Reality

The death of my uncle really brings in the reality of what is happening with my mother.

When my uncle was dx, the doctors made clear to my aunt that it was incurable.  I had to look up the specific liver cancer and read about it again to remember why.

My mother’s stage IV colon cancer is also incurable.  It has metastasized into her liver.  Currently, she is considered stable because the tumors in her liver have shrank since the last CT scan.  The numbers are not in her favor though, according to what I have read: “relative 5-year survival rate of about 14%. This means that about 14% of people with stage IV colon cancer are likely to still be alive 5 years after they are diagnosed.”

I know that she may beat those odds, but realistically she will not.  For now we ride the up’s and downs with her as she and the doctors continue to fight the disease.  I know that they will fight until the cancer makes them stop because the quality of her remaining life   will outweigh the side effects of the treatment.  I do not have a magic ball to see when that day will happen, I just know that the thought sends tears to my eyes and dread and anxiety to my stomach.

Losing my dad has grown harder and harder as the time has gone on.  But losing both of them will leave me an orphan.  It sounds crazy, we weren’t really even a nuclear family in the true sense of family.  We were only family on paper and because together they created me.

The reality is that in the future her body will not be able to fight off the cancer and I will have to say good-bye to her.

My Uncle

My mom’s older brother passed away yesterday.  This spring he was dx with a rare form of liver cancer that starts in the bile ducts and is hard to detect.

I have not seen him in years, I think that the last time I saw him was when my grandfather was recovering from one of his cancer surgeries, I was 19.  It was a super stressful time.  My mom has spent the summer taking care of him at my grandmother’s home and she needed a break.  I came in from school and spent the two weeks helping with his care.

My uncle arrived and to my chagrin became an additional burden.  He refused to cook or do anything to help my grandmother or I.  Then he would stand outside to smoke.  Things came to a big explosion when my grandfather wanted a cigarette and my uncle tried to give it to him.  I told them both no.  My grandfather had recently had his vocal cords removed because of smoking related cancer.

My grandfather was so mad at me that I wouldn’t let him have a cigarette that he flipped me off, swore at me (he couldn’t talk but he was cursing me), and cried in his anger.  At the time, I just laughed, but I was pretty horrified.  I do not regret my decision to not let him have a cigarette, even though my mom now tells me, it wouldn’t have been a big deal because he died two years later. Whatever.

I do have some memories of him as a child.  My mom and I drove her younger brother to Texas when I was very young.  It was after Christmas and I was not in school yet.  I remember that we were caught in a snow storm on the way.  I rode in the back of my uncles van and it was super boring.

We got to Texas and stayed with her older brother and his wife for awhile.  I do not know how long.  Then we later flew back home.  A year or two later, my Uncle turned up at my Grandma’s home, broken.  He had found out his wife had cheated on him and he left her.   He was broken because they had had a daughter together, which blew up later when it was discovered through a paternity test that she was not his.  I am not clear on the details because I always seem to have known that my uncle was sterile because they family always said that scarlet fever did that to him as a child.  I guess the paternity test confirmed that and the fact that he never had any children that he knew of.

He showed up and stayed with my grandma for awhile.  I remember  he would be very excited about something and then later, he would be crying unconsolable. So, as child it was hard for me to understand.

I saw him a few other times after he married his last wife.  But they were brief visits, and as a kid and a teen, I was not really welcome into the adult conversation circle….. I loved being part of it though, I learned a lot of ‘family secrets’ that way.  I was guilty of listening when I could.

I can’t really comment about what kind of life my uncle lived.  To me, it appeared that he struggled with a lot of  anxieties that may have prevented him from doing things.  I don’t think that he held a job for many years.  I remember during one of his visits, my aunt complaining and my grandmother pleading with him to get a job.  I think that his anxieties prevented him from coming to my grandmother’s funeral, but I am not sure.

I know that he had bladder cancer before this last bout of cancer.  It caused him to change his lifestyle and to stop smoking.  I don’t know what his hopes or dreams were.  I don’t know how he felt about not being able to have children.  There are so many things that I do not know about him.

I did have a few nice talks with him in the last few years.  I had embarked on a long search for our immigrant family and I talked to him a few times to ask him to search his memory for things that he remembered.  Before he died, I complied the research into a book and sent it with pictures that I had received from other family branches so that he could see where my research had taken me and what information I had found.  I still have a brick wall in the form of my great-grandfather’s family.  I was hoping that with the help of memories and such that I would perhaps be able to crack open that wall, but so far I have not.

I am extremely grateful that my aunt was able to talk him into sending in his DNA.  I am hopeful that with it and my mom’s DNA I can find the answers to open up that part of the family tree.  I was hoping to have one last chat session with him before he passed, but that is not possible.

Dear Uncle, rest in peace.

 

DNA and the secrets uncovered

If you are going to do a DNA test, I would tell you to expect the unexpected.

I felt confident that there would be no surprises which was a crazy mistake.

It was revealed that my favorite grandmother had strayed.  It was known in the family that there was an affair, a mutual one in fact.  She and my grandfather swapped partners with another couple.

While the news was a bit of a shocker, the information has actually been staring my cousin and I in the face for awhile now.  But we never really looked closely enough to figure out what it was really saying.  It was words out of the affected person who thought for some reason they had a different father, is what caused a reexamination of the DNA.  It was then decided that the affected persons gut feelings were indeed real.

I told my parent and I told the affected family members child as well and that it where I am stopping.  I feel that it is not my duty to shatter the reality of any other person.  If someone else wants to, that is their prerogative.

 

Cancer

Cancer has struck my family again.

My grand-father and his father both died from cancer.  My grandfather’s was in his throat, his father’s was in his stomach.

My mom was recently dx with colon cancer and at the same time, her older brother was dx with liver cancer.

Nothing is working for my uncle.  He has had two different rounds of chemo.  The tumors in his liver did not respond to either type of chemo.  My mom’s cancer is now considered stable.  No new growth and three tumors have shrunk.

I am now considered at higher risk for colon cancer and I have to start being screened this year.

This has really had me reflecting on the fact that I will be losing the last of my nuclear family in the next few years. I will be an orphan when my mom dies. It makes one look at family and family relationships.  While I was lucky enough to have a step-father that took me on as his own, it does make me wonder how strong are the family ties.  In my mind I have already started to distance myself from him and my half-siblings.  I think to protect myself from rejection etc in the future.

I am not particularly close to my half brother and while I am finally talking to my half sister now, we are not close either.  I will make no guesses or predictions on the future, things will just have to unfold as they will.

Dad’s Birthday

My Dad’s birthday is in September.  I have tried for so long to ignore it.  My relationship with him was so complicated and it’s easier to not think of him, of what he did and did not do as a father. It’s easier to not think of it all.

But it’s hard to ignore him.  He is part of my DNA, 50% in fact.  I try to think of nice things that he did when he was alive, but it’s not easy for me to find them.  He gave my husband a motorcycle.  He tried to teach my kids to fish, but complained about my older son and clearly favored my second son. He believed that I would take care of my grandma and him, though it took him years to trust that I actually would.

My father was a violent man.  He threatened me with guns around in front of social workers which ended up triggering calls from two different police departments to warn me.  Less than 5 years before he died he bragged to me about beating up a woman and her boyfriend.  I don’t even know what the fight was about.  I just know that he was really beating up the boyfriend and the girl tried to help out.  When she did was was also beat up.  Even though my mom won’t talk about it, I know that he also hit her too.

It’s difficult to struggle with the person that he was.  I know that the stroke and his dependence on me changed him.  There was a psychotic medicine that he took, and when I filled his pills, he would tell me to make sure those pills were in the medicine boxes.  He said that if he didn’t take them he would be really angry with me and that he didn’t want to feel that way about me (anymore).  I struggle with this too.  It was very important that he recognized all of this and ground breaking that he told me.  But at the same time it still makes me a little sad.

With family, we feel this intense need to love them no matter what, no matter how they hurt you.  It’s not really a healthy and it doesn’t work.  We see the evidence of that all the time in our society.  Everything should be forgivable, but not everything is forgettable.  Sometimes there is a fundamental trust that is just broke in our relationships.  When that trust is broken, it is hard to rebuild.  what we have to struggle with, is how to move on after that has happened.

Family Revelations

It turns out my BD had secrets.  Not that it is necessarily a surprise to anyone that new him.

The year I graduated from high school, when he decided that he was not going to come to my graduation…. at that time in his life he was dating a very young girl who was closer to my age than his.  This girl apparent found out she was pregnant.  I know, because he kept the test that indicated the date the baby was to be born and the date of the test.

Before he died, I told him that I was surprised I didn’t have some half siblings out there.  He assure me that there were none, that ‘it was all taken care of’.

I think he thought that it was… or maybe that the girl was pregnant with someone else’s baby.  I ended up looking her up on Facebook and finding her.  I also found the child as well.

The girl had a child already and she did marry someone else.  What exactly does it mean?  It means that I do possibly have a half sibling out there.

I found the test before his funeral and it threw me a bit.  My husband and I wondered if a half-sibling or this girl would possibly show up at his funeral.  No one did though, much to my relief.  Someday she might catch up with me due to the wonders of Ancestry DNA tests.