Horror Stories of my Extended Family (alternate title: The Most Awkward Day of My Life)

Everyone has that side of the family. 

I don’t even have to explain what I mean with my ambiguous that.  You know. 

Mine is worse than yours, as long as yours doesn’t include people (?) named Sister, Peanut, Monday, and Luvie Mae. 

Disclaimer: these are distant, distant relatives.  On my dad’s side. 

But they’re there.

The only one I’ve met more than once is Sister, whose real name is Kathleen.  I will not pause to ponder why in God’s name you would choose to go by “Sister” when you have Kathleen as a perfectly viable, and arguably more obvious, alternative. 

That ship has sailed.  She is called Sister. 

Of course, that’s “Aunt Sis” to myself and my sisters.  That’s right, “Aunt Sis” is short for “Aunt Sister”.  You can imagine my shock at age sixteen when I finally put that together.   

In all reality I know very little about Aunt Sis’s family, save for the fact that they have enough issues to fuel three seasons of Maury.  Aunt Sis is often at my family’s holiday gatherings alone due to exclusion from her own family’s events for one reason or another.  This is actually very sad and for the most part can be blamed on her other family members rather than herself.  She’s can be a really sweet 84-ish year old woman with good intentions (sometimes). 

Aunt Sis had a husband named Hubert (if you were more familiar with the area of Mississippi that these people live in, these names would seem less odd).  Hubert died at a slightly early age of seventy-five, which I then thought was tragic but now, knowing Aunt Sis better, kind of understand.

Fortunately, Aunt Sis was able to procure for herself another husband by the time she was 80 years old.  Russell’s addition to the family has, as far as I can see, made little to no difference.  He has been attending family functions for the past five years and I have probably heard him speak a total of fifty words. 

There was, of course, some drama surrounding Aunt Sis’s marriage to Russell.  There were some strong objections on the part of Russell’s daughter.  This is much more amusing if you keep in mind that Russell’s daughter is probably sixty years old. 

Of course, when we later found out that Aunt Sis more or less forced poor, old, almost-mute Russell into marriage, we understood the problems that his daughter had with the marriage.

But still. 

Also, it is rumored that she occasionally hits him.

Actually, that rumor has been substantiated. 

But I digress.

Another interesting bit of information with regard to Aunt Sis is her relationship to my grandmother. For clarity’s sake, I will remind you that my grandmother is Aunt Sis’s brother’s wife. 

Fortunately I am saved the trouble of describing the relationship between these two women, because popular culture has already done it for me.  My grandmother (whom I love very much) and Aunt Sis have the exact same relationship as Rachel McAdams  and Lindsay Lohan’s characters (Regina and Kady) in Mean Girls had. 

Does this seem sad? It’s not. These are women in their mid eighties having petty teenage catfights.

It’s absolutely hilarious. 

I’ll paint a picture for you.

One Christmas when my grandfather was still alive, he and my grandmother bought my sister a hot pink chair for her room.  It ended up in the middle of the room after all the presents had been opened.  Aunt Sis elected to sit in it.

My grandmother walked by and put her hand on the chair for support. My grandfather, in a tactless move that is rather characteristic of that side of the family, commented.

“Betty, don’t lean too hard on that chair, you’ll knock it down,” he suggested.

“Well,” she snapped, “It’s probably already broken from your sister sitting in it.”

For the record, the awkward silences that follow these situations does not become less awkward with repetition. 

These are not isolated incidents.  Last Christmas, my father had the gall the rearrange my mother’s seating arrangements, which are actually plotted out with his family’s dysfunctions in mind.  The result of this thoughtless move was that my grandmother and  Aunt Sis ended up sitting beside each other.

This is almost as good and idea as inviting the Montagues and the Capulets to a dinner party.  The fact that we have as of yet escaped the amount of bloodshed involved in a Montague and Capulet function is due to nothing but luck, and possibly divine intervention. 

There came a time in the meal when everyone had gone into the kitchen to get dessert, leaving only myself, my grandmother, Aunt Sis, and Uncle Ronnie, my grandmother’s eldest son who occasionally joins in these catfights, always siding with my grandmother.

The pettiness sounds even more ridiculous coming from him, as he weighs in somewhere upwards of three hundred (and fifty?) pounds. 

Aunt Sis, apparently choosing (maybe) to forget the earlier argument about who had brought the most dishes (like it matters- everything either of them brings is always disgusting.  sorry, but asparagus casserole is not a thing), starting telling my grandmother about the goings on of her church’s senior citizen group. My grandmother, like a petulant child, turns her head to the side and puts her nose to the air and proceeds to pretend that she can’t hear. 

I do not exaggerate.  It is entirely juvenile. 

Again, this is awkward every single time.  Uncle Ronnie always takes my grandmother’s side, which is extremely unusual in my eyes as her side has no rational argument whatsoever.  Regardless, Uncle Ronnie pretends not to hear as well.  Russell may have been there, but I wasn’t kidding before: the man doesn’t talk. Even in these sorts of situations.

Presuming myself the only adult at the table, I attempt to rectify the situation, or at least to make it a little less awkward.  I start nodding and inserting “hm!”s and “ohh”s and “yes that sounds very nice!”s.  Aunt Sis fortunately takes my lead and finishes the story, pretending that I was her intended listener all along.  Then she picked up her plate and went into the kitchen for dessert, exercising what for my family should be considered staggering amounts of grace. 

My mother later told me that Aunt Sis went into the kitchen to tell my mother that she had a brain tumor, a story which was quickly fact checked with her daughter and proved to be entirely false. 

This seems somehow extraneous, but notable.  Moving on. 

This seemingly excessive amount of backstory sets the stage for what turned out to be the most awkward afternoon of my life.  I say “seemingly excessive” because I want you to fully understand my relationship, or lack thereof, to this woman. 

So here’s the story:

I was eighteen years old and Monica was dead. 

If this sounds tragic to you, reconsider.  I did not know Monica.  My only information about her was that she was Aunt Sis’s daughter and that her dead body was encased in what had to be the hugest casket I’d ever seen. 

Seriously, this thing was the polished mahogany triple XL of caskets.

My dad’s side of the family are not finnicky eaters.  (Read: Luvie Mae, who died in the 1970s, once had a doctor actually request that she venture over to the farmer’s market to be weighed, as the doctor did not actually have a scale that would do the job. I wish that was a joke.)

If you still think there could be one single bit of sadness in my heart over Monica’s death (excluding the sadness that I was being forced to travel to Magee, Misssissippi, for the occasion), you should know this little tidbit of information:

Monica’s name was pronounced “Mah-knee-cah”.  My mother and I only found out that her name was spelled “Monica” on the way to the funeral.  We were flabbergasted at ourselves only for being so flabbergasted by this information, as this type of behavior is nothing but typical for my father’s family. 

We arrived at the funeral home for the visitation with leaving as quickly as possible on our minds.  I took one look at the casket, decided that I didn’t want to see the body inside, and headed towards the back of the room to see if I could find a potted plant to hide behind in order to avoid talking to anyone for the next two hours. 

Unfortunately, I bumped right into Aunt Sis.  Being Monica’s mother and therefore the chief mourner, it was, of course, her job to sit in a chair (she is eighty something, after all) and have people come give her their condolences. 

For reference, the chair was a padded affair with immovable wooden arms curving around on either side: a pretty standard funeral home chair.

Before you ask, let me just say that I wish the description of the chair was irrelevant.  I really do. 

I patted Aunt Sis on the shoulder and gave my own condolences.  In a move that I did not forsee, she wrapped her surprisingly strong arms around me and pulled me onto her lap. 

In a funeral home.  I was mortified and began planning how to console her as quickly as possible and then free myself. 

We talked for a minute and then sat in silence for a few more before I offered to get up in order to avoid crushing her eighty five year old femurs. 

She ignored me and clutched tighter. 

Fifteen minutes later (I don’t think Monica was that popular), a man wandered over to give his own condolences.  As I felt decorum dictated (if there is even applicable decorum for those situations where your stranger of a great aunt is forcing you to sit on her lap at her daughter’s visitation), I offered to get up so that they could converse. 

Aunt Sis declined (read: refused vehemently) again. For that and every conversation that followed, I sat on Aunt Sis’s lap and was spoken around.  This was not exactly easy.  Aunt Sis is not a huge woman and I was covering up most of her.  A lot of peering around my body in order to speak directly to Aunt Sis was done. 

This lasted for two and a half hours. 

You might ask: where was my family during this point? Well, I was asking that exact same thing for the entire visitation. 

I disowned them all for abandoning me immediately after I found them and related my tale of the visitation and then reversed my decision after my mother’s reminding my that a disowned family was not exactly good for a ride back to Jackson.