My Mother's Version of Events

My mother's version of events, as written for the Butterfly Glen house psychologist. All grammatical and punctuation choices are her own. I'll embed links to relevant blog posts so you can compare different perspectives. The only emails I've made into blog posts so far were the big ones, and most of my retellings aren't dated at all, so I'll have to go through my old emails and post the excerpts from the events my mother references in her letter (from 2005 to 2008), partly just to confirm the timeline.

She doesn't mention the times she called me or talked to me during the events detailed below, but we were still in contact. A lot of what I know comes not just from my dad but also from her.

She was often high back then and, based on how long she says we've been estranged, she presumably wrote her version within the last year. I don't trust my own memory that much, let alone hers.

Dear Curtis,

    Could you please help me find my long lost daughter Christina Rosetti Martin DOB 7-31-1980. The last time I saw her was on her wedding day 15 yrs. ago!

    When I married my paraplegic husband, I married in sickness & in health and I took care of him for 36 yrs. but as soon as I got sick he filed for divorce. Paul was in the VA Hospital in Cleveland when he filed for divorce. I was totally blindsided. We had talked on the phone and he hadn't said anything. He followed up the file for divorce by cleaning out our bank account right after I paid the entire mos. bills (wrote checks for) All of the cks. bounced & I was faced with pay up or we'll shut off water, lights, gas, phone & cancel insurance on house & Cars. Naturally I panicked, I called the bank & they told me that my husband had closed out our joint account & opened a single account leaving me penniless & deep in debt. He received $8,000.00/mos Disability & $325.00/mos SS. All tax free.

    I called Paul at the hospital in Cleveland & said, "What the hell do you think you're doing? I just wrote checks for all of the months bills & now thanks to you there's no money to cover them!" He hung up on me, so I called him back & he hung up on me again.

    Paul had an extensive music collection in our family room so I called Guitar Center where he bought it all and told them that my husband passed and I wanted to sell his music studio. Notice that I didn't say my husband died, I just said he passed, as far as I was concerned he passed for asshole of the century!

     I kept out his keyboard & bartered it for massages & as mad & desperate as I was I couldn't bring myself to sell his 3 prized guitars. I just sold the amplifiers & the recording equipment. I donated his harmonica collection to the church, and I donated microphones to the church. 

    Guitar Center came to the house & gave me a check for $1,000.00 which was a rip off but I didn't have time to quibble. I took Jeff's wedding ring (had diamonds) & his grandmother's second husband's wedding ring to a pawn shop, and I sold his computer. 

    I still didn't have enough money to cover the checks I had written and I took all of his record collection (jazz & blues) to vintage stock and they gave me $60.00 which I'm sure was a steal for them and a rip off for me but beggars can't be choosers.

    I went to the bank in tears and told them my sob story all they said was I could've done the same thing to him, he just beat me to the punch. You'd better believe if I had known he was going to clean out our account I would have done it.

    I went to my best friends house and used her phone to call Paul so he would answer the phone after I got served with divorce papers at 8pm on Tuesday. I asked him what brought on the need for a divorce and he said it was because all I did was lay in bed all the time, didn't cook & didn't do laundry. I told him I had been severly [sic] depressed for 6 mos and I had only gotten out of bed to go to the bathroom. I was hospitalized 3 times in 6 mos. for dehydration & falls. He hung up on me again but he said he would put some money back in our joint account.

    Many times after that I called to try to talk some sense into him about the divorce and explain bipolar disorder but he refused to listen, he said I was just lazy, no good.

    Eventually the hospital disconnect [sic] his telephone so I couldn't call him anymore. My mother always said, "There's more than one way to skin a cat." So I bought a bus ticket and rode 4 hrs. to Cleveland, to confront the jerk face to face. He was in the ICU so I couldn't see him very long, he looked like Jabba the Hut all propped up 350 lbs. buck naked with a colostomy & foley catheter & IV's & Blood. I slept in the waiting room til it was time to catch the bus for home. As soon as I got on the bus I fell asleep and when I woke up my head was on the shoulder of the man in the seat next to me. I was so embarassed [sic]. We got to talking and he told me he had just been released from prison. I told him my story and when we got back to the bus station in Cincinnati I discovered that I didn't have enough money to take a taxi to my house so he offered to share the cab & he would pay for it. When we got to my house I drove him to the building where he was staying downtown but first we had to go to the Emergency Room to get him some medicine. He asked me to get in touch with some friends of his and tell them that he was back in town.

    I got in touch with his friends and they decided they were my friends too. They moved in with me and proceeded to sponge off of me. I was lonely so I went along with it. My son, Dante came over and he expressed his concern for me taking in a bunch of strangers. Without me knowing he hid my husbands prized guitars in the garage.

    We had a bad storm and the roof was damaged, when I called the insurance company they said they would have to do a walk through inspection of the entire house. The house was a mess so I offered $100.00 to every man, woman or child who would come over & help me clean up & get ready for the inspection, Of course the ex convicts friends were the first in line and the five teenage neighbors of my parents came over too. Dante was suspicious of all the people who helped me.

    After about a month I got tired of supporting 3 freeloaders and I told them it was time for them to go home.

    Dante came over and he asked me what I did with my husbands guitars. I told him they were on there [sic] stands in the family room & then they just disappeared. That's when he told me that he had hid them in the garage. I don't know who took them but it wasn't me.

    Anyway, I'm sure that's why my daughter quit talking to me, because I sold part of my husbands things and she thinks I sold his 3 prized guitars. She hasn't ever let me tell her my side of the story. Being left penniless. I had no choice. She also doesn't understand bipolar disorder.

    If you can help me find her, you can share this letter with her.

    Thank you in advance!

    Annie Rosetti 

 

From checking my old emails, I know that she took the Greyhound bus across the state to visit my dad at the hospital in November 2006, right before Thanksgiving. She says in her letter that it was to confront him about surprising her with divorce papers, but he didn't file for divorce until April 2007, long after she'd invited the ex-convicts to live in their house, and long after two of the convicts had been arrested for stealing Dante's car. Based on old emails, she sold my dad's music equipment at least a week before being served with divorce papers, and she had been threatening to sell all his belongings since at least December 2006. I also knew Dante took the guitars. My dad had been relieved that he'd managed to save something. I don't remember being aware they ever went missing. The only pieces of information that seem new to me are that she pawned his rings and told people he was dead.

Excerpts about Mom from Grandma's Letters

I went back through the old letters from Grandma that my cousin Michelle lent me.  I copied down all the excerpts about my mother starting with her strange behavior, which I remember kicking up in 2002 shortly after my uncle's death, but which Grandma didn't start writing about until my mother stopped talking or eating for spans of time in 2004.  No drugs are mentioned by name.  Here's what she said:

Aug 24, 2004
Annie [my mom] still isn't doing very well.  What I can't get used to is that she doesn't talk to me. We can spend the whole day together, & she won't say 10 words all day. I know there are a lot of things bothering her, but I have never seen her like this. I guess part of it is a let down from all the years Chrissy [myself] was in school, & now that she is graduated she is making a life for herself miles away. Part of it is Paul [my dad, Annie's husband]. Part of it is physical, & part of it may be menopause. Beats me.

Since I had a full abdominal hysterectomy in '74, I don't know what she is going through. And I said at the time it was a shame, since I had planned to be a flaming bitch!

sept. 4, 2004

Annie isn't any better. She forces herself to take me out shopping on tues., but we can spend all day together & she doesn't say ten words. I can't get used to that.

sept 11, 2004

Annie isn't any better. In the "better late than never" category, now Paul and Chrissy have decided to be very concerned. Last Tues. morning she called and just said "I can't make it today."  I knew last week that she was just forcing herself to take me out. This time she admitted defeat, & stayed home. When Paul found out about it he called me, full of concern. I wished I'd had the nerve to tell him that he could help the situation if he would quit calling her a stupid, fat bitch, & pointing out to her that she has no friends. But I knew that would just cause more trouble, so I bit my tongue. I've done a lot of that in the 33 years they have been married. 

Then thurs. night Chrissy called, which is the first time that has happened since she went away to New York, in 2000. She had called & got the same one word comments from Annie that I have been getting for weeks.  Paul had told me that she sleeps 20 hours a day & that she has stopped eating. Chrissy is "worried sick."

I really think Annie is overmedicated, I know she is very bitter that she doesn't have a good relationship with either of her children, & there has been a real let down, since Chrissy graduated college & decided to live on the East coast. She is menopausal, & Paul can be as mean as a snake. All of these factors are a part of Annie's depression.

The same night Chrissy called, Grandpa insisted that I call Annie. When I was talking to her he said, "Do you need to be detoxed?" loud enough for her to hear it. I think it startled her & she seemed better after that. Asked how his appointment with the doctor went, & that is the first time she has initiated a conversation in weeks. Fri she took me to the grocery store & she did seem a little more like herself. 

sept 30, 2004

Don't want to jinx it, but I think Annie is starting to turn the corner. She talks more & even initiates topics of conversation. Still not going to church, but I take improvement where I can see it. We don't "do lunch" but the last three Tues. we have stopped at Wendy's for Jr. Frosties. The first week she only ate about half, the next week she ate two thirds, and this week she ate it all. Also she made it clear through Wal-Mart without breaking into a sweat. Keep praying for her.

Don't know how Chrissy is doing, since communications between her & Annie have broken down. [I'll have to look up my old emails to see what was going on at this time.  I can't remember "communications" ever "breaking down," just occasional respites from her calling to say I'm a bitch.]

oct 6, 2004

Annie and I went out shopping yesterday. She ate all of her frosty & was fairly talkative. I notice a difference in how she drives. She used to do it so naturally, like it was second nature. Now she grips the steering wheel tightly. Spends a lot more concentration before she backs out of a parking space, & seems tentative in a way. We come back out of Mason on a narrow stretch of road. End up to turn onto I-71 at Unity. Yesterday as we were getting ready to go off to the right, the car behind us came whipping around, on our right side, & could easily have caused a bad wreck! I made a remark about it & she said he didn't like the way she was driving. That surprised me & I said well, what was there not to like, she was driving in a perfectly straight line. She said she guessed she wasn't going fast enough to suit him, that he had been riding her tail-end ever since we turned onto that stretch.

Chrissy must think she is better -- she called whining & complaining about her job! She has an office now, but says they expect her to get way too many things done, & if they don't get her some help, she may have to quit this job. Our mantra has always been "don't quit your job unless you have another one lined up!"  

oct 13, 2004

Annie is doing better. She's talking more. Got her hair cut. 

dec 29, 2004

Annie seems some better. Yesterday was the first time in months that she wanted to eat an actual lunch. For many weeks we settled for a stop at Wendy's on the way into Mason. She would get a Jr. Frosty, I added a jr. cheeseburger to mine. Then when it got cold, we would go to Chilli's for plain water & a bowl of broccoli/cheese soup. Yesterday she suggested 91st Street Bar & grill for potato skins & stuffed mushrooms!

jan 5, 2005

I do think Annie is a little better. Last week she suggested we eat at 91st St bar & grill. Yesterday she said we should have just gone to Patrikio's to start with. We know they have good enchiladas, but knew we were under a time constraint because of the weather, & Patrikio's is over in KY. She has been in touch with the two people from her class at Cincy CC that she spent a lot of time with. I will know she is better when she comes back to church, she hasn't been to church since the first of July. Did you know she has lost 70 lbs?

jan 26, 2005

Praise God, I feel like Annie is finally coming back to normal!! Her appetite is back, & she is talking to me again. Starting to take care of some problems & take an interest in the world. Her main concern right now, is that she is losing her hair -- by the handfuls! Chrissy lost the gas cap off her car when she was home for Thanksgiving. I tried not to nag her about getting a replacement, but knew it needed to be done. Yesterday she finally bought a new cap. Grandpa had told me to pick up another bottle of "Heet" when she handed it to me, she asked what it was for. When I told her it would take any moisture out of the gas tank, she said maybe she better get some too. She also bought a gallon jug of windshield fluid. 

Feb 9, 2005

By the time we left walmart the snow had started. We started home, by way of KFC for grandpa's chicken dinner. Our problem was that we go by one of the mason high schools. Normally we are by there before all the nuts, in their pick me up trucks & soup up new cars, are turned loose. But because of the snow they dismissed early. We watched a pick up truck go tearing out of the parking lot, headed east, same as us. Because the road was slick, & he was going way too fast, we saw him fishtail. He went in a complete circle & was headed right for us! Annie jumped a curb to try & avoid a direct hit, but he still managed to smack her back fender hard enough to put blue paint, from his truck onto the fender.

He never offered to get out of the truck & his passenger sure didn't want to roll his window down, but finally did. The driver was giving Annie "I'm so sorry! Lost my traction! My tires aren't very good!" She let him leave, said afterwards she was thinking what if it had been Dante. Then she found out my elbow had been split open, & was bleeding. But the worst of it was when she started to drive away. I told her it sounded like the front tire on my side was blown out. And it was.

Annie bought a wig last friday. She doesn't like it much, but it looks good, & I think she will get used to it. [I had no idea my mother ever bought a wig.] Right now it makes her feel like she has a hat on.

April 6, 2005

Annie had a hit & run virus on Saturday. She threw up, & passed out , then threw up some more. Felt like death on a cracker the rest of the weekend, but is fine now.

Annie even feels well enough that she is going to have our party, at her house, on April 25th, which is a real break through. She is getting used to her wig, but still hates it.

sept 22, 2005

Annie has given up on the idea that she will ever have grandchildren. She asked Lea [my cousin, Annie's niece] if she could be an "honorary grandma" to her baby & Lea said she can. She wants to give her a baby shower in Oct, but hasn't gotten a list from Lea about who to invite. Now when we go shopping, she wants to buy everything she sees.

oct 12, 2005

Chrissy & Annie got into it (poor Michael got the brunt of it when Chrissy got off the phone). Annie made the mistake of telling Chrissy I won't allow her to call Chrissy "a little bitch" which has really always upset me. So I asked her to call her a "snotty little knothole" instead. It is from an old TV show, Barney Miller.  

oct 19, 2005

Chrissy & Annie have butted heads again, so I doubt she and Michael will be coming here for Thanksgiving.  [I looked October 2005 up in my old emails and saw one from Michael to me describing how my mother had called him in the pre-dawn hours to pressure him to come to Thanksgiving and -- because he knew I had already said I wasn't going -- he told her he couldn't get the time off from work.  I had only taken time off work and traveled all the way to my parents' home for Thanksgiving the previous year because my mother had lied and convinced me my dad was dying, but maybe Grandma didn't know.]

And that's the last of the letters.  My mother was so much worse in 2006, but I guess this was around the time my Grandma stopped writing letters.  By 2008, my mother had moved in with her parents.  Grandma died the next year.

Searching for a Published Family Tale

When I first DNA tested, when I started deducing the identity of my biological father, I found a man with whom I had so much in common I thought he might be my father.  Spoiler alert:  he isn't, but he did turn out to be my uncle.  I heard recently that he published something he wrote about his mentally unstable mother (so I think writing tell-alls about our mothers might be a genetically heritable trait?).  I hear it was deeply personal and possibly scathing, at least based on its family reception.  I want to find this piece of writing about my grandmother and the house where my father grew up, but I cannot. 

I don't know anyone who will tell me what it's titled or where or how it was published.  I don't know if it was a book or a magazine article or when it came out, but it was allegedly published.  My uncle is a prolific author who has published dozens of books and articles, but I can't find one that claims to be a memoir or a personal story.  His CV and his Google and Amazon author pages center on his career-related non-fiction writing, and none of them list everything.  None of them seem to list the articles at all.

I don't want to ask him personally partly because I don't think he'd tell me.  I have literally never contacted him, I'm not entirely sure he knows who I am, and I just don't like asking strangers for things when I can skulk about on the web hoping to uncover secrets myself instead.  My sister didn't know any helpful details and assured me our father wouldn't give up the information if she asked.  She feels sure he wouldn't want me to read it.  Any suggestions on where to find this story?  I'm betting it was an essay and not a full book... 

Grandma's Letters

My cousin has a binder two inches thick with old letters from our grandmother.  Today she lent it to me to see if I could find any genealogically significant information that she hadn't.  She'd already highlighted parts.  She told me Grandma wrote things that were weird to write to your grandchildren.  She said Grandma hadn't been the innocent victim of circumstance she used to think she was -- she made the choice to stay in her environment, and she made it repeatedly until she died.

I hadn't expected my name to come up so many times in her letters.  My mother was my grandmother's only daughter, closest friend, and primary source of transportation, so it's only logical I would be a prime source of gossip.  Except I wasn't interesting.  The gossip isn't always bad.  Sometimes she says I sang at church and did a good job, or she comments on how hard I've worked to maintain a 4.0 GPA throughout school.  Sometimes in the next sentence she comments on my related "whining" or "complaining" or my "mood swings."  "Same old, same old," she dismisses.  I was 17 for that one.  It was around the time my mother called the hematologist from church to prescribe antidepressants for her "moody teenager," though talking to the doctor myself or seeing a mental health professional was still strictly forbidden.  I'm not sure how much of my bad behavior was witnessed first hand and how much Grandma heard from my mother.  I mostly saw my grandmother at church at that point.  

She details my mother's breakdown in 2005 on a week-by-week basis.  She didn't detail it in my letters, but she did for my cousin, and probably for other friends and family on her mailing list.  She comments how I "finally got around to being worried" about my mother.  "File that under 'better late than never,'" she quips.  My dad and I had been talking and worrying for some time of course, but that didn't count because it wasn't for an audience.  She said my mother's change in behavior was partly due to her poor health, partly her bad husband, partly her daughter finishing school and choosing to continue to live so far away, and partly because she didn't have a good relationship with either of her children.  And partly the "over medication," of course.  Grandpa yelled from the next room, "Do you need to detox?!" while my grandma was on the phone with her, but my mother heard him and "snapped out of it" enough to behave better, so no action was taken.  All of this came from letters.

My grandmother gauged my mother's mental health by how much she talked to her and how much she ate.  "Annie only ate a quarter of her Frosty yesterday," was cause for alarm, but "Annie finished her Frosty today," was a sign that the worst was over, the dark cloud had passed.  "Did you know Annie has lost 70 pounds?" she asks in January of 2005.  I didn't realize it had started so early.  I don't know if I saw her between Thanksgiving of 2004 and my wedding in 2008.

Grandma's reviews of me improved when she started receiving regular letters from me.  I hadn't realized I was writing my own press releases.  She references my purchasing "a proper dining table" in three consecutive letters.  I guess she wrote to my cousin more frequently than I wrote to her.  She details the stressors of my Manhattan job, but this time without the added snark or the implication that I'm whining.  I wonder if her news bites inherited whatever tone the original teller passed down.  She wrote about my trip to Atlantic City, my cooking Christmas dinner for Michael's family, and she seemed delighted or at the very least neutral about all of it.  

I don't know if there are letters from the time my mother swore she would turn her parents against me.  I can't stand to find them.  I don't want to read anymore.  I was shaking from adrenaline as I read about myself, like I was being attacked to my face, but there is no one to even talk to about it now let alone fight.  My grandmother has been dead for eight years, and I'm just now seeing that she wrote what I perceive to be snarky things about me when I was in the darkest and hardest time of my life.  I don't like it.  I don't like being made fun of for "complaining" and "whining" and having emotions.  I was depressed, and my mother was mentally unstable and abusing drugs.  They complained about my emotions, and then they complained when I stopped exposing my emotions to their view, even though it was 2005 and I didn't cut ties with anyone for another three years.  I've tried to stop having emotions, and I can't.  The best I could do was shield myself from the people who mocked me for having them.  

I am finding it hard to be generous when I'm hurt and angry and no one in that family has ever apologized to me (or anyone else, as far as I know) for anything.  I'm afraid I will never stop being angry.  I wish my dad and my grandmother -- and, hell, my grandfather too -- were alive just so I could say mean, cold things to their faces.  I would be quiet and calm, and when they would get upset at my terrible words, I would scold them for being so emotional, so "moody," so sensitive.  (It's what I'd like to do to my mother too, but I hear she's kept heavily sedated these days. More on that later.)  

I try to be generous because I know they all were mostly miserable, but I still judge them because they made me miserable too, and I deserved better than what they dished out.  Everyone does.  Everyone deserves better, but they were the ones who were responsible for me and prevented me from having that.  I will try to be generous and believe they did the best they could with the tools they had not because I think they deserve my kind thoughts but because it's good practice for the generosity I do owe to my daughter.  It's another way I can be less like them.  It's really hard.

I'm afraid I will never stop being angry.

I Found My Secret Half-Great-Aunt with DNA Testing

I mentioned in a post two years ago that my maternal grandfather was conceived out of wedlock.  His mother was between husbands, and his father got around.  I also mentioned that a much younger half-sibling had contacted my grandfather in the late '90s, but I never learned her name.  She lived far away, and my grandmother had said she would send her a copy of the only photo they had of my great-grandfather and the few she had of his other children, the legitimate offspring.  My half-great-aunt didn't know her father because she had been conceived during an extramarital affair.  Her mother and social father (stepfather doesn't seem accurate if they passed her off as his own) already had two other children.  My half-great-aunt would be about 70 now, barely older than my mother.  Well, I found her.  Or, more accurately, DNA testing found us both.

My half-great-aunt popped up on AncestryDNA the other day with just three people on her family tree -- herself and her biological parents -- and I immediately knew who she was.  Even without the family tree, the 450+ cM of shared DNA and the many DNA relatives in common made it clear that my great-grandfather was our closest common ancestor.  I messaged her explaining how we're related (cushioned with "I think") and that my grandfather was one of the children born after their father's wife died.  I was trying to put delicately that he was one of the outsiders like her, that almost everything I knew had come much later from my own research.  I wanted her to feel comfortable talking to me.  I wanted her to know I was an outsider too, albeit one with lots of collected data and photographs.

I asked if she'd been the half-sister whose named I'd never learned who had written to my grandfather in the '90s.  She wrote back right away, and she was welcoming.  She said she was probably the same sister.  The few details my grandmother had mentioned, like birth year and state of residence, matched up, and she said she had tried to reach out to her "father's people" back then.  She hadn't known her father, she said.  She'd only seen him once when she was little, and her mother was still married to someone else, so she hadn't been allowed to talk about him at all.  How strangely similar to being donor conceived.

Looking Up My Family Online (Again)

Have you ever remembered something one way all your life and then seen it again later and it was completely different?

I was looking up Eugene, my lone surviving maternal uncle, online today, as I sometimes do.  He's hard to find.  I'm Facebook friends with his wife of nearly three decades, but she never mentions him, her photos don't include him, and based on some posts from her family, they didn't spend Thanksgiving together.  I wonder if they got divorced or maybe he died.  Surely one of my cousins would have known and said something.  Surely my regular Google searches for his name and the word "obituary" would have turned something up.

My uncle Eugene has lived in the same house for about three decades.  My other uncle used to live there too until he died in 2009 just shy of age 60.  They didn't live apart in my lifetime.  Uncle Boyd would pay the mortgage and Uncle Gene would pay the utilities.  Uncle Gene had always worked odd jobs that earned below the poverty line, selling used cars, playing in a band at a local nightclub, and working in collections at one point.  Pooling their resources was the only way they could afford their beautiful and spacious house, my mother said, and there was plenty of room for everyone.  I remember Uncle Boyd lived in a ground floor bedroom off the kitchen.  Uncle Gene and his wife lived in one of the upstairs bedrooms.  There was a stained glass window in the corner of the stairway, a gazebo off the front porch, and the sprawling backyard had fruit trees.  It was the nicest house anyone in our family owned.

I looked up the only address I could find online for Uncle Gene, but the picture was of a tiny shack of a house.  He must've moved.

But there was a gazebo in the same place.  And the front stairs looked the same.  And I realized my uncles had lived a tiny shack of a house all along.  How is this possible?  The lines of the roof and walls aren't even straight, and they're at odd angles.  According to the internet, the bank foreclosed on the house in 2013.  I guess they couldn't pay the mortgage without Uncle Boyd's contribution.  He lost his job at the steel mill to a machine back in 2000 and he never found another one -- it was the only job he'd had since he was 16 years old -- but I guess he received something in unemployment or maybe disability since he was diagnosed bipolar around the same time.  He should have had a pension too, though I don't know when that would have started paying out.  Grandpa started collecting his pension from the same steel mill when he retired at 55.  Anyway, Boyd died, the bank took the house, and my uncle Gene doesn't live there anymore.  One of my cousins said she had wanted to reach out to him after Boyd died but she'd held back because he's mentally unstable.  He was the most stable of all of them, I thought.

The bank auctioned off the house for $18,000 to something called BLT Homes Inc., which appears to fix up homes just enough to rent them out.  Uncle Gene and his wife started renting the place two houses down after that, according to the internet.  But I can't find anything about where Gene works, if anywhere, or what he does or how he is.  Why does no one in my family blog?

Then I started looking for my mother.  That way madness lies.  I haven't found an updated address for her since the group home the hospital released her to after her last suicide attempt by self-poisoning (don't try it, folks -- Harvard School of Public Health did a study, and ODing by pills has a less than 2% success rate).  And my dad said she left that place years ago when they told her she'd have to pay something to keep living there.  I keep searching by her name and her past addresses and diagnoses and the churches she's attended, but I find nothing new.  I don't want to reach out to her; I just want to watch her quietly while she is unaware.

Genetic Counseling for the Donor Conceived

I'm getting to the point where I'm posting enough stuff my half-siblings know that, if they stumbled across this blog for whatever reason, they would be able to identify me.  This makes me nervous, but not nervous enough to stop posting.  Obviously.

My half-brother Hans emailed me the other day to say our uncle had tested positive for some sort of mutation that puts people at higher risk for specific types of cancer.  He said our father had asked him to let me know in case I wanted to get myself or my daughter tested.  Below Hans' note was a series of emails between my biological father and my uncle's wife.  She had the job of informing my uncle's family members that they might want to get tested.  There was a limited amount of information exchanged.  The emails were from several months ago, but the dates showed my biological father just had forwarded them to Hans to forward to me this week.  It reminded me vaguely of how people who find out they have an STD are supposed to reach out to everyone they've been intimate with.  "Hey, it's Joseph.  Yeah, the Joseph who sired you about 30 years ago.  Good times, huh?  So anyway, I tested positive, and it turns out you might want to get yourself tested too..."  I wish I had more known half-siblings, just to add to the comic effect.

I had a check up scheduled with my doctor for just a few days later, so I brought a print-out of the email chain to my appointment and asked my doctor what he thought of genetic testing.  I'd assumed he would say there wasn't much point in it if I'm not planning to have more kids and there is nothing actionable I can do with the results anyway.  When I'd brought up prenatal testing before conceiving my daughter, my OB/GYN at the time had said, "What for?  If you don't even know your family medical history, how can we know what tests to run?"  I hadn't known who my biological father was back then or anything about his family medical history, but I thought there were standard tests doctors could run for common disorders. 

To my surprise, maybe because I have more family information now, my current doctor had a different reaction.  He referred me to a local cancer center that does genetic counseling and strongly recommended I do it.  He said that, while there isn't often something actionable to be done with a heightened cancer risk, there might be more screening options in the future, and the field of genetics is progressing constantly so it would be good to have my results on file.

I called the genetic counselor to make an appointment.  She asked me if I had a copy of my uncle's report because there was relevant information in it that they could use in testing me.  I told her I might be able to get a copy.  She stressed the importance of it until I finally explained that my biological father was an anonymous sperm donor and I'm still a secret to most of his family, said uncle probably included.  I told her I would ask my brother for the report, but I wasn't sure I could get it.  She told me it was okay.  While it's useful information and would inform what genetic tests would be done on me and would probably make my testing cheaper, they can work without it. 

Then she asked me to compile a list of every  member of my extended family who has had cancer too, as well as which type of cancer and at what age it developed.  I know some of that.  I know what I know anyway.  I don't know when their various cancers developed, but I know they all died soon thereafter or as a result of the cancer, and I know when they died, so surely that counts for something.  My information isn't lacking enough that I would try to ask for more anyway.  Most of the cancer in my family is on my father's side.  All of the "lady cancers" are, and those are the ones whose risk are heightened the most dramatically by this particular gene mutation.

I told my brother thank you for the information and thank you when he got me the extra pages from our uncle's report.  He's always very prompt in his replies.  I didn't mention that I already have heightened risk for colon cancer, which I inherited from our father's genes, in spite of our father pointing out in the email chain that he thinks he got "the good genes" because he hasn't yet had the same colon issues his brother or mother have had.  I'm not going to tell any of them the results of my genetics testing either, both because I don't think they want to know and also because I want to have information they don't have for a change.  I'm not mad at my half-siblings.  They are nice and kind to me, but I'm angry at my father every time I remember he exists, not just for this.  I get so angry when I think of him that I often cry in impotent rage, and I don't want anyone in his family to know that.  I want them to think I'm calmer and cooler than them, as I've always pretended to be.  I do not want them thinking I'm irrational and ungrateful or expecting too much.  I will take what I can get.  I will take months' old forwarded emails indicating that my daughter and I might want to get ourselves checked out for new and exotic cancer risks, carefully funneled through a third party so that I don't dare take liberties with my father by responding to him directly.  I know I have more than most DC people already.  But I'm still angry.  

Bright Side:  At least it's not ALS.  I scoured my raw genome data from 23andMe, and I'm definitely not getting ALS.

Bright Side

If you don't yet know the identity of one or both of your genetic parents, and you don't yet have life insurance, consider buying a life insurance policy in 2016.  The forms generally ask for family medical history, and if you don't know yours, your life insurance can actually be a tad cheaper than it would be if you knew just how sick your biological family really is.  I got life insurance between finding out I'm donor conceived and finding out who my biological father is, and my family medical history for those forms was half the length it is now that I've found him.  It's called "plausible deniability."  Might as well force something useful out of parental anonymity.  Happy New Year's Eve, Everybody!

The DAR and Cultural Identity

I have craved a cultural identity since I was a young child.  I relished movies about people with strong cultural ties, such as "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and "Pocahontas" and I really want to think of a third one that isn't "Schindler's List" but every example I think of is more culturally insensitive than the last.  I grew up in a white, Midwestern town where our grasping at cultural identity was probably a large part of what led people to genealogy.  It's what led me to mine.

My interest in the Daughters of the American Revolution began when I thought I'd never know the identity of my biological father.  My social father's mother had been very interested in her own genealogy, and I have a framed family tree she drew that includes pencil sketches of a few generations of her ancestors.  They aren't my ancestors, but no one else in her family seemed to want it, and she's a talented artist.  It seemed less weird to have it hanging on my dining room wall when I thought it was the only paternal family I'd ever know. 

I decided to trace my dad's family tree on Ancestry.com since his mother had given me a decent start.  I remembered another family tree she had drawn up that traced her American ancestors back to the 1600s.  I thought maybe I could join the DAR.  If there was going to be institutionalized lying on my birth certificate, I wanted at least to be able to use it to gain entry to a club where I didn't belong.

In case you aren't aware, the DAR is an American group for ladies over the age of 18 who can trace their direct lineage to someone who aided America in the fight for independence.  By "trace," they mean you have to produce birth, marriage, and death certificates for everyone in your direct line back to the ancestor in question.  Most states didn't keep such records until about a hundred years after the Revolutionary War, so that can be a tricky feat.  Fortunately, if a more immediate ancestor is already a member of the DAR -- such as your mother or grandmother -- you only have to prove your lineage back to that person.  Very convenient for maintaining the status quo.  DNA evidence doesn't count as proof nor is it accepted, so no one really knows how many of the members actually descended from patriots biologically and not just legally, or how many meet the bloodline criteria but are excluded because of an ancestor being adopted or born out of wedlock.

I think my dad's mom tried to join the DAR at one point.  When I found a "patriot" in her tree and looked him up in the DAR's patriot database, there was a note explicitly stating that the there was no certifiable proof that the daughter from whom my grandmother descended was legally his child.   

Now that I've done more genealogical research on my own family tree, I've found I'm descended from at least half a dozen "patriots" on my maternal grandfather's side.  While I find a club based around purity of blood rather distasteful and assigning yourself value based on who you were born to rather sad (especially in my case), the DAR still sings its siren song for me.  I crave acceptance and belonging.  Also, "I'm off to my DAR meeting," is one of the WASPiest things a person can say, and I've striven to be WASPier since adolescence.

In case you aren't aware, a WASP is a White Anglo Saxon Protestant, but it has a connotation of snobby old money and power, which is what I find appealing about the term.  I was born white, of mostly British descent, and Methodist, so I'm a WASP in the most literal sense, but I was raised as White Trash.  It's a very different subculture.  We kept a totaled car in our driveway when I was growing up.  My brother has a gun collection.  My grandpa used the "n" word at Thanksgiving dinner.  I don't get jokes about "double-wide trailers" because my uncle lived in one and it was a hell of a lot nicer than the house where I grew up, not to mention TWICE AS WIDE as his previous trailer.  It's a very different subculture.

As I drew up my family tree over the last year, it seemed my DAR dreams would be quashed by the fact that my maternal grandfather was "illegitimate."  I had no idea what name he'd had at birth because his parents weren't married, and his siblings were all half-siblings with different surnames.  Every census since his birth had listed them all under a different surname -- that of whomever their mother had most recently married, even though there was never a man in the house come census time.  I couldn't find evidence my grandfather had even existed under his father's surname before he enlisted in the army for WWII, so I didn't know how to request a copy of his birth certificate. 

Then a couple of weeks ago it occurred to me to try.  I knew his birth date and his mother's maiden name and the city where he was born.  Maybe that would be enough.  I used the only legal name under which I knew him and included his father's name for good measure.  It worked.  It turns out Wilkes -- his father's last name -- was always his last name.  And his father's name was on his birth certificate too.  Where my grandfather and I come from (and maybe across America -- I'm not sure), the mother's husband is automatically the legal father, whether he is present for the birth or not.  If the mother is unmarried and no father is present to sign his name to the birth certificate, the father line unceremoniously reads "bastard."  I'm not sure if this is still how things are done, but it's how they were done when my grandpa was born in the 1920s.

My grandpa's father wasn't present for his birth.  I know this because the line of the birth certificate where it asks for his last known address reads, "Unknown -- Abandoned Wife."  Perhaps it's true.  Perhaps they were married, in spite of the fact that there is no marriage license registered for them in the county where they both lived or anywhere else I have looked and in spite of the fact that my grandmother's letters made it sound like they weren't.  (Or perhaps Michael is right and "Abandoned Wife" was the name of his hometown in Kentucky.)  But I think it's equally likely my great-grandmother didn't want to have "bastard" written on her son's birth certificate.  And I think that was a solid move on her part.  I have great respect for people willing to lie for a good cause, and in this case, my great-grandmother was able to convey more truth on her son's birth certificate than the word "bastard" ever would have.  

Unexpected Relatives

I found another second cousin today.  On Facebook.  On accident.  He had replied to a school friend's post, and his surname was familiar, so I asked where he was from and suggested we might be cousins.  Turns out our grandparents were siblings. 

One of the best things about second cousins is that they are distant enough relations that I can say who my paternal grandparents were and we can establish how we're related without raising any eyebrows.  I don't have to tell them my father's name or that he was an anonymous sperm donor.  People don't usually expect to know their second cousins, so we say "small world!" and laugh and move on.  I've done it before.

And as soon as I wrote that sentence, he messaged me, "Who is your dad?  My dad wants to know."

I didn't know what to say.  If I told him my father's name, it might get back to my uncle who still lives in the same town, and even though he knows who I am, I don't know how he feels about my existence or my advertising it.  If I said, "He was an anonymous sperm donor, but he doesn't like people to know, so keep it quiet," that would raise eyebrows and probably more interest.  It would also make me an interloper who doesn't belong in their family, at least in some people's eyes.  This is why I don't reach out to my first cousins or my uncles, even though they are the ones with the old photos and the family stories I want.  It would be awkward.  I would feel like a tattletale or even a liar, claiming the family of a father who won't claim me.  I didn't realize how much of a secret I was still keeping with his identity.  I have never kept his name secret from friends or advertised it publicly, but today was the first day someone who wasn't a friend asked for it.  Even on my Ancestry tree his name is private, and no one has ever asked for it.  Today was the first time I had to draw a line. 

I didn't respond to my second cousin.  Ignoring his question seems rude and I don't like doing it, but I don't know how to respond, so Jerry suggested I just never respond because it will do the least damage.  I'm on here posting everything I remember about my mother, but I'm still keeping my father's secret.  I feel nauseous. 

My Latest DNA Project

One of my hobbies is figuring out how I'm related to my various "DNA relatives" on Ancestry, 23andMe, and Family Tree DNA.  I love it.  It's my favorite kind of puzzle, and while some of them are simple enough to solve to keep me from getting too frustrated, there are a handful of people in the vicinity of 3rd to 4th cousin who I feel like I should be able to figure out but haven't.  Is it a non-paternity event?  Was there an adoption?  On their side or mine? 

I've been able to figure out everyone up through my second cousins and most of my third cousins at this point, typically up through third cousins a couple times removed, at least when their names are visible to me.  In some instances I've been able to determine their legal names from their user names and work from there, and in a couple rare occurrences I've identified private users on 23andMe simply by knowing who I'm looking for and what their maternal haplogroups ought to be (I'm proud of that one -- this is me patting myself on the back).

One of the closest relations I haven't been able to figure out yet is Aida.  Aida is a black woman my mother's age who has been a prominent figure in her community and in the US Civil Rights Movement.  She didn't know of any white people in her family, so when her 23andMe results came back, she was surprised to learn she was more than 50% white herself.  That meant there had to be quite a few white people in her more distant ancestry.

When I first talked to Aida, she knew a lot more about her ancestry than I knew about mine.  She comes from a large, proud family and has a cousin and a couple of aunts who have served as unofficial family genealogists back when that involved a lot more than internet research.  Her cousin devoted a few years in the '70s to visiting old family homesteads and interviewing "the old-timers." Thanks to a family website she showed me with all the data they've collected, I now know about as much about her extended family as she does. 

Now that my own family tree is better fleshed out (back to the early 1800s across the board and as far back as the 1600s in some branches of my tree) and we still have no family surnames in common, we're trying to figure out how we're related.  If I had to put money on it, based both on shared DNA and our respective family trees, I'd estimate we're somewhere in the vicinity of 3rd cousins twice removed.  She has a daughter, a granddaughter, and a couple first cousins on the various DNA databases.  Because I'm also related to those particular cousins, we know I'm related to her on her mother's side.  Because she isn't related to my paternal uncle, we know we're related on my mother's side too. 

Because my 23andMe ethnicity report says I'm 99.9% European, we know our closest common ancestor was also white.  I went through her family tree and highlighted all the people who were or could be white.  There are some slave owners further back whose surnames don't appear in my tree (so far).  A "non-paternity event" -- finding out someone's dad is not in fact his or her biological father -- is always a possibility, but even those locations don't appear in my family tree.  If I am related to those particular slave owning families, which are farther back in time than I would expect our closest shared ancestor to be, Aida and I must be cousins a couple times over to account for all our shared DNA.  I don't think that's the case, simply because we don't share as many DNA relatives in common as I would expect if we were twice related.  It's not impossible though.  My family has been in America for close to 400 years, and there was a lot of intermarrying between the same families over and over again for the first century or so.  More than one of my seemingly closest DNA relatives turned out to actually be my 5th cousin AND my 6th cousin, or my 4th cousin twice over.

However, there is another way Aida and I could be related.  Her grandfather was born just after the Civil War.  His mother was a slave, and she had a few kids, all of whom were listed as "mulatto" in census records beneath their mother's "black."  No one knows who his father was, but we're all pretty confident he was white.  I didn't have direct ancestors in the same state where Aida's grandfather was born, but it's possible one lived there for awhile and it didn't end up on public record.  Maybe during the Civil War, in which much of my family fought.  It's also possible one of my ancestor's brothers was Aida's mysterious great-grandfather, which would make us 3rd cousins, probably twice removed, depending on which branch of my family tree.

The most obvious way I've come up with so far to figure out how Aida and I are related involves finding someone to whom we are both related the same way.  We have a mutual distant cousin with whom we share the exact same 14.8 cM of DNA, but I haven't figured out how I'm related to her either. There are large blank spaces in her family tree that I haven't been able to fill.  I keep thinking if I figure out how she and I are related, Aida and I are probably related just a generation or two closer on the same branch of the family tree.

I printed out a few generations of Aida's mother's tree and my mother's as well -- just a couple pages in total -- so that I could shade in the names of people who couldn't be our common ancestors and tag the ones who I share with other known cousins.  I don't appear to share any of those cousins with Aida, but it's hard to be sure when some of them are distant relations and sites like Ancestry won't let you compare genomes anyway.  I think I've narrowed down my mother's side of the family tree by about half at this point.  I've even taken to fleshing out Aida's family tree with descendants of her grandfather's siblings, and their descendants too, in the hopes that I'll run across a name from one of my DNA databases.  If I found one, I would consider it a lead indicating that we were most likely related on her grandfather's side.  I've done the same with the slave-owning side of her family, but still no matches.

Setting aside the more obvious ills of slavery -- being kidnapped, held hostage, legally owned, and possibly beaten and raped, all so you can watch your children go through the same experiences -- slavery had some long-term side effects I am ashamed to admit didn't really occur to me until I started working on Aida's family tree.  For instance, slaves were given their owners' surnames.  I knew this.  This was a thing I knew.  But when I ran across the name of a famous slave with the same surname in the same region of Aida's ancestors around the same time, my first thought was that they might be related.  In my family tree that far back, people in the same immediate area with the same surname -- even common names -- tend to have been related in some way.  But in Aida's tree, it more likely meant people were owned by the same master, or by masters who were related.  It's like all slaves were subjected to an exceptionally messed up closed adoption, and those adopted surnames are the ones that persist today. 

No wonder Aida's holy grail of genetic genealogy is to find a cousin in Western Africa.  Every bit of data her family had about their ancestors in Africa was obliterated by kidnapping and slavery.  She knows no names or places; the people doing the kidnapping didn't write down her family's personal information in a ledger for later.  A generation or two might have held onto the knowledge for awhile, passing stories and names on to their children, but whatever might have existed once is gone now.  The DNA they handed down is all that's left, and with each passing generation, that DNA gets more diluted and the possibility of finding out who their ancestors once were grows weaker.

The Time My Uncle Committed Suicide

When I was a toddler and he was in his thirties, my Uncle Charles committed suicide.  He was my mother's brother.  I knew him, but I was too young to remember him.  I don't know how he did it.  No one ever told me, and I never thought to ask.  He was out of state at the time, and his wife (ex-wife?), Janie, was at home with their three young children.

I remember being young, maybe six or seven, and asking my mother why Uncle Charles had killed himself.  "Because he knew he was worth more dead than alive," she said.  She explained to me about life insurance policies and how he'd had one.  She also explained that debt collectors had started calling my grandmother as soon as he died, but she had been smart and refused to give them anything.  The non-transference of debt was one of the most important life lessons I learned as a child. 

Grandpa Was a Bastard

My maternal grandfather was born out of wedlock in the 1920s.  He grew up with his mother and two maternal half-siblings.  His mother married several times over the course of her life, and she worked as a washerwoman when she was between husbands.  Grandpa's father was a widower who left his children with his parents when his wife died.  He went on to live in local boarding houses and impregnate women in the area.  But I didn't know any of these things when I started looking for their names.

My cousin's letters from our grandmother mentioned some of my grandfather's half-siblings' names.  She said Grandpa hadn't really known his father, so he ran away from home at the age of 14 to find him.  He learned that his half-siblings from his father's marriage had moved to California, so he traveled half-way across the country to find them.  Using the names in her letter, I found them too.  Census records showed that their father had been in their hometown all along.  I wonder if Grandpa found him when he got back home.  I wonder if he ever found him.

Grandma's letter mentioned another paternal half-sibling showing up at the house when Grandpa was in his sixties.  She was another illegitimate child.  She had already found the California half-siblings, the legitimate ones, and they had pointed her in my grandfather's direction.  Grandma didn't mention her name in her letters.  Much like my own half-siblings, she would have to take a mass market DNA test for me to find her now, if she's still alive.  Much like my own half-siblings, we don't know how many more are out there.

Since Grandpa had taken his father's surname and his parents were never married, I had no idea what his mother's first or last name had been.  I couldn't find a single census record with my grandfather on it until after he married my grandmother, and there is no evidence that he even existed by that name until he enlisted in the army during WWII.  Grandma's letters did mention his maternal half-siblings' first names though, so I took the names I had and enlisted help from an internet forum.  Someone who is better at genealogical research than me found them as children living with their mother in the right area under a different surname.  The next census showed them at the same location but with yet another surname.  They were simply listed with whatever married name my great-grandmother had at the time, which explained why it had been so hard to find them.  In reality, all my great-grandmother's children had different surnames and different fathers.  All were dead by the time I found this information. 

I was surprised to learn my great-grandmother had lived in the same city as my family until she died when my mother was a teenager.  My mother had never mentioned her.  She had inherited her middle name from her.  I wonder if they ever met.  According to her death certificate, she had died a couple of days before she was formally pronounced dead.  I think this means she wasn't found immediately.  I haven't been able to find a headstone for her or any evidence of a burial or an obituary. 

I found some old photos of my great-grandfather that had been posted on Ancestry.com by descendants of his legitimate children.  I have his nose.

My Mother's Oral Family History

I have always known who my biological mother is.  She was the same mother who raised me.  But finding out about her family history was harder than finding my biological father.  I haven't found a single person in her family interested in genealogy but me, and our family is full of secrets that we only know from oversharing.

I grew up within a mile of my maternal grandparents and saw them at least once a week for the first eighteen years of my life.  There were certain things I grew up knowing, stories I grew up hearing over and over again, but they were specific and limited.  I knew my grandmother had had ten pregnancies in eleven years.  I knew my only biological aunt had died of SIDS on Christmas Eve and that my then 3-year-old mother had tormented her own mother with the persistent question, "Where is my baby?" for weeks afterward.  I knew my mother had been named after her own maternal grandmother, and that her grandmother had hated her own name so much that she'd gone by her middle name nearly all her life.  These were some of the facts my mother recited to me regularly, just like the story of my birth (I "ripped [her] from end to end") and of my brother's adoption ("she called and said, 'Do you want a peanut?' A peanut is what they called premature babies.")  They were her oral history, and they are embedded in my brain.

I knew my grandmother had gotten married at age fifteen because she wanted to run away from home, but I didn't know she had been running away from her "wicked stepmother."  I knew her own mother had married at fourteen and lost custody of my then 2-year-old grandmother when she became a teenage divorcee, but I didn't know my great-grandfather's name or that he was a college graduate, unlike anyone else in my family for the next 75 years.  Grandma's maiden name was Adams, or Addams* -- I didn't know which -- and my mother hated my great-grandfather for taking Grandma away from her mother.  He "didn't like girls," my mother told me when I asked why Dante had been invited to meet him and I hadn't.  I knew he'd written and self-published a memoir that my mother claimed was a catalogue of his sexual exploits, but I didn't know the name of the book, and I didn't know that he lived within a half-hour's drive of my home for over a decade of my childhood.  I didn't know he was the only person in my family to live to the age of ninety, or that he'd died within a year of "the love of his life," my Grandmother's longtime stepmother.  I didn't know they had given my grandmother a half-sister, who had finished college but who hadn't been able to bear children of her own.  She has an adopted daughter close to my age who has a graduate degree.  They're both on Facebook now.  She looks like a younger, healthier, more affluent version of my grandmother. 

I've mentioned before how my cousin helped me with my search for maternal family by providing old letters our grandmother had sent her.  Our grandmother used to write letters once a week to pretty much everyone she knew who lived out of state.  My cousin had kept several years worth of Grandma letters.  She pulled them out of storage at my request.  She said they shared too much information, that she wouldn't be comfortable rereading them if Grandma had still been alive.  They read more like private journal entries than something you would say to a granddaughter.  Those letters also held names and dates I hadn't absorbed from my mother's oral history.  They gave me search terms, and the knowledge my mother had embedded in my brain filled in the blanks.  My cousin didn't know the things I knew -- even our great-grandmother's first name -- so I was able to fill in some blanks for her too. 

I assume my great-grandmother's first pregnancy ended in miscarriage because she got married at the age of fourteen and didn't give birth to my grandmother until over a year later.  I learned these dates from documents on Ancestry.com.  She got divorced in the 1930s at the age of 18 and lost custody of my grandmother to her ex-husband.  My great-grandfather left my then 2-year-old grandmother with his parents and moved on.  My great-grandmother spent time in the Deep South, though neither I nor my cousin knows why.  My grandmother's letters made it sound like purgatory.  My grandmother lived with her own grandparents until she was eight.  She became close with her father's only sister, whose name I recognized because my grandmother had visited her every week at her nursing home until she died in the 1990s.  At the age of eight, my grandmother moved in with her newly remarried father and the woman she referred to in letters as her "wicked stepmother."  Her father called her the love of his life.  My grandmother wasn't happy there.  As I mentioned earlier, she ran away at the age of fifteen to marry my grandfather.  She didn't know how to cook, and she never learned how to drive.  Neither of them finished high school.  They eloped on my grandfather's birthday, allegedly to distract the court registrar out of asking for proof of my grandmother's age.  It apparently worked.  Their marriage license lists her age as 18.  My eldest uncle was born ten months later.

I've found my great-grandparents' headstones.  My great-grandmother remarried at least once, but she survived her final husband, so even her death certificate doesn't list his full name.  My mother told me she died of stomach cancer, but her death certificate cites cardiac arrest.  I've learned that death certificates list whatever catalyst literally killed the person that day and will never say what led to what killed them, like cancer or diabetes or blunt force trauma.  I come from a long line of ladies who battled their weight, and my great-grandmother relished the easy weight loss that came with dying of stomach cancer.  One of the few pictures I've seen of her shows her svelte figure standing with both legs inside one leg of pants, demonstrating that she was half her previous size and delighted by it. 

My grandmother's aneurism created the same effect.  The weight melted off when she spent months on a liquid diet, unable to swallow most food without choking.  She recovered though and was unhappily battling her weight again by the time she died some fifteen years later.  One of my last memories of her was of visiting her and my grandpa's duplex and witnessing one of her daily weigh-ins.  She had gained weight and was disappointed.  She was in her seventies. 

Mental illness was my mother's best diet.  She lost around eighty pounds when she stopped eating or drinking or getting up from the couch in her early fifties.  She was pleased with the effect and bragged to me over the phone in the days leading up to my wedding.  It was the thinnest she had been since before I was born.  She commandeered one of my dad's old wheelchairs because she had grown too weak to walk.  When I saw her next, she had aged twenty years.  Her formerly thick brown hair was sparse and grey, and the skin hung loose from her face and neck like wax dripping from a candle.  She reminded me of Emperor Palpatine.

My grandfather's lineage was much harder to trace because his parents were never married or lived together, and he never spoke about either of them.  I met one of his half-siblings once as a child, but it turns out there were at least six more.  More on Grandpa next time.