Occasional Bitch

My stepfather. We hated each other while I was growing up. No wonder about that, my mother blackmailed him into adopting me. She would dump me with her parents if he would ‘legitimize’ me. Then he wouldn’t have to take me to Texas with them. (He was in the Army at the time and stationed there) He never felt like my father and never acted like it. When I was old enough to know the score, I resented that. And got more reasons as the years went on to hate the man.

Then my mother died. He remarried and things were worse for a while. After their divorce we both, independently, realized that what we resented were the roles that had been forced on us. Roles that neither of us felt and neither of us could play very well. We started to become friends. We started to like each other.

He married again and that was the end of the friendship. The woman he married was greedy, grasping and jealous of everyone else in his life. She managed to isolate him from family and friends. She hastened the death of his mother. (You don’t feed an uncontrolled diabetic candy, cakes and pies…especially when you know what the results can be…in the days before home meters and the tools to control the condition) She made sure his daughters didn’t get much attention from him, doing her best to ruin their lives and spoil anything good that might come their way.

She killed him. No, she didn’t shoot him, stab him or poison him or throw him off a cliff. What she did was deliberately not pay the child support due the daughter from his former wife. When the ex’s boyfriend confronted Will he didn’t believe that Will thought the payments were being made. In the ensuing fight, Will suffered brain damage. A 16 day coma and when he woke up there wasn’t much left that was him. And he was easier to control.

In the last couple years she stopped doing his laundry, expecting my sister to pick it up (on HER schedule) and return it. Expecting my sister’s family to do all the things Will could no longer do and she didn’t want to do. She snuck around and had her son appointed his conservator without ever even telling his daughters that they would have no legal rights to try to protect their father.

He died from Parkinson’s. A direct result of the injury. She killed him. He’d been in a nursing home since last fall. She hasn’t been to see him once. It was left to my sisters to settle him in there, unpack him, take care of him. For the first time in a lot of years they finally got to spend time with him without her talking over them, making sure that she was the center, the ONLY, focus of attention.

She made sure there was a DNR and an order that he was to have no visitors except his daughters and her son (I was especially excluded, even though I am a legal daughter). In the last week that he’s been dying she’s called the home several times…even as late as 2am this morning…to make sure that nobody was with him. But SHE never came.

And now she has him all to herself. There’s to be no viewing, no funeral service, no burial. (Unless my sisters want to pay for it, of course). A quick cremation and anybody who wants the ashes can have them, she washes her hands of the whole thing. No chance for his family and friends to say goodbye.

I’m so angry. The funeral home has an online guestbook. I left the message “say hi to mom for me” and signed my name. Yeah, it’s childish. But the thought of how it will affect her is very satisfying.

The only good thing that will come out of this is that my sisters will never have to deal with her again.

Goodbye Will. I’m really sorry that we never had to chance to become the friends we could have been.

PeTA slams Obama for smooshing a fly. Yes, that’s right…our president smacked a fly and PeTa is having a cow about it. First ’sea kittens’ and now rights for flies.

One link

Second…peanut butter disproves evolution. Want to know what the scariest part of hearing this from this man? He’s a “Branch Chief of the Department of Guided Missiles” in the US military. In other words, a guy with his finger on the buttons.

And people wonder why the US is steadily marching backwards.

The media has been so full of Farrah Fawcett and her fight against breast cancer. I’m sorry for her and her family. My own mother died of breast cancer, and a friend who was more like a second mother to me. I know what it’s like from the point of view of loving someone who is going through this.

But I wish the media would turn this much focus on the case that is much more typical than that of Farrah Fawcett. The woman now dying because her insurance wouldn’t pay for the tests that would have caught it at a stage where there was a better chance for a cure. The woman now dying because she has no insurance and doesn’t have the money for the treatment. The family who now has to declare bankruptcy because they chose to try to save her life.

Farrah had the money to search all over the world for the best chance. Too many women in this country don’t have the money to search for the best chance in their own town. Or are denied the chance to search by the accountants at their insurance company.

The media coverage brings recognition of the disease, puts a spotlight on the problem. But it doesn’t address the inequalities in treatment that exist between someone with the means to explore options and the un- or under-insured.