Goodbye Forever: Family and what it really means

My sister is a member of Our Lady of the Cast-Iron Unmentionables. She's a cast-iron bitch. She's narrow-minded, dull, and mindlessly cruel. And she doesn't care that others see her this way; she secretly revels in it.

That's fine and dandy; she has that right and I will respect it. I don't ask her to change; at this point in our lives I don't know if I really care either.

When our father was diagnosed with cancer, I was there. I spent the next year and some driving 400 miles each way 3 of every four weekends every month, to clean his garage, mow the lawn, get up early to go with him to uncle Lloyd's for dry toast and coffee. Then she came home from her career to take over, and I wasn't welcome there any more. The one thing I asked, after we'd talked with the hospice nurses, was that I be called when the final days were happening.

She called the day after he died. She was making all the funeral arrangements, would we be able to attend?

I said nothing until after the funeral. Then I told her, once, that I was very angry how things had been handled, and that when mother's time came did not want anything like what had happened. Most likely she's completely forgotten; she wasn't the one pissed off and hurt, so she doesn't care.

She never has, if she wasn't the victim. But she remembers every slight in the past 50 years.

She doesn't quite get that we all remember hurts. The bigger the hurt, the more we remember it. And when we ask for small things it hurts a lot that she refuses. And the fact is we, her sibs, have all had enough of her shitting on all of us. It's why we very seldom visit her and Mom. It's not why none of us live nearby anymore, but there sure wasn't any reason for any of us to not move away.

And when Mom does die, we all expect my sister to be queen bitch again, and no one will have any say in anything about it.

And after the funeral, and paying it off, we will all go home and leave her alone for the rest of our lives.