This was the next to last time I saw my sister, in 1992. Taken in front of our home outside Phoenix, the only time she visited out west from Chicago since I left that place 20 years earlier. Here, she is 62 years old and I am 50. Just after Labor Day, 1995, I flew to Kansas City, where my older nephew, Dan, picked me up, and drove us to Chicago, where his mother, my sister, was lying in a hospital bed. Several days later, she died there. My younger nephew, Mike, stood at the grave long after the others had left, his back to Dan & I sitting in Dan's car. Mike seemed unaware that the workers wanted to fill the grave. I learned during the following years that Mike had been far closer to his mother than any of us others........ Smoking all her adult life took it at age 65. She had 5 children, the two boys, my nephews, and three girls all younger than Dan & Mike. Since the funeral in 1995, I have not seen, nor heard from a single one of those nieces, who continue to abide by their father's dire rantings all their lives demanding they have absolutely nothing to do with their uncle. Nice, well-acclimated family...... Frank
I am not close to any of my nieces and nephews, or even my half-brothers and sisters. It's not a family issue, though. It's just that I have always lived thousands of miles away so we don't know one another. A few of them, I am in contact with on Facebook now and then, but that's about it.
I never really knew any of my relatives. My parents were into their early 40’s before I was born, so any cousins were already grown by the time I was a little kid, and all of my grandparents were either dead, or lived a long ways away from us (and really old). Since I was an only child (as was my mother), I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and barely remember my aunts and uncles that I only rarely saw. After my mom and dad passed away, the only actual family that I have here is my three children, and thankfully, we all get along just fine.