The Cost of Family: Buying Back (Some Of) My Past

A few weekends ago, I found myself standing in line at an estate sale. Even though I’m normally excited to attend such outings, this one hit differently because I was familiar with the house and its contents - it had once belonged to my mom’s sister.

Perhaps it would have been more succinct to call it my aunt’s estate sale, but I could never use that terminology because the woman in whose house I was standing had never been an aunt to me. Not really. Though she was my mother’s only sibling and someone I tried to be fond of as a child, she grew in such a gnarled and twisted way that she scratched herself out of my story long before it had ever begun.

She had always been an odd sort. A freelance artist of many mediums, she never landed steady work or made any sort of living. Never filled out an I-9 or received a W-2. Never paid taxes. But always quick to dramatize her situation, one of her favorite things was to tell people how close to the poverty line she was. Unlike other “starving artists,” though, she had a trust fund and a gifted house that made her status less-than-dire. In fact, through the course of her entire life, she had never once paid for a bill or picked up the tab with money that she had acquired through her own hard work. Everything she had, every dollar spent, was given to her by the fruits of my grandparents’ (or our ancestors’) labors. But interestingly, she always begrudged others getting a handout.

I remember how, one Christmas, when my mother wanted to give my grandmother’s nurse – a tireless and devoted woman who caught the early bus each morning so she could clean my grandmother’s soiled linens - a $300 bonus, she guffawed as though it was coming out of her own personal coffers. “Why does she need that much,” asked the woman who had never worked. She was a walking contradiction. A staggering infuriation.

The same was true after my grandmother’s passing when it was just the three of us set to receive all that remained. Whenever my mom and I asked to take an item here or there, it was deemed by her to be too much. She, on the other hand, felt entitled to take the lion’s share without any hint of irony. We didn’t fight back since my mother was trying to keep the peace (for her own sanity) and I was trying to enjoy life as a newlywed. We thought letting her have all those things would make our situation easier. It did not.

As I wandered through the shotgun-style home that had once belonged to my great-great-grandparents, I saw many relics from our past stretching along a linear path. There was an immediate ache. But there was also anger. A whole lot of it. Despite the bubbling of emotions, I walked anonymously along the landscape, ogling items of remembrance.

Little pink price tags populated most of the furniture and knick-knacks in the house. Wading through it all, I took a first turn to the left and found myself standing over a chess table ($350) that I remembered playing with as a kid. It sat positioned under a rather large stained-glass window ($1,800) that had once hung in my grandfather’s library. They were like old friends. I wanted to hug them for all the special times we had enjoyed together, secrets told, awkwardness abated. As an only child, sometimes there is a stronger connection to things than to people. I certainly longed for them more than I did for their newest owner.

As I moved forward, the next thing I stumbled across was a beautifully carved chest ($2,200) that was once used as a coffee table in my grandparents living room. Remembering it from my youth, I streaked my hands over its surface, feeling the bumps and curves of the cranes and ships that some Ming-Dynasty artisan had painstakingly crafted. Knowing it wouldn’t come home with me – not for that price – I waved my goodbyes in the form of one last gentle grazing.

Walking on, there was a stack of little blue shopping carts that stood at attention, waiting for eager shoppers to clutch onto them and gather treasures. Treasures like a large conch shell ($26) that my grandmother used to hold up to my ear as a child and tell me to listen for the ocean. Or three little white scalloped ramekins with green olives painted on the side ($18) that she used to serve chocolate pudding in. Also, a Swiss Army pocketknife ($32) that my grandfather used to carry around when he was working outside in the garden. Those were just a few of the items I couldn’t bear to see go to someone else, so I scooped them up in my basket with a zealous fervor.

In no time at all, I had amassed a heaping pile of trinkets overflowing in my grasp. All of this and I hadn’t even made it outside, or up into the garage apartment, yet! Knowing that I, a person on a public-school salary, needed to pace myself, I started to get increasingly discriminating.

My grandparents’ windchimes ($500) were too loud, anyway. I didn’t need them. A quilt ($180) that my great-grandfather’s sister made was too heavily starched to be cozy. Plus, I already had too many blankets. My grandmother’s favorite garden statue of a little girl ($300), who she often said reminded her of me, was too heavy for me to lift. Where would I even put it, anyway?

Even in my selectiveness, saying goodbye was hard. I held back the tears and tried to keep perspective, repeating a mantra in my head: It’s just stuff. I don’t need it. I still have the memories. Even though all of that was true, it still stung. It stung because this sale was the final materialization of what I always knew to be true: she hated us. This act was her final fuck you.

What led to this point was a reasonable question, but sometimes there is no reasonable answer. I can only relate that paranoid psychosis coupled with brain damage and narcissistic personality disorder make for a bad combination. That and her two favorite things in life were to be the center of attention and to be the ultimate victim.

Looking at the silver candle holders ($72) that once sat on my grandparents’ buffet table, I recalled some of the cruelty she dished out to me when I was still a child. While it was clearly evident from my protruding collarbones and sunken pallor that I was in the throes of anorexia, she found it necessary to impart the opinion that my hips looked big in my tiny pants. She knew what she was doing, saying it out of anyone else’s earshot, but she gutted me in a way she could never fully fathom. It took years – decades, really – for me to feel good about myself again.

Before I fully knew how vile she could be, I thought she was cool. And I always sought her approval. Even after her brutal critique on my body, I still wanted to get a thumbs up from her as I started my own healing artistic venture. But all I ever heard were words of criticism, reasons why I would never be good enough, ways in which I had come up short. She liked to call it honesty, but I only felt heartbreak.

She could never be happy for me when good things happened, either. As I got older, when I got a job at a law firm – my first real, salaried job – she made me feel discouraged because she said they weren’t paying me enough. She didn’t understand that I (like most people) had to pay their dues. “You should tell them you deserve $50/hour, and not a penny less!” I doubt she thought I deserved that money; instead, I believe she was hoping I would take her advice and get fired.

Later on, when I broke the news that my boyfriend had proposed, she looked at me with a dour face, and stated in a venomous tone, “He’s a good guy, just like your dad,” as if it were a bad thing. Clearly, she was despondent that I was getting married and she wasn’t. She never mastered the skill of being happy for others.

When we were still on speaking terms, prior to my wedding, she came to me in tears one day saying she had a “vision” – possibly implanted by one of the many psychics she routinely saw - that we (my mom and I) would push her out of our lives and she would die alone. I took her by the arm, and I hugged her with all my might. Reassuring her that this wasn’t true, I promised her that we would always love her and include her in our lives. She dried her tears and seemed placated though not convinced.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick with my words, but it’s what I believed in the moment. Family was a forever venture, or so I had assumed. But it should go without saying that every well-intended proclamation comes with one automatic and obvious caveat: unless you treat me like shit.

I will never fully understand where the notion came from, but out of the blue she started to accuse us of siphoning money from my grandmother’s account to pay for my wedding. Obviously, nothing could have been further from the truth! My mother had check-writing privileges, it was true; but they were for paying my grandmother’s bills, as well as her sister’s. With regard to my wedding, my fiancé and I both had jobs and were bank-rolling the events ourselves. We didn’t even get any financial support from our parents. But a person who had never even paid for their own shoes probably wouldn’t understand how such a thing could be possible. And so, it descended downward from there.

Within a month after our wedding, my grandmother passed away and her estate was set to be inherited by my mother and her sister. That was when she did what any unreasonable relative would do and sued my mother to become executrix. It didn’t work. My grandmother knowingly assigned my mom such a position because, out of the two them, she was the only one who had ever, a) paid bills, b) balanced a checkbook, and c) operated her life with a sense of propriety, ethics, and fairness. Oh, and my mother didn’t have cognitive impairment from years of drug abuse. But that didn’t mean her sister couldn’t assert her own power to cause unspeakable amounts of harm and stress to my already overburdened mother. And, as a side quest, she aimed to do the same to me.

In the end, a family member can only be a punching bag for so long until they have had enough. As an only child, I am not reliant on the idea of having people around. If they cause me harm, I have no problem cutting them out like a cancer. My mom, on the other hand, was ever-more forgiving and relenting than I could be. Though their estrangement lasted for years, in the last decade of her sister’s life, despite the unforgivable hardships she caused and the stress-related health crises she created, my mom resurrected a bridge of contact between them.

They exchanged birthday presents and emails routinely. They even met up once in person. Things were better, to a small degree. And, in the end, as her sister lay dying, my mom sent daily messages of childhood remembrances and sweet poems radiating love. She was always a part of her life – just like I promised. But her sister never valued any of it and only paid her back with yet another act of cruelty. Par for the course.

As I stood at the checkout while the saleswoman added up the final bill ($80 for my ancestors’ daguerreotype + $12 for postcards that a friend wrote to my grandfather + $18 for kitchen aprons my grandmother used to wear), I was struck by the irony of everything. Buying back what rightfully should have been ours felt gross. I mean, who sells family pictures, anyway?! After adding an extra $2 to buy back a photo of my grandfather as a boy and $16 for a picture of my great-great-grandparents, I had reached my fill of “shopping.”

I could have just gagged over the whole situation. But I didn’t. I smiled at the lady running the estate sale, made small talk about the “wonderful” selection of items (if only she had known why I thought they were wonderful!), and listened cynically as she talked about the woman who owned these things before. She was such an interesting person. She had such great taste and an eclectic sense of style. Yeah, right.

As I held back my ire, I wanted to tell her about all of the inhumanity this woman had shown her own family, based on feelings without facts. The needless drama, the incessant bitterness, the hatred. But I repeated another mantra in my head instead: She died alone. It wasn’t your fault. Some people are just shitty.

All in all, I wouldn’t trade my broken promise for what it all would amount to. I only sometimes, in the darkness of night, wonder why she couldn’t see us for who we really were instead of seeking a victimhood of her own making. But that was how she felt comfortable, in the areas that bred distress.

Estrangement is ugly, brutal, and unnatural. I always wanted to be there, but not at her price. It would have cost a level of comfort I wasn’t willing to pay. Spending a final cost of somewhere in the hundreds of dollars for family treasures was pricey, yes, but still a much better deal than enduring twenty-one years of her bullshit. And I was happy to pay it if it meant we were all finally done wondering how her story would end.

It was over. She was dead. And the hate she felt for us would now be dispersed among the Earth, scattered randomly along the landscape, just like many of the items in her estate sale…sans the pretty pink price tags.