Family Secrets

It’s a tradition in my family to keep silent about things that are obvious.

My maternal grandmother was extremely obese. Like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? obese. She died at age 60 from heart problems related to her weight.

When I was about six years old, my family was visiting my grandma’s house. Aunt 3 (I have five biological aunts on that side of the family. I will refer to them by birth order for clarity. The aunt who’s in the hospital is Aunt 5) was holding my baby sister and reaching for something from the medicine cabinet when I asked, “How does Grandma get in and out of a car?”

Aunt 3 looked at me.

“Why do you ask?”

Too young to sense that the proper answer involved evasion, I responded candidly.

“Because she’s kind of fat.”

This seemed obvious to me. She had trouble walking and rarely left her chair at the kitchen table. I couldn’t quite grasp why my aunt hadn’t noticed it.

“If you ever call my mom fat again,” Aunt 3 said, turning to look directly in my eyes, “I will not love you anymore. Do you understand me?”

This was the first explicit lesson I received in how our family keeps secrets. Even if something is obvious to anyone observing, we must not say anything, or we will be out of the family.

When I heard about Aunt 5’s illness, I was a bit surprised to find that I wasn’t shocked that she’d managed to hide her suffering for so long. Remembering this interaction with Aunt 3 when I was a child helped me to understand why I wasn’t shocked.

Secrets are the way my family operates.

My cousin, Aunt 5’s daughter, was at her mom’s house this summer when she noticed the side of my aunt’s tank top soaked in blood.

“Mom, what did you do to yourself?” she asked. My aunt looked down at her shirt.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” she said, and went to her bedroom to change her shirt. That was the end of the conversation. In retrospect, we suspect this was when the tumor in her breast ulcerated.

We know the cancer moved to her bones, but when this happened is unclear. She’d been losing teeth and complaining of hip and back pain for the past few years, but that may or may not have had anything to do with the cancer-related bone loss. What we do know is that when she finally arrived at the hospital this week, her bones had degraded to the point that her blood calcium levels were so high, the doctors were surprised her kidneys hadn’t failed. Her hip and a few other bones in that area were fractured.

The only reason she was at the hospital at all this week was that she couldn’t speak to refuse when my uncle called the paramedics to the house.

I can only imagine that the pain must have been—and must still be—excruciating. She must have had incredible resolve to sit with that pain for so long without seeking medical help.

When she got to the point that she was in too much pain to sleep in the same bed with my uncle (if he rolled over and moved the bed while they were sleeping, she’d cry out in pain), they set up an air mattress on the living room floor, and she slept there. When she got too weak to leave her bed, she stayed in her bedroom all day, my uncle and my cousin caring for her. They wanted her to seek medical care, but she refused, and they were too afraid to seek help, afraid of my aunt’s anger if they disobeyed her.

In the months since last summer, my aunt cut off all of her older sisters, including my mother. She told only those few people who would supply her with prescription pain medications without making her see a doctor. She lay in her bed and waited to die.

When my sister visited her in the hospital yesterday, our aunt was in and out of consciousness. In the moments when she was awake and lucid, she seemed pissed off that she was still alive and impatient for death to finally come.

I’ve been working through in my mind what it means to be part of a family so intent on keeping secrets that a relatively young woman can hide away for months, waiting to die, confident that she can keep anyone from helping her simply by threatening to withhold her love if they disobeyed her. I’m not blaming the rest of my family. I’ve not seen or spoken to my aunt in nearly four years. I’m complicit as well. I’m a part of it, and I don’t understand it.

I don’t know what it means, but I know I don’t like it. I’ve been moving myself out from under the shadow of that secrecy for years. But the lure of the connection of family is still strong. I crave not what my family is but what my family could be. Seeing the pulling together of my in-laws in the face of my husband’s grandpa’s illness and death last month put in stark contrast the reaction of my mother’s family to my aunt’s diminishment and imminent death. As a result, I’ve decided I’m tired of crouching in the shadows.

I long to tear open the curtains and expose us all to the light. I’m a grown up now. If this means I’m out of the family, I can handle it.

Anything less is just waiting for death.