That sounds just awful and I sorry you had to go through all that but you seem like a survivor. I think I used to follow you then stopped for some reason but now I am again.

While I was reading your story I thought of the family of my high school girlfriend, whose father was even worse of an alcoholic than my mother was, whose mother was a religious nut case, and whose manic depressive sister went on to die by suicide while married to my best friend. Also about my sister who is a religious nut case and who expended a lot of time and money getting custody of two of her grandchildren because she hated her daughter-in-law who lives an unconventional life style.

Maybe I shouldn’t say it but my mother-in-law was on hospice care for congestive heart failure for like two years then “graduated.” She took an extraordinary amount of time dying, living her final year or so with my sister-in-law, who is, well, let’s not go there.