***Trigger Warning – contains potentially distressing material pertaining to sexual assault
A Life Ending
After a few weeks of being home, I slowly settled back into home life after having spent nearly three months with my aunt for the summer. My life was as it had always been except I was quieter and angrier. I was also more into staying in my room listening to music, writing random thoughts, and reading. I resided within an imaginary world of fictitious lives and different selves. These different selves were all of my thoughts from all the minds that seemed to talk within my brain at once. It only makes sense to say that it was a world my brain actually created to help me cope. Looking back upon this time frame now, I wonder if this was how my brain protected me and whether this was an aspect of posttraumatic stress.
Yet, there were more important things going on around me that concerned my aunt’s health issues. She had grown sicker since I had left her to the point that she was hospitalized for days at a time. My grandparents and my mother traveled to stay with my aunt on and off for weeks at a time to care for her. To my family’s dismay, there was nothing that doctors could do to further stop the cancer that had already spread within my aunt’s breasts and body. She was apparently given a short amount of time to live, and this was unconscionable for my mother and my grandparents. They all tried everything to change the prognosis, but they were powerless.
Within family systems of narcissists, power means everything, and when narcissists find they have no power or are at a loss of power, they go on a predatory hunt to obtain the power to control by any means necessary. My aunt was dying, but instead of heeding wise counsel from doctors, my grandmother went on a hunt to find any doctor that would tell her what she wanted to hear. She, in fact, went all over the city where my aunt lived just to find someone who would attend to my aunt’s medical needs. She found no one, however. So my grandmother took matters into her own hands.
My grandmother returned back home and concocted her own healing potions, made meals, and sought the counsel of people she called wise men. Then she headed back to my aunt’s hospital bed and fed her. Much of what my grandmother did to assist my aunt directly defied doctors’ orders, but my grandmother did not care. She emphatically stated that she was taking care of her child and willing her child to live. It came to a point where my aunt became scattered in her thoughts from listening to both her mother’s directives and her doctors’ directives. Eventually, my aunt was released from the hospital to hospice care because her condition became a lot worse.
Even in the face of my aunt’s oncoming death, my grandmother stood staunch and fearless believing against the odds. She willed my aunt to live, but she did not realize that she was literally driving my aunt crazy. In fact, for a time after my grandmother returned home, my aunt was admitted into a psych ward for help. Having a mother for a narcissist had driven my aunt to the depths of despair, and all that my grandmother had told my aunt defied any medical sense. My aunt became quite doubleminded that doctors recommended that my grandmother not visit her for a while. Just imagine how my grandmother took this. She did not take this well at all.
My aunt had a life that was ending, and its progression was steadily hastened by a narcissist. So to salvage the remainder of her life, my aunt requested that my grandparents and my mother return to their homes. My aunt wanted to spend the last few weeks of her life with her child. A few times, my aunt would call and my family would talk to her, but when I wanted to talk with her, I was always told that she was too weak to speak to me. Although no negative words were ever said to me, I soon internalized that I had been responsible for my aunt’s cancer progression – that the stress of the trauma I suffered was the reason she became sicker. I do not know this now to be the case, but I surely believed it then. Yet, I was very disappointed to miss out on talking time with her until she requested to speak to me herself.
The Last Conversation With My Aunt
One phone call from my aunt was a phone call like no other because it was the last phone call we had together. My aunt requested to speak to me, and although my mother and grandmother did not think this to be a good idea, my father granted my aunt’s wish. When I heard my aunt’s voice on the other end, she sounded no less like herself but still somewhat different. Her voice sounded lite and airy. What I empathically heard was a voice of peace. I surmised that she had found peace within herself and was no longer going to battle the cancer anymore. Although she did not tell me this, I instinctively knew that it might be the last time I ever talked to her again.
As my aunt talked to me, I took in her voice because I did not want to forget it. If I could have recorded her last words to me, I would have so that I would have a lasting memory. She sounded far away, but at the same time her voice was clear. We talked about things that seemed far too insignificant to discuss for a dying person, but I was still a child. We reminisced about the neighbor’s child from across the hall who I had escorted out of my aunt’s apartment so that I could watch Prince on television. We laughed about her different neighbors that lived in the building and their interesting professions. We also laughed about fun times we had walking the city.
She exclaimed that she missed the sound of my voice, my funny facial expressions, and my sarcastic responses that were always timed just right. She expressed that her apartment had not been the same since I had left. She told me how her child often went out into her den area to look for me. She said that I had become a special part of her household, and she was honored to be my aunt. She said that she regretted never taking me to all the sites in her city that I had wanted to visit, but she had no clue that it was not a big deal to me. I simply did not have the heart to tell her I explored the sites on my on anyway. I certainly was not going to say that with my parents listening.
Needless to say, never once did my aunt mention what my mind had already long forgotten, but she apologized to me for ever causing me pain. She asked me to forgive her for the times she hurt my feelings, and I forgave her. She told me she loved me, and I repeated the words back to her. I wanted to cry. Intuitively, I knew it was over. I knew it was the end of us. I wanted to say so much to her in that moment, but it sounded like she was so distant and far away, and I could not express my deepest heart. Before I could think of what else to say, my dad took the phone. There was nothing left to say, and I felt broken in this. A life was ending.
Stay tuned for the next post.
My Voice Unchained 