Your worst nightmare realized

How many of you had a time where you had an inkling that something was wrong before you even started what you knew would eventually lead to an unhappy and regretful possibility?
I truthfully cannot say that was what happened yesterday, but that’s because the horrendous possibilities were not something that I was allowing to cross my mind.
My theory was if you think it’s not true then it won’t be.
Didn’t work no matter how hard I tried to disprove the possibility.
And the final devastating reality did happen.
Sadly and dreadfully both my niece and my half brother have passed away.

My niece was just 13 days short of her fifty-first birthday, passing away on October 13th, a Friday, 2006, and my half brother died six years ago, but not in a VA hospital instead in a nursing home that his daughter, my niece, had put him in so he could have his very last days in as much comfort as possible.

Now to do this story justice let me give you some background on my relationship with my niece and brother. First my niece, who was only 5 years younger than me. She was more like my little sister, and her grandparents my Mom and Dad treated her like she was when she was with us. They had me late in life, my Mom was 39 and my Dad was 43 when I was born. I was a product of their second marriages; my Mom was a divorcee with a young son of 9 and my Dad a widower without any children, their union produced me.

My Mom had my brother at the age of twenty, two years after her first marriage without any difficulties, but for some reason it took ten years for me to be born. Anyway, I was much wanted by my parents, so they said.
Rumor has it though that I am one of the many reasons my brother signed up to become an air force medic during the Korean War, he was 19 by then, and I think I was a thorn in his side to his single childom, and only-ism. And he didn’t even know me yet, and unfortunately never would, nor I him.
He was injured in the war to the point of receiving a medical discharge, which to my young brain was never clear. All I do know is that I spent a lot of time, by the age of five going with my parents to horrible chambers known as VA hospitals.
Anyone who has seen them or the movie Born on the Fourth of July, a Tom Cruise flick will know exactly what I mean.
Memories of dismembered bodies and bloody bandages, maimed and disfigured people, screaming distorted souls played in my reality and I am sure also in my 5 year old nightmares, the first year that I can remember going.
My brother oddly enough had no outwardly seeable distinguishable characteristics of injury.
But it was there, in his brain, a five year old doesn’t get that, even a ten year old or sometimes even a fifteen year old.
Yes, it was rough on him and me, and I didn’t understand, but I was told to try and understand. As I got older everyone seemed to need me to understand even more.
Some say that I should have known him before that… he was very different, and others insist that he was always that way.
Well, I don’t know… because I wasn’t there or even born then!

Even though he was ill he did leave the hospital at times and fell in love, I can only suppose since my niece was produced at this time, and I would hate to think that she wasn’t produced from his and her Mom’s love.
And I felt betrayed, now my single childom was infiltrated and my parents loved her too!
But I also bragged to my kindergarten mates and teacher that I was now an Aunt and she swiftly called my Mom to verify that I was not telling tales in school with who knows maybe mental problems?
Eventually I found a common ground I was bigger and I could boss her around, and she wasn’t like other peoples siblings…she would go home to be with her Mom, but not her Dad since he was back in the hospital again.

I could teach her things and she would listen.
When she got older she was as annoying as any little sister my friends would complain about, but then she would go home to her Mom, and damn it I would miss her!
She came on vacations with us and even my dates with my husband and me. He and I had met when we both were seventeen and she was twelve then and extremely bright, always asking a thousand questions and receiving straight A’s in school.
I can remember when she said that after she graduated high school that she was going to take a year off. I pleaded with her not to thinking she would never go to college but she sure did, and became a physicist, one with and MBA!
Pride is something I do hope I told her, she was in our wedding as a bridesmaid at the tender age of fifteen. Later on our sons, her cousins loved her too.
She was my niece, my underling, a sister and a friend, and she will be sorely missed.
We only lost contact when we moved and my husband became a deputy and we foolishly got an unpublished number since he arrested people I was concerned, he was 45 and it was new to me being a wife of a police officer.
I am so sorry for that, she moved too, and her numbers changed so basically we lost each other.

If I have one thing to say to whomever may be reading this…don’t lose touch or if you have get back in contact before it’s too late!

Good night to all and to all just do it!

Another topic: the Market dropped another 500+ today, but somehow that doesn't seem that important anymore, you know?