Too Much, Too Late

Yesterday I got a disturbing email from a first cousin I don’t know.

My dad came from an extremely dysfunctional family. His dad was a local politician in Eastern Kentucky. He worked as a county clerk and also as a sheriff. People say he was brilliant and brave an so on, and my dad thought he would have been a very big deal had he been able to go to college. People say a lot of things that aren’t true, however.

He was probably pretty smart, because his wife was not bright at all, yet his children were very intelligent. On the other hand, he was a violent alcoholic who beat his wife. An old story says he beat her bloody on the steps of the county courthouse. He died at 41 because he drank bad moonshine that probably had methanol in it. His kidneys failed, he swelled up with fluid, he went into convulsions, and he died.

Relatives have made excuses. His aunt claimed he died from food poisoning. People closer to him have admitted the truth.

My grandmother was like an empty glass. I probably saw her 10 times in my life. She was civil to my sister and me, but she remained a stranger. She and her two daughters did not make the 4-hour drive to help my mother when we were born. I recall her sending Christmas presents to us one year and one year only. She had very little personality. When we visited her and her husband in their small apartment in Oak Ridge, the only books I saw were supermarket-grade novels.

It appears my cousins called her “mamaw,” which is Appalachian for “granny,” so I guess they had some sort of affectionate bond with her. On the other hand, most of them are Mormons, and I have learned that Mormons cover up ugliness and failure in their families.

My aunt was a nominal Mormon, and she was a horrible mother, but her Mormon kids wrote her an obituary that would have made Florence Nightingale jealous. Maybe my grandmother was no warmer to them than she was to me. I know that when she became old and infirm, she used to curse my aunt and hit her from her wheelchair.

When I was grown, her relationship with my dad barely existed, and what little there was of it was not inspiring. One day she called him and said she needed money, so he sent her $3,000.00. Later someone who was concerned asked her why she needed the help, and she said, “He’s got all that money, and I love spending it.”

However trashy my mother’s family may be, that is beyond the pale. Her mother would have jumped in front of a train before pulling a stunt like that.

After I was an adult, my father and mother and I spent a couple of days with my grandmother, the sisters and their husbands, and a sister’s youngest daughter in my dad’s waterfront condo in Panama City Beach. My grandmother told us a couple of things about my grandfather. She said he was very brave and that it didn’t scare him at all to face a man with a gun. Later she told my mother she had just said whatever would make us happy. As if I cared what a person I didn’t know did 50 years ago.

Apparently she assumed my mother was also okay with lying and treating men like children and with destroying family history. But my grandfather did arrest two armed men after one of them had broken his leg with a lucky shot, and he then drove them to jail in a car with a manual transmission, so there must have been some truth to what she said.

She also looked at my dad and me and said something like, “I wouldn’t take anything for the two of you right now.” That was odd. Did she mean it? Was her lack of involvement with my family just due to shyness or the fact that my dad was a very unpleasant person? Have I misjudged her? Or was she trying to maintain good relations with a son who might send more money? I don’t know, because I didn’t know her.

My best guess is that I have been fair. Shy or not, you can get yourself to the post office and send your grandchildren Christmas and birthday gifts, or at least cards.

My feeling is that it’s all on her. If our relationships were lacking, it was because a grown woman chose not to be proactive with her grandchildren. You can’t hold children responsible for starting and building relationships with adults.

Maybe she is one of the reasons I have never had the feeling that anyone missed me, cared if they ever saw me again, or wasn’t willing to abandon me at the drop of a hat. I’ve always had the feeling that if I made anyone angry, they might cut me off instantly and never talk to me again. They might treat me the way my grandmother did all her life.

I have no doubt my dad was unpleasant and disrespectful to her when he was young, because he was that way with everyone, but we didn’t do anything to deserve to be ignored.

She never showed any signs of affection to us or anyone else when I was present. In that respect, she reminds me of my sister. I’m not like that. Even my parrot has a bare spot where I rub his fat every day.

To this day, I am not sure whether she and her second husband had one, two, or three sons together. That’s how unfamiliar I am with my dad’s family. I am sure the husband had at least one son before he met her, and I know at least one son belonged to both of them. He was, frankly, trashy. He was of average intelligence, unlike my grandfather’s kids. I don’t think he ever got a degree. I saw him two or three times in my life. He visited us once with his parents when he was in his early teens. I believe this was before I was born. He gave my mother reason to think he was likely to molest my sister, so that cooled things between her and him quite a bit. She found him in her bedroom on her bed on his hands and knees, looking down at her.

He also used the bathroom curtains to wipe his rear end, and that didn’t endear him to anyone. My mother didn’t have much money to work with back then, so she made some curtains from towels, and he grabbed them because there was no paper in the room. That really burned her up.

The web says he died in 1988. I had to check. I didn’t remember. I know he had cancer. He smoked. I can’t remember when my grandmother died. I would have to check. It would have been around 1990. It didn’t occur to me to go to the funeral. I don’t know if my relatives thought that was weird, because I didn’t know them well enough to have any kind of communication with them.

I guess they were offended. That would have been the natural thing.

A strain of psychopathy ran in my dad’s family. I believe my sister is a pure psychopath, and my dad and his older sister were on that spectrum. His mother didn’t seem cruel like her son, daughter, and granddaughter, but she did seem emotionless, except for anxiety. I don’t think she possessed any warmth.

My dad’s sisters had almost nothing to do with us until I was in my thirties, and at that point, we only saw them when there was some need or they wanted to freeload, staying at his house, at his vacation properties, or on his boat. When they visited the Panama City Beach house, they arrived first, bought groceries for the house, gave him the bill, and asked him to reimburse them.

I have one cousin on that side whom I like. His eldest sister’s stepdaughter. His sister abused and beat her for no reason, systematically, while favoring the blood daughter she had had before marrying her second husband. The stepdaughter is a very sweet, sincere, gentle person. Unfortunately, she is now some kind of Mormon minister, and she is a leader to a large number of women. She believes American Indians are really Jews. Like the ones in Blazing Saddles. The whole 9 yards, I guess. Very sad.

I don’t want any interaction with these strangers, apart from praying my minister cousin comes around and accepts Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. I don’t dislike them, and it would be fine to have dinner with one or two I don’t know some day, but I don’t want to get together with them and start pretending we’re real cousins. It’s too late for that. Every time I saw them, I would be thinking of the past and how we had never had a normal relationship.

They have grown children and grandchildren. I assume. How would I know? All the things cousins would ordinarily share during their lives are over with. “Little Bobby’s prostate screening came out negative!” “Suzy’s hot flashes are getting better!” Too late.

I should also add that while my cousins maintained pretty close relations with each other over the years, they never once showed any interest in my sister or me, so they can’t barge in now and expect me to have the normal feelings cousins have for each other. These are not my cousins except on paper. You can’t reap what you don’t sow.

I also did nothing to cultivate relationships. I never had the feeling I was supposed to be close to them. Didn’t occur to me.

They haven’t shown any interest in freeloading, so that’s good. Maybe they’re not like their parents. My dad’s boat is long gone, along with the vacation homes.

They may be rich. All of the eldest sister’s kids are Mormons, and Mormons do pretty well.

This brings me back to the email.

The eldest sister and her second husband had one child together. A girl. I have seen her twice in my life.

She seems like a very nice person, although she is her mother’s daughter and her uncle’s niece, so if she’s a psychopath, she came by it honestly.

Until the email came, I didn’t know how to spell her first name. My first cousin. I know I have seen her name a few times during my life, but you don’t retain information you don’t use. The email mentions a husband named Mike. She probably has kids and grandchildren. Mormon.

She sent me a link to an online folder containing family pictures and documents such as my grandfather’s draft registration. That was nice of her. On the other hand, she also asked if she could perform some kind of Mormon ritual on my dad’s dead soul. This made me very angry. I am a Christian, and Mormons are not Christians. Mormonism is a pagan cult based on Christianity. Mormons deny the central, essential tenet of Christianity, which is that we receive salvation by faith, not works. If you believe in salvation by works when you die, you will go to hell unless there are extenuating circumstances.

Mormons have a reputation for being rude and aggressive in their proselytizing. They send rude young men out to spend a year of their lives chasing people on the street and badgering them about joining the cult. Christians are supposed to rely on the Holy Spirit to draw people. Mormons lack the Holy Spirit, because they are pagans, so they rely on aggressive sales tactics. I didn’t appreciate being subjected to this by a relative.

Mormonism is very unpopular for a cult that started nearly 200 years ago. It has a big media presence in the US, but they make up less than 2% of the population. Mormons claim the figure is more like 5%, but Mormons have a history of lying about their religion and its successes, so I believe non-Mormon sources. After all, the religion itself is a lie, started by a notorious con artist known to local authorities.

Perhaps the aggression and rudeness are based in the knowledge that an unpopular church with beliefs that fly in the face of common sense needs hardball promotion in order to survive.

I see Mormonism for what it is. Not a harmless branch of Christianity, but a cult created by Satan in order to destroy the real church, defame God, and increase the population of hell. The Mormons think Yeshua is Satan’s brother. They think Yahweh, Yeshua, and Satan are aliens who live on another planet. They believe a tiny number of people will be resurrected, and that those people will make it because they’ve done a really good job of obeying the rules and competing with other Mormons. Their beliefs are only a little less bizarre than those of Scientologists.

I’m not sure why they evangelize so hard. If the odds of being saved are so low, and there is a cutoff, what’s the point? Is it just to prevent people from drinking caffeine and alcohol, prior to spending eternity in Mormon hell along with all the other also-rans?

Christianity is different from Mormonism in that it acknowledges that there is no limit to the number of people who can be saved. It makes sense for Christians to try to increase the flock, but we don’t run around in black pants and white shirts, hectoring people for not believing in the angel Moroni and the white salamander.

What possible reason could God have for limiting salvation to a few people? He’s not the admissions committee at Stanford. It’s not like there are a limited number of parking spaces up there. He created the earth just so he could fill heaven, so it’s pretty obvious he’s not going to grade on a curve and only accept the A students.

When a person tries to involve me or my relations in a cult that sends people to hell, it makes me angry. I can’t help that. It’s a presumptuous attack on our souls. It’s an attempt to put us in flames for eternity, instead of swimming in love and peace forever in the presence of our perfect father and more brothers and sisters than could ever be counted.

I’m not reluctant to talk straight to such people. We are supposed to fear God, not people, and especially not people who threaten to take us and our children to hell.

I don’t think performing sick rituals involving the dead can cost the victims salvation, but for all I know, demons would go forth from the scene of the Satanic rites and try to bring down the victim’s descendants. This is the kind of things demons, losers who have nothing better to do, would try to pull. I don’t want disgusting Mormon spirits bothering me, my wife, my new son, our parrot, or even the cattle that wander around outside the house.

I might be okay with them going after the squirrels.

I am sure my cousin meant well, and I tried to be polite in my response, but I was blunt. I told her Mormonism was not compatible with our beliefs. I told her my dad died enveloped in the Holy Spirit, in peace and equipped with eternal salvation. I said any effort to involve him or my family in Mormon rituals would be upsetting and a failure to respect boundaries.

I was forceful. Maybe I was too forceful. I was forceful because I knew Mormons had a reputation for being pushy, self-righteous, and inconsiderate. Not knowing my cousin, I was afraid she would continue to pester us and upset my wife and me during the challenging first month of our son’s life.

Maybe I overdid it, but she had it coming, because she really crossed the line, and I’m sure she knew better. I have zero regrets. She had a lot of gall, sending us that condescending, tone-deaf, poisonous nonsense. Am I too harsh? Maybe she doesn’t realize how out of line she was, because she lives in a Mormon bubble and assumes everyone loves her cult and thinks it’s part of Christianity. Maybe she thought we would think she was doing us a favor instead of trying to write our names in Satan’s book of death. I don’t think an intelligent person could be so oblivious, but if so, she needed to see things from the other side in order to temper her behavior.

Mormons need to know that no one else considers them Christians and that their outreaches are seen as attempts to drag people to hell.

As for the photos, we received a total of 57 items. I was able to recognize some of the people or deduce their identities. Others…no clue. I will have to look them up. We got a couple of photos of my dad as a kid. I guess that’s good. We got photos of my great-grandparents and at least some of their parents. I thanked my cousin and said I would show my son this stuff when he was old enough to understand it.

As for my mother’s side of the family, before inheritance-greed and the dishonesty of a few cooled the love, we were close. I had the key to my grandparents’ house, I could have shown up any time in the middle of the night, unannounced, and they would have thought it was completely normal. It was my house, too. I could take whatever I wanted out of the refrigerator or deep freeze. I shot my grandfather’s guns without asking permission. I hung out with my grandfather all the time. I spent lots of time with my cousins. I liked my aunts and all but one of my uncles. We spent Christmases at my grandparent’s home. Gramps gave every grandchild a hundred-dollar bill every year. He gave us calves and sent us the money when they were sold. Before things went sour, we attended each other’s funerals.

I knew a bunch of my great aunts and uncles. I used to spend afternoons at my grandfather’s older brother’s house. I wouldn’t need a score card to pick most of them out of photos.

I don’t know whether I offended my cousin or not. I can’t say it matters much, because in terms of impact on my life, it would amount to less than offending the receptionist at my dentist’s office, whom I see once every 6 months and who has never approached me about involvement in a Satanic cult. We will never spend Christmases with these people. My son and my wife will never meet any of them. We will probably be separated from them for eternity because they will be in the lake of fire with Joseph Smith and the angel Moroni, if he exists. Our real and eternal family is the collection of people God joined to us through our shared faith.

My father’s relations and I should have done better, but when a family is this cold and crazy, you can’t expect any kind of a harvest. My borderline-sociopath dad and his borderline-sociopath sister were never equipped to create a tribe that gathered for huge family reunions.

When I thank God for my son, I thank him for my nation. He’s more than a baby. Like Isaac, he is the source of whatever nation springs from my loins. He and his siblings will surely do better than my dad and his sisters. They will have a chance at dwelling in God’s secret place all of their lives, and in the end the ones who listen will find rest in heaven.

MORE

Well, I have to correct myself.

I said Mormons think God and Yeshua (whom they appear to consider separate beings) live on another planet. This is not quite right, although what they actually believe is worse. They think Yahweh used to be a man, and he became God because he was so good. Or something. Of course, the God of Christians has always been, as the Bible says repeatedly.

Mormons think God has lived on another planet. Where they think he lives now, I am not willing to Google to find out. Park City, perhaps.

Also, while I did read that Mormons think only a small number of people can be saved, it appears that is not true. My understanding now is that they think only a small number will be really close to God in the afterlife, which is not what Christianity says. Like Buddhists, they have a weird system of heavens which, like their notion of the current whereabouts of the almighty, I am not willing to research or expound on.

They really do think Yeshua and Satan are brothers. The Christian and Jewish scriptures clearly say Yeshua is God almighty. Obviously, no created being can be the brother of the most high.