(Roughly taken from my LJ)
So I may have spoken before about my asshole junky cousin, whose parents died six months apart when she was seventeen (one from an accident, one from pancreatic cancer). In the three short years since then, she has managed to marry an even bigger piece of shit than she is (no mean feat, I tell you), have a baby, rob my grandmother’s house, make enough threats against my mother to get a restraining order prohibiting her from having any contact with any of us, and blow through at least $100,000 worth of inheritance and life insurance settlement, somehow living in public housing despite the fact that she owned a $100,000 farm with a perfectly good house on it.
Well, at least that last part isn’t a problem anymore. The day they realized that the estate had been settled and the farm was in their name, they sold it. For $30,000.
It’s bad enough that they sold a piece of property that has been in my family for the last 100 years or so, and that they let it go for such a pittance, and that they almost certainly don’t have a nickel of it left or a thing to show for it. But none of those things is the worst part.
No, the worst part is that our family cemetery is on the property. Like most cemeteries in the mountains, it’s perched way up on a hill, saving the valuable bottom land for farming. My great^3 grandmother, who came to Kentucky when she was two years old and her father was on the run after escaping a Confederate prison, is buried there. Our great grandparents are there. Our grandfather is there, with a spot reserved for my grandmother. The asshole junky’s mother and father are there. Her sister, who lived to the age of three after being born with Niemann-Pick disorder, is there, under a pink heart-shaped stone.
They could have opted the cemetery out of the deed, but who thinks about that when you have the chance to trade the last of your parents’ legacy and the only fucking valuable thing in the world that you own for a few weeks’ worth of smack?
It isn’t that big a disaster, from a practical standpoint; you can get almost to the cemetery via a county road, the land is absolutely not useful as anything else, and you can’t really keep family out of a cemetery legally (I’m told). That doesn’t mean my mother isn’t devastated by it. No one has told my grandmother, even though this happened a month ago; they’re afraid she won’t make it. (She’s fragile as it is.)
It’s just sad that I can be so closely related to such worthless pieces of trash, and it’s even sadder that if somebody came in tonight and told me they both overdosed on that big pile of smack, all I would feel is relief–relief that my family might actually have some peace, and relief that their baby might have a shot in hell at life. There isn’t a thing in the world that my family and I have not tried to get these people straightened out, and if they’re going to self-destruct, I wish they’d get on with it before they take everybody else with them.
I might feel differently about that tomorrow. But I doubt it.
