This is my participation in the daily freewriting prompt
@daily.prompt/30-april-2025-mariannewests-freewrite-writing-prompt-day-2722-my-dead-cousin
Good afternoon freewriters.
I made it through another day of work. I'm still recovering from bronchitis. Taking back-to-back phone calls at work is exhausting. So....here starts the freewrite.
My cousin Connie Jo, was an interesting woman. Her mom was my aunt on my father's side. His youngest sister's oldest child. She was older than my brother. We got along well and we shared the common interest of writing. Connie married when I was around twelve years old if I remember correctly. She married a man in the military and they moved out to Las Vegas. Her husband did well for them financially. He died young. And I honestly cannot remember what happened. It was so long ago. He left her a widow with two children. In her forties, she had breast cancer.
I don't remember the order of things but my Aunt moved down there with her to help her during her cancer treatment, and she pulled through well. Eventually, she returned to Erie. We lost contact with one another somewhere along the line. We used to write regular letters and share stories when I was a teenager.
Her cancer returned and escalated through the years after more chemotherapy or radiation. She began to call frequently, and we would talk. When they put her back on radiation, she stopped calling. I hoped she'd recover. She lived in the same trailer park as my son, but I never could figure out which trailer she lived in.
A rift occurred between her and her mom years before. She cut off contact completely with her mom for the remaining years of her life. They lived within blocks of each other, but she refused to see her or talk to her. It was very heartbreaking for me. My mother passed by suicide in 1997. I would visit my aunt as my only living female relative near me. Both of my grandmothers had already passed away. My aunt lived very close to my employment at that time. I would stop and she would feed me dinner, or we would have a cup of tea and talk.
Towards the end of Connie's life, she cut off contact with her son and her daughter, too. I don't know what happened but it was sad.
Lately, a very surprising thing happened. Snapchat started sending me invitation requests. One of them was for my cousin who is gone. I know it's because she's still on my contacts list.
So that is my story for today. It's not a very happy story, and there is so much more to that family's tale, and how I got wrapped up into it. Because I was the only one in contact with my aunt at the time of her death, other than the one who was a jailbird in and out of jail, his whole life for drugs. She had four children.
My moral of this story is reconcile with your family before somebody is not here any longer. Her children were trying to call me because they had unfinished business. It's too late once you're gone.
Thanks for reading and taking part.
Have a blessed night.
I can't find a picture of Connie Jo, so this is her sister Chris. We met up after many, many years after no contact in 2018 in Arizona when I went to visit my dad. She just happened to be there visiting her brother a short distance from us.
