Crazy week

This has been a crazy week--LITERALLY. My mom and her sister had to go get a court order to have my uncle committed to the psych ward of the hospital. It really dragged up a lot of memories and old emotions for me and for them too, having all of this happen.

He was always manipulative. He could get anyone to believe just about anything he wanted. He put appearances above all else, and so much of what he did was done so that people would see it. He would verbally and mentally abuse family behind closed doors while smiling and putting on a great face in public and doing huge things for his family that other people would notice.

I remember when I was little, how he'd act. He'd keep me and sometimes my brother for a weekend here and there, and of course he'd do a lot with us so people would think he was the best uncle. What they didn't see was how mean he'd be to us if we tracked a little bit of dirt into his apartment, or left something out of place, or touched something he didn't want us to touch. They didn't see how he'd take us to Burger King, buy a Whopper, cut it into quarters, and give each of us a quarter and take the remaining half for himself. And this is us as older kids, seven or eight years old! They saw how he took in my great grandmother (the woman who raised him, my mom, and the other two older kids) when she began approaching her last days, but they didn't see behind closed doors how he'd talk mean to her and refuse to give her her medicine if he was angry. They didn't see how he basically stole the inheritances of his siblings by forging my great-grandmother's will.

They didn't see how he beat up my mom in our own house, and they didn't see why. They didn't see him fail to show up when he said he would, or us leaving to go to the store several hours later, or him at our house, angry that we weren't there when he finally showed up. They didn't see him hit my mom while using his one year old son as a human shield to keep my mom from hitting back. They also didn't see how, a few years later, he waited until he knew my mom was at work to stop by and leave her a nasty little note about how she was never around when he came by and how, "by the way", their oldest brother had died six months before of heart failure (the details of that are a story for another day). Nobody knows how he held on to that information and put off telling anyone until it suited him!

And nobody knows how my cousin used to stay every weekend with me from the time when she was six months or so old until the final falling out, and how I used to find bruises on her body that there was no way she got the way he said she did. No one saw how she'd get in trouble for things her baby brother got away with, or how she'd get blamed for what he did, and just how harsh my uncle would be on her.

It's been probably ten years since I saw the kids, or him for that matter. And I've got so much anger towards him for all the things he did to all of us. I feel awful for it now that all of this is happening.

It's such a conflicted feeling. How do you show compassion for someone who never showed any, even to his dying grandmother who raised him? How do you care for someone who has never done anything but lie and cheat and steal from the people who were closest to him? How do you forgive someone who abused the most vulnerable people in his life?

A part of me thinks they should have just left him there and not wasted their time. After all, what you do to others comes back around again, and I tend to think that this is karma (for lack of a better one-word descriptor). He was starving himself, after all. He was the one refusing his medications. He was the one running everyone off. Why should anyone else put up with it?

And the sad part is, when this is all over and they finally release him, he's going to pretend like none of this happened. He's going to either tell people my family lied to get him locked up, or he'll tell people that it didn't happen, that it was just a rumor. And people will believe him, because how could sweet, wonderful him ever land himself in the psych ward?

I've avoided him for the last five years. I go out of my way here locally to keep my life low-key because I don't ever want him finding my family and subjecting my daughter to the drama we were subjected to growing up. He's part of the reason I don't tolerate the nonsense in NG's family, because I've already been there, done that with all of it.

But, there is hope: maybe I can reconnect with my cousins and their mom and finally reestablish a relationship with them, now that he's out of the picture.

Hopefully I can continue to keep him away from Sweet'ums and keep him out of my life.