In the last couple days, we’ve gotten two cards from Danny. A Christmas card, and a belated birthday card for my mom, since her birthday was the last day of November.
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Especially after all the stuff that happened, all the things he did. It sounds like it ought to have been an attempt at apology or explanation. Unfortunately, the “nice” stopped with sending the cards at all. The things he wrote on them were nothing but hate, vitriol, and crazy.
He told us that he’d reimburse my mom for some of the more than $3,000 bill he ran up when he kept the rental car a month past the end of the time he contracted for. Some, but not all. Because, he claims, he had a contract to return the car he’d rented on 12/22 and get a van or a truck to pack all his stuff into for his cross-country move, but that my mom, or my mom and I together, forced Enterprise to cancel the contract and confiscate the car. So he will not reimburse her for the $450 fee Enterprise added for going out and towing the car and refusing to either return it to him once it was refueled or give him a different one. His claims about the contract are patently false. Enterprise had been calling us since the end of the contract on 11/10 when the car wasn’t returned. They were quite patient about it, really. It wasn’t until the car had been overdue to be returned for a month before they started telling my mom that they would report the car stolen and that because she had allowed herself to be put on the contract as prime driver, she was legally responsible as well as financially.
He told us that he had a fungal infection so severe that it required a prescription to clear it up, and told us that it was our fault. That he’d gotten it from our dirty toilet (he had already tried to claim that the toilet, which *I* have cleaned regularly *and* we’ve had a weekly maid service in and *they* cleaned it also, had shit stains on it that had been there when he visited two years ago) or from our dirty cats (don’t even know how that one’s possible) or from the dirty recliner I normally sat in until he took over the living room and forced me out of it. I will admit, the recliner is horrible looking. The supposedly stain-resistant fabric was, quite frankly, not at all, and my grandmother when it was her chair spilled coffee on it, stroked the arms compulsively and ground in her body oils, and was a bit incontinent but would not admit it. We have tried to clean the chair. We’ve had professionals come in and try to clean the chair. It’s as clean as it will ever be. It is stained, yes, but that is entirely different from the filth he claims.
He then went on to say that he is so relieved that at least my grandmother no longer lives here, but with my uncle and aunt. Because she lived in an awful environment here, was horribly neglected and mistreated, and didn’t deserve it because she’s never been anything but sweet and never abused either my mom or me. Which is news to me, since she drove me to the point of wanting to kill myself within two years when I lived here during high school, and when I tried to talk to her about it in a last-ditch effort to get the abuse to stop, she beat me for being stupid as well as a monster who ruined the lives of anyone who had contact with me. She drove my mom to the point of wanting to die within a year after my mom moved here to take care of her and my step-grandfather. And when my mom was sitting there with a razorblade to her own wrist, my grandmother didn’t give a damn right up until she realized that if my mom was gone, there’d be no one to do the shopping and cooking for her. Then when I moved here and wound up taking care of both her and my mom after my mom’s stroke, it took me three years to get her to understand that hitting me any time she didn’t agree with me was unacceptable and she had to stop. Her verbal abuse got significantly worse thereafter, but she could no longer hurt me with that and her emotional blackmail. It no longer controlled me and it no longer made me hurt and hate myself, it only made me angry. And in spite of that, I cooked and cleaned and did her banking and met with her accountant and tried to find funny or interesting things to talk to her about to keep her entertained since she had lost her sight and had been far too visual a person to adjust well to the loss. I got only two to four hours of sleep every night for so long that my own immune system crashed, yet I couldn’t let myself stop because if I didn’t take care of them, there was no one else. And for doing all of this, I got told daily how much my very existence was a burden and that I had completely ruined her life. And that was before the Alzheimer’s really took hold and she totally lost it. It was a complete relief when the day came that she could no longer remember who I was. It was the first time in my entire life that she ever treated me with anything other than hatred and contempt at best. But she’s sweet and never abused my mom or me. Yeah, right. But we were complete monsters to her. Again, yeah, right.
He closed by telling us he can’t believe that we’d throw away 44 years of friendship like that.
So that was our Christmas card from him. Merry Christmas.
The Christmas card arrived day before yesterday. Yesterday came the card with belated birthday wishes for my mom. It was another rage-inducing spate of insanity and verbal poison. I’m honestly so enraged right now that I can’t remember most of what he wrote in it. I can remember two things. One that he hoped either Juan or I had baked her cake because being stranded in El Paso without a car, taking care of a terminal cancer patient and fighting a fungal infection was better than baking stuff for the birthdays of swine. And two that there will be a snail mail letter to follow with instructions on what to do with all the crap he left here that he is now unable to pick up because of what we did to him with the car. So that means any day now we can expect a third round of being told how horrible and monstrous we are and accused of all kinds of evil things that we have not ever done.
He has gone from chosen family to never darken my doorstep again and is now in my “dead to me” list. As far as I’m concerned, the man I’d loved as an alternate father, who had been there literally all my life, who I had planned once upon a time to have move in with us and I would take care of him as I had my blood relations should he ever reach a point where he needed a caregiver, is dead. Dead and gone for good. And better off dead than being who he has become in the last several months. This person contacting us now is a complete stranger, and evil in ways my “godfather” Danny would never have even considered. He is no one I have any desire to know or hear from again. Now if only he’d actually “let go and walk away” as he keeps claiming he has to do from such awful people, since he’s the one who keeps renewing contact, if only to tell us again that we are monsters and to accuse us of everything horrible he can think of.
