My drunken uncle nearly beat my aunt to death [View All]

[bleedingheart]

many times...sometimes he beat her so badly that she couldn't see because the swelling was so bad in her face.

He fathered 9 kids of whom 7 survived to adulthood and of the two that died...one died because that winter he drank his paycheck instead of feeding his family and taking care of them...and the infant died in a house where there was no money to heat it.

Times were hard and people in my family looked down on folks who took welfare and the motto of "you made this bed...you now must lay in it"...was thrown up at my aunt...

However that didn't mean that her brothers could endure it...they wanted to kill the bastard for the beatings and she would beg them to spare him....not from love...but more because she didn't want her brothers going to jail.

When my own father died, I was a child and I remember thinking..."why is uncle xxx allowed to live while my own good father dies?" I remember that drunken lush coming to my dad's funeral and mumbling what a good man he was and even though I was only 10 at the time...I kept thinking..."why isn't it you in that casket..." because even at a young age I knew what a jerk he was...and it was when I learned that the good do die young...

When that asshole died, some of his kids put together a funeral for him...and they carried on like he was some sort of saint ...perhaps it made them feel better but you know what...the phony funeral alienated them from their own mother...she had endured beating after beating...she had begged for food to feed them because he treated them like shit...and to see some of her kids try and canonize him in death because they didn't want the world to know him for what he was...a monster....was more than she could handle.

When another of my cousins who had endured much the same lost her husband...her kids rallied around their mother and basically had a giant sigh of relief that the monster that had dominated their life was finally dead...at his funeral they shared the story "warts and all"...and I remember people walking away from the gravesite shocked at the honesty and mumbling about "speaking ill of the dead" but you know what...it was the best thing they could have ever done...