why no one cares if my aunt is dead

for diana

my uncle is paraplegic and when my aunt became pregnant I thought it was some sort of miracle. no one told me for several years that she'd had an affair with the homeless junkie who crashed my uncles car into a bus just last week.

my aunt is bipolar and she goes off her meds all the time and really loses it. before she got pregnant, she was an alcoholic (as my uncle still is) and the pregnancy completely changed her life. she stopped drinking immediately and thats when her illness became prevalent and she was diagnosed and put on medication for bipolar disorder.

her mother, brother and grandmother are all bipolar as well, though my aunt is the only one obtaining treatment. her mother was not well and had major substance abuse issues throughout the majority of my aunts childhood. she was raised primarily by her brother who introduced her to pot at 8 years old. she dropped out of school just a few years later and proceeded to live up to the family legacy.

after the birth of her child, sobriety became increasingly difficult as my uncle continued to drink heavily. their daughter was born autistic but was not identified as such until nearly 3 years of age. up to that time, my aunt had been ridiculed for her parenting inability by much of my family because her toddler was unable to listen or speak to anyone like a normal child would.

she was of course upset by this and it caused problems between she and my uncle. both of them drinking again, and now fighting all the time. she went off the meds and built shrines all over the backyard to worship the moon or some shit.

she had to go to the hospital and stay for a couple of weeks and while she was in there she filed charges against several members of my family for sexual abuse of her daughter. she said her daughter told her about it. the charges were dropped when a social worker went to the school to interview the child and she, being autistic, couldn't even form words let alone sentences.

that incident has yet to be forgiven by most of my family. she and my uncle remained married though the relationship was severely strained. she went off her meds something like 3 times over the next year, each time becoming increasingly more violent toward him and police became involved on several occasions, including the last time anyone heard from her which was something around 4 months ago when she hit him in the head with a skateboard and pushed him out of his wheelchair in the backyard.

tapeworm and I speculate she never made it out of said backyard.