A letter I can't send

Growing up, I idolized you.  Even though our official relationship is uncle and niece, the fact that you are only 10 years older than me made us more like cousins, or sometimes you even seemed like my older brother.  When I was little, you were the big kid that I could follow around.  When I was a teenager, you were the cool 20 something year old, living on his own, and as I entered adulthood, you were someone to talk to who had been there and done that.

We spent every holiday and family birthday together.  Every meal that I remember eating at Grandma and Grandpa's house has you sitting beside me.  I tasted caviar for the first time when you graduated from college (and promptly threw it up because you had been slipping me champagne all afternoon and had gotten me drunk).

You took me to Gay bars in Toronto long before I came out.  You were the first family member that I came out to.  I knew you would be fine with it, after all, you had already walked down that same path years before.  I watched you mourn your friends and lovers during the Aids epidemic and I feared for your health and safety.

When I first moved to Halifax, ours was the one relationship that I knew I would miss the most.  We kept in touch at first, by phone and email.  But then something started changing.  You started changing.  While it had never been a secret that you disliked my father, you become more and more vocal about it and you started including my mother in your diatribes.  That was around the time that my own shaky relationship with my Mom was starting to mend, so I found this hard to handle.

Then the lies and secrets slowly started.  You would tell me something that you swore no one else knew, but then I would hear a different version from someone else.  And after you got caught in a couple of these, you stopped calling me all together, blaming me for your lies and accusing me of betraying you.

I mourned the loss of our relationship then.  I knew that my son would never know you as a member of his family.  It hurt, but I learned to move on.  I would still ask after you when I spoke to family, happy to hear that you were well, as I never wished you any ill will.

Then things got worse.

I don't know what caused you to do the things you have done.  Perhaps you are in a bad financial situation that you see no way out of.  Not much else can explain why you would coerce your elderly mother who suffers from Alzheimer's into changing her will, cutting out my mother, and giving yourself a bigger share.  While I don't condone this in any way, I can at least see how money may have motivated this.  The other things you have done have no explanation other then you simply being an evil and cruel person.

I have heard the voice mails you have left my mother in the middle of the night.  I have been known to swear like a sailor at times, but the words you used and the names you called your own sister left me slack jawed.  You really know how to hit a person where it hurts, with awful references to my father, who had recently passed away.  You even went for the low blow of bringing up my mother's infertility.   I'm glad Mom had the courage to go to the police and register a formal complaint of harassment against you.  Having them show up at your apartment on your birthday seems to be the only thing that has stopped you from continuing this horrific habit.

But it didn't stop you from continuing your cruel attacks on your own mother.

Once you were the Mama's boy who called your mother everyday, checking in on her, sharing the details of your life.  She looked forward to those calls, telling everyone that you cared about her so much that you took time out every single day to make sure she was okay.  It's now been more then two years since you've called her and she doesn't understand why.

Reporting her for animal cruelty to the SPCA. She loved her cats and took such good care of them.  Luckily the dementia kept her from truly understanding what she had been accused of.  The woman from the SPCA only had to take one look at them to realize that she had been set on a wild goose chase.

Calling in a social worker saying that your mother was being neglected and forcing your 90 year old mother to go through that type of investigation when her Alzheimer's already makes life so confusing for her.

Feeding her lies about my mother, digging a chasm of mistrust that has taken my mother 2 years to over come and that may never be completely healed due to Grandma's mental deterioration.

The tales of your antics have lessened of late.  I don't know if these means you have decided to stop completely and let your mother live out the rest of her life in peace or if it's just a matter of waiting for something to trigger you before you start up again.

I often wonder what I would do or say to you if I were to run into you on the street.  Fortunately the odds of that happening are very slim given that I live in Nova Scotia and you are still in Toronto.  I wonder too if you will show your face at Grandma's funeral when that sad day comes to pass.  Would you dare?  Or do you believe yourself to be so right, so above contempt that you don't think you have done any wrong?

I will always mourn the loss of the person you once were, but I do not mourn for the person you have become.