(no subject)
My Uncle Kelly was found dead next to a bottle of liquor in his bed in a halfway house in Ventura County yesterday. He was tasked with caring for me alongside my Great Grandma after I was taken away from my Mom at the age of 8. The coroner found my family members and then notified us. And with that, Kelly is dead. I've had a few family members inquire about how I feel, and if you know me well enough and long enough you'd understand why this is complicated. I'd like to first say that I don't hate Kelly, and I hold no resentment towards him.
Even if he took the gift my Dad gave me and ran it over with his car as a punishment. I hadn't seen my Dad in years and I clung to that gift, and he destroyed it because he could. I don't hate him for making me make his coffee, draw his baths, make him food or do his laundry. I don't hate him for making me walk to the pharmacy when my leg was scalded by bacon grease and he gave me 5 dollars and said "walk there" as he smoked a cigarette inside alongside his trusty beer. I was a child, and that's how he treated me. Sometimes he would be nice and take me to Jack In The Box or share baseball knowledge, to which of that he was quite obsessed.
He would call me drunk and demand I bust out the stats book for whichever player during whatever year on the Dodgers team. I'd read it to him and then I'd hear drunk men cuss or laugh in the background. Kelly kept many scientific books and articles and from that I got my knowledge of science and science fiction. He also kept about 20 birds in his bedroom, which was littered with stacks of porn magazines, cigarette cartons and bird feed. I was also tasked to care for the birds, and from that I got my understanding and affinity for birds, and to this day I adore them.
Kelly screamed at me and chased me out of the house at 1 am screaming "THE HEART COMMANDS" while my feeble Great Grandmother suffering from dementia sobbed in the house. He put bars on my windows so I couldn't leave, and he soldered my electronics and land line phone so he could separate the base from the power source at will whenever he wanted, and when he wanted. He also made my Mom feel like she was nothing during the few times she tried to visit me and my Grandma during her bout with her drug addiction after she lost custody.
Kelly was a mean, intelligent and angry man, and he pushed that hatred on to everyone he encountered because it was never his fault. And even now, I do not hate him. I saw a broken man who was floundering with his own demons right before me as a child. But at the same time I was navigating my Mom and her own struggles, and to have both of that pressed on me as a kid was traumatizing. And then there was my poor Great Grandma who had held the family together for decades, and could no longer as the silent grip of dementia took her.
I have been diagnosed with PTSD and other acronyms from surviving this childhood that Kelly, and yes my Mom gave me. There were good times, but the bad unfortunately was more often. I dream about that house on 18th street constantly, and in some ways it used to plague me until one dream an outside force tried to meddle with the house and the time period it's forever stuck in. I woke up and had the realization that the house on 18th is my traumatic place, but in so many ways I am very protective of it, and I wish for it to be left alone.
Kelly is now dead, and so are my grandparents, my great grandparents and my Mom. I am saddened, but I am also inspired to believe that the generational trauma that haunted my family is finally closing a chapter and loosening it's grip on us. I'm writing this now with a loving fiance, opportunities ahead and in a beautiful and stable home. Something Kelly couldn't foster or create, and for that I suffered as a child. But as an adult I do not have to. You are no longer hurting Kelly, and neither am I.