auntie and I didn’t get along. She thought that I was a weirdo failure who’d proved my inherent stupidity by completing ’a Housewives Degree’ (that would be an Arts Degree) and who would be ‘quite attractive to decent, normal men - if it wasn’t for my nose’. For my part, I thought that she was a vacuous philistine.
It wasn’t always like this. I used to visit her large ramshackle share house when I was a kid and she must have been in her 20s. The house, my parents tell me, was practically falling down but I never noticed - I loved it there. When we visited she let me run wild in her massive overgrown garden, poured me drinks in proper glasses (made of glass, not plastic) and let me play with her precious collection of Snoopy dolls. When I was a bit older, she happily taped her Bruce Springsteen and Phil Collins albums for me. Neither of us were ever cool.
For reasons that we’ll never properly understand now, the situation changed and she and my family (and therefore me) didn’t see eye-to-eye anymore. She got married, moved away and got a new life which we didn’t fit into. When we did see each other, bitchiness reigned. The last time we really spoke was a curt hello at my Grandfather’s funeral in the mid-90s.
But despite all this, I still think of her. Every now and again at random moments she pops into my head and I feel an inescapable sense of loss. There is a difference between not seeing someone because you don’t want to and not seeing someone because they’re not there anymore when they should be.
Tags: regret
October 27th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
I think the one thing common to most family rifts is that nobody remembers what started it all in the first place, only the last incident that kept it going.
October 28th, 2008 at 3:39 am
I had a grandfather that I had a love-hate relationship with. He wasn’t always the nicest man in the world. He was my dad’s father. I had often see why my dad turned out the way he did and wasn’t really a great father himself. I remember that my brother and grandfather got in an argument the day before he died. He said something really mean to my brother that started the argument. He was good at that. He was never a really nice and warm human being. That’s not to say I never had any good times with him. I often wish that I had done more to try to be closer to him. I wish that we had spent more time with one another.
October 28th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
I have an Aunt and an Uncle I haven’t spoken to in (*thinks to self*) 23 years or so now. They fell out with my mother over the care of my grandmother way back then, and subsequently excommunicated us all, refusing to talk to us even at funerals (inluding me, a slightly bewildered child at the time).
My Aunt has since suffered the loss of her husband, and has now decided that life is too short and that she wants to communicate with me again, but so far I’m one of the only members of my family not to take up the olive branch. The reasons for this are numerous, but it’s mainly that I never liked her even when I was a kid, know damn well she’s a BNP sympathiser who once cut off communciations with my sister because she was having a relationship with a black man, and feel that my life is already full enough with family members who have “issues”, and I don’t need another burden of that nature. The gulf between us also now feels far too wide to bridge, and I don’t know what we’d actually have in common apart from some bad memories.
I wouldn’t even know how to start the phone call. “Hello, remember me? You… erm… were a deeply unpleasant person from my past who has now decided you want to get in touch with me again. You snubbed me at a family funeral when I was a small child, and you enjoyed wearing fake leopardskin coats. Remember? Oh good, because that’s all I remember about you…”
October 28th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I think that like ’supernatural’ experiences, every second person has experienced ‘the family rift’. The often unsaid consequences of that old adage ‘You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family’ loom large in everyone’s lives.
Ill Man, I wish you were right that nobody remembered what started it all in the first place but we do and we raked over it all the time – so it never went away. I have a reasonably good idea of what I think caused this rift, but it goes into too much amateur psychology for this blog!
Keith and Dave, I think you have touched on one of the big issues – that you’re automatically meant to like and respect your family, even if they haven’t necessarily earned it.
It’s a confusing thing to deal with and it’s difficult to accept. My Auntie and I would have never have got along if we met at work or at a party. We’re just very different. In the same way I get along very well with my other two Aunties; one of them is actually coming to visit for a week in November and I can’t wait to see her.
The worse thing about our situation is how it has perpetuated itself. On the day that she died my Auntie had made amends with my Grandma who she hadn’t seen in years. But at the funeral, well, I wasn’t there, but her husband and friends wouldn’t let my brother and aunts anywhere near our 3 cousins who we scarcely know. We remain the bad side of the family.
October 30th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
After a lifetime’s mutual animosity, one of my sisters and I finally fell out for good ten years ago. At our mother’s funeral in 2000, I went up and gave her a hug, but didn’t feel any need to talk or try and ‘patch things up’ as I think we both work better when we’re not in each other’s lives. I don’t miss the person she is, and I am sure she doesn’t miss the person I am either, but there’s a gap where a sister should be which still makes me slightly sad at times. Families, sheesh.