Showing posts with label estrangement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label estrangement. Show all posts

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Microstory 1864: That’s It

Here’s a story for ya. You can either choose to believe it or not, but I’m telling you, it happened, and it happened to me. My father and his father did not have a good relationship. According to what little my mother was able to relay to me, they fought all the time when he was young, and then they just stopped talking completely. I don’t know what they were so angry at each other over, but whatever it was, it’s the reason I never met my grandfather. When he died, he left no one to go to his funeral, let alone plan it. I decided to take up the responsibility of putting him to rest. Because hey, if my dad wouldn’t tell me what the guy did that was so wrong, he couldn’t expect me to hate him as much as he did. Four hundred bucks gets you a bag of your loved one’s ashes, and that’s pretty much it. I didn’t hold a service, and I didn’t buy a fancy urn. I just kept it in the cardboard box that the guy at the morgue went out of his way to tell me was included free of charge, and walked away with the rest of his personal effects. And when I say effects, I really just mean the one thing. Besides his pajamas—which he died in, and I didn’t want back—the only possession he had was a key around his neck. Per the paperwork, he lived only a few blocks from my childhood home, which makes the whole thing even sadder. I took that key, drove to my grandfather’s house, and unlocked the door. The place was immaculate. No dust, no dirt, no smudges on the windows. It looked like it had just been cleaned, but it couldn’t have, because it was missing the smell of cleaning chemicals. Oh, and everything else. Like the man himself, the only thing in the house was a key, hanging from the chain for the entryway light. I tried it on every interior door, but it didn’t work anywhere. It didn’t even fit. I had to investigate, which was harder back then, because my phone couldn’t magically spit out information about it just by taking a picture, like my grandson’s does. He showed me that once.

I went to three locksmiths until one happened to recognize it. It belonged to a storage facility on the edge of town. Most facilities require that the renter use their own lock, but this particular location prided itself in excellent security. Their keys couldn’t be copied, and you couldn’t use it unless you were already on the list of people allowed to access the unit. Still, I figured I might as well go check it out in case they made an exception. They didn’t have to. Their records showed that I was on the list, as was my grandfather, and nobody else. He left this all for me. Whatever was in there, it must have been pretty special. Was it a pristine collection of rare figurines worth millions? Did he just leave me a chest of actual millions? Could it be a creepy, ominous freezer, inside of which was the dead body of his archnemesis? I just kept thinking of all the amazing things that could be waiting for me, and nothing was even close to what I ended up finding when I opened that roll up door. Was this it? I was about to run back to the office to ask for a flashlight, but the guy who signed me in had followed me, and had one at the ready. I switched it on, and shined it all over the unit. “Any secret entrances?” I asked. No, this was it. Both of the neighboring units were recently emptied, in between renters. This. Was. It. On the floor in the center of the unit was a key, like someone had dropped it without noticing. But it wasn’t just any key. It was the key to my parents’ house. It looked exactly like the one on my keychain. All that anticipation just to learn that my mom had given him access to our house in case of emergency, and he had never used it. That’s it.

Thursday, March 3, 2022

Microstory 1834: Much Older Sister

My sisters and I were never close, mostly because they didn’t know that I was their sister. Our parents were split on whether they wanted me to help take care of them or not, so I kind of did both. Let me start at the very beginning. Our parents didn’t much like each other. They were the product of an arranged marriage, precipitated by four mothers and fathers who were themselves not products of arranged marriages. Nor did the bloodline have a history of it. It was just something they wish they had done. All of them were unhappy, and decided the only way to prevent the next generation from going through the same thing was to make this decision for their children. Of course it didn’t work, because that wasn’t exactly a scientifically proposed hypothesis. Still, my mom and dad stayed together—to the end, as it happened—because that’s what was expected of them. They were pretty good actors, and only got better with time. I’m old enough to remember how apathetic they were towards each other, but my much younger sisters are not. More to the point, they were never really paying attention, or they may have noticed that they never saw their own parents show affection towards one another in front of them, not even when they thought they were alone. That was weird, and honestly, my sisters should have picked up on it. But this isn’t just about them. When I was still an only child, I left home at age sixteen, and started to live my own life. They never really wanted to have me, because I was the result of an obligation, rather than love, so they were fine with this. We didn’t hate each other, but we stopped talking, because we had never developed a support system, so there wasn’t any point. I met a man who I loved dearly, and began to plan my own family, which never materialized.

After seven years of being estranged, my parents sent me a letter, informing me that they were pregnant again. I wish I could find that letter—or note, to put it more aptly. I remember it being so formal and to the point. It was something like, I’m pregnant with another daughter, and nothing else. My husband had just died not one week before, and I was feeling so alone. I wanted that support system I never had, so I tried to return. Again, there was no hostility, but my parents didn’t care about me, and they didn’t want me to live with them. As fate would have it, a house went up for sale in their neighborhood around that time, so I bought it with the money my parents-in-law were giving me to help out after their son passed. I realized then how much closer I was with them than my real parents, and I was grateful for this. I kept my married name, and tried to be in my sister’s life as much as possible. She remained completely unawares of our true relationship. She, and our youngest sister later on, would always refer to me as their aunt, but ya know, the kind of aunt that isn’t related. It was heartbreaking, but I chose to respect our parents’ wishes. Or rather, I respected their parents’ wishes, because I had long ago accepted that I was no longer a daughter. Their health declined at about the same time, even though they were seven years apart, so I contributed as much as I could for someone who wasn’t supposed to be too invested in their lives. When they passed, I suggested the three of us take a trip together to connect, and put the past behind us. They were interested in hiking up a mountain, so that’s what we’re doing. I was planning to finally tell them who I was when a selfie accident kills us all.