The Truth Will Set Us Free

Editor's Note

You may recall that my cousin Becky unexpectedly reached out to me last month (marking the first time we've spoken in ~15 years).

She wrote me a lovely note—to which I responded with a letter of my own, and we've since switched over to text and have been looking forward to our families meeting for dinner over Valentine's Day weekend.

But naturally, one of the things she'd mentioned in her note was that she had no idea what had ever happened between our families that caused us to fall out of touch in the first place.

I gave her the short answer in my letter back: That it was basically a metric ton of assclownery that had exactly NOTHING at all to do with us directly.

The long answer... well, that would've required a substantially larger envelope with a substantially larger number of stamps; and I wouldn't have felt right mailing a 30-page letter back, in which 29 of those pages were merely the details of someone else's assclownery.

Yet, for the first time in quite a while, I've had a lot of events from the past bouncing around in my head ever since I received Becky's note. And I think it's past time those of us who have been for so long affected by those events should finally get our catharsis.

So, this is the "long answer" to the question of why my mother, my sister, and I have been out of touch with half of my late father's surviving family for the better part of the last three decades... and, more importantly, what I hope can be a step forward for all of us toward reuniting.

I have never publicly discussed the majority of what I'm about to unpack here—though God knows I've wanted to the entire time.

In hindsight, it's an absolute wonder that I managed to spend nearly three full decades willingly sipping the Kool-Aid of the shared delusion that maintaining my silence as some sort of tactful pacifism for The Greater Good^TM year after year was more important than repairing my own damaged familial relationships.

But, it isn't.

It never was.

And I'm not doing it anymore.

That being said, this post is likely to ruffle some feathers, were the right people (or the wrong people?) ever to come across it—although I challenge anyone offended by it either way to examine what I've written through a genuinely objective lens and find some detail that I could have left out and still conveyed the entire truth:

I've left out PLENTY of the more damning details as it is, simply because those details are not pertinent enough to the parts of this story that affect me and my family personally. (Also, this is already a half-hour read as it is...)

And remember, this all only ever tangentially had anything to do with me anyway: I never chose any of it; I never wanted any of it; but I've suffered immensely as a result of it just the same.

So...

In all seriousness, I've written this post as a means of bridging the gap that has existed between Kelly and me and our dad's side of the family since the late 1990s:

We have never collectively had the benefit of a shared context for virtually ANY of the bullshit that occurred around us; and, in the absence of such, we humans have an unconscious tendency to project an "assumed context" onto others—assuming that others knew what we knew at any given moment, and then judging them accordingly... while never knowing the depth or the inaccuracy of the assumptions we made to reach our conclusion.

Despite how obvious the pitfalls of this approach may seem, however, these are (quite naturally) considerably less obvious in the moment—when we're living through some emotionally-charged experience and our feelings are cranked up to 1,000%.

So, it's often only when we go back and re-analyze something with the increased objectivity the passing of time provides, that we stand a better chance at seeing more clearly: identifying connections between events that had seemed discrete, realizing things we hadn't known we hadn't known, and gaining a new perspective from the sudden clarity of our 20/20 hindsight.

Fortunately, I happened to be pretty heavily introspective in my childhood and my teenage years—which manifested as my keeping a "diary" in some form or another for the majority of my life—and so I can be relatively decent at that sort of thing, at least sometimes.

On that note, I'll largely be working off of a blog post I pseudonymously published back in 2005...

That post (and that entire blog) hasn't existed in a long time—at least not beyond the confines of my hard drive—but it was, in turn, informed by events I had witnessed and observations I had made over the then-recent years, along with some additional context from my mother on things here and there that Kelly and I might otherwise never have perceived at the ages we were then.

In those days (because I was 20 and it seemed cool and edgy), I used to open and close every blog post with song lyrics—whatever I happened to be listening to at the time, or something apropos to what I was writing about. And, the lyrics I chose for the "Garfield" post are still remarkably fitting, even all these years later; so I've decided to transfer them over to this post.

Other than that, I've polished things up a bit: My affinity for profanity has tragically decreased by 0.3% in the decades between 20 and 40... but also, I'm no longer incensed by all of this the way I was 20 years ago: At this point, I'm just sad for all of us involved and the time we've lost.

And, now that we have those pleasantries out of the way, here we go...

A Beginning

Every story has a beginning; and even though I don't know exactly when this one starts, we can just go back to when my dad died—Valentine's Day, 30 years ago.

So, just to provide a quick bit of context for those of you reading who didn't meet me until sometime after the turn of the century and might not know all of this: My dad's side of our family tree coming into 1995 looks like this...

Meanwhile, my parents and Kelly and I have known Ron, Diana, Kenny, and Gina for years at that point through church; so, they're out there floating in the ether as well...

So, my dad passes away on Valentine's day of 1995. But, my mom and Kelly and I have become extremely close to Ralph after everything we've all endured together throughout my dad's battle with cancer.

Meanwhile, my mom and Diana are "best friends" in some capacity...

...and so, our family and Ron and Diana's spend a decent amount of time together over the course of that year or two since we kids are all close enough in age for our parents to get us together for play dates and such.

But, somewhere amidst all the considerable time that Ralph has been spending with us, he notices Diana.

And she... notices him as well, I guess.

So, things start to get a little nebulous.

Liar, Liar

One Friday afternoon in March of 1996, my mom and Kelly and I head out to the Gettysburg area (where my dad's whole family is from) for my Great Aunt Catherine's surprise 70^th birthday party later that weekend. We meet Ralph for dinner and then later proceed onward to my cousin Nancy's and her husband Allen's house—where we'll be spending the night.

Meanwhile, Diana knows about these plans, and she tells Ron all about how she's going to be driving my mom out to the cemetery on Saturday (as in, the following morning) so they can visit my dad's grave together...

But obviously, we're already out there—and for a get-together with a bunch of family that Diana doesn't even know—so, she's clearly coming out to see Ralph.

At any rate, my mom inevitably finds out about this at some point over the weekend—and naturally isn't pleased with having been made complicit in Diana's lie. (Yes, she's Diana's best friend; but Ron is a lifelong family friend as well; so, it's not like there's a 'hey, if you ever need to craft a lie to cheat on your husband, I'm your girl' sort of arrangement in play here!)

And so, at the party on Sunday, my mom asks Ralph what time Diana finally headed home the evening before.

Ralph gives her a sheepish look—indicating that she'd spent the night with him—and my mom later finds out that Diana had crafted yet another lie and given Ron some sob-story about how her contact lenses were bothering her too much to make the drive home, and so she and my mom "had to spend Saturday night at Nancy and Allen's house" (while her contacts magically fixed themselves overnight, I presume, so that she could drive home Sunday morning instead).

But anyway, this is now a second lie into which she has roped my unwitting mother.

And, while something of this magnitude would easily be the immediate cessation of a friendship in my book, my mom is a hell of a lot more compassionate than I am... so, her friendship with Diana continues for the time being (though not without incident, I'm sure).

Crashing the Party

Fast-forward a few months to July (still 1996): My mom and Kelly and I are once again out in Gettysburg to visit my dad's side of the family for the weekend.

Meanwhile, Diana has moved out of Ron's house by this point. And she and the kids have literally just returned from a trip to see her family down in Texas... but, when they get back to Pennsylvania, she claims to have misplaced her house key:

And so, Diana takes her five- and seven-year-old children—who have just sat through a flight from Texas to Philadelphia and a car-ride home from the airport, and have to be beyond spent at this point—and she loads them back into the car and drives another two hours out to Gettysburg.

Bear in mind, however, that we're in 1996: This is a solid decade before cell phones will become ubiquitous; and so, when Diana gets to Ralph's house and finds neither him nor my mom nor anyone else there, she has no way to get a hold of any of us to find out where we are.

Unbeknownst to her, the rest of us are all out to dinner with my dad's family; and it's only after we finish eating, and then drop Kelly off at Jill and Terry's to sleep over with Jenna, and then get back to Ralph's, that he and my mom and I pull into his driveway to find Diana's car inexplicably sitting there.

And I will never forget being in the back seat of his car and seeing my mom just slowly turn to glare at him—to which he insisted, "I had NO idea she was coming!"

But?

So, she springs it on Ralph and on us that they're all going to be sleeping there that night as well... and then she has the audacity to send Kenny and Gina downstairs to the auxiliary bedroom and the living room (where my mom and I will respectively be sleeping), so that she and Ralph can be alone upstairs in his bedroom.

My mom promptly hits Diana with an Uno Reverse card and tells Kenny and Gina to turn right around and go back upstairs, because she and I are the ones who were scheduled to be spending the night, and she and I are the ones who will be sleeping down here.

A Non-Apology

A few days later, Diana reaches out to my mom to ask if she can stop by our old house—ostensibly to talk about things and apologize for the “misunderstanding” over the weekend.

However, instead of even quasi-apologizing in any capacity at all, Diana takes the opportunity to whine about how half of her relatives down in Texas didn't even talk to her, and the other half just told her what an imbecile she was to be divorcing a guy like Ron (who basically raised the kids himself, did the majority of the cooking and the housework, worked as the full-time breadwinner, et cetera).

And, though my mom may be more compassionate than most, even compassionate people's tethers reach an end eventually... So, after sitting through a couple straight hours of Diana's unfathomable self-absorption—and weighing this, I'm sure, along with the endless string of lies and the clear pattern of manipulation in recent weeks and months—my mom finally severs the friendship.

Completely and in no uncertain terms.

Where Does That Leave Us?

Unbeknownst to anyone at this point in time, my mom's ending of the friendship will end up being the event that will trigger a complete shitstorm over the next 10+ years—informing virtually every interaction Diana has with her or Ron going forward.

So, it's worth stopping here to really comprehend some of the variables that would have been in play...

First of all, I'm sure Diana never could have anticipated that my mom (with her extraordinarily passive nature) would be the one to cast her aside. And, while I'm sure it must be a jarring experience for anyone to be flat-out hit with some permutation of, "I literally can no longer stand you as a human being and I don't want to be your friend anymore," I suspect that Diana is particularly wired with an emotional ineptitude to process that and recover from it in a civilized manner.

Regardless of how you want to frame it or phrase it, my mom has served as a fiercely loyal and reliable best friend to Diana for years at this point; and she has such a remarkably unassuming personality that I imagine a seasoned manipulator would have felt extraordinarily confident in her perceived ability to continue spinning up lies and playing puppetmaster forever without consequence.

And so, you really have to take a moment to fully appreciate that moment when the friendship ended—and, specifically, how thoroughly it would have completely shattered Diana's understanding of reality at that point in time.

But at any rate, for being someone who doesn't seem to experience guilt or remorse in any capacity, this woman sure will exhibit gratuitous amounts of resentment, wrath, and petty jealousy over the next decade.

Marrying Your Ex-Friend's Ex-Husband

So anyway, Ron and Diana's divorce goes through later in 1996.

And, of course, my mom and Ron have no bad blood with each other: Our families are still all friends from church; we kids are still good candidates for play dates with each other; and, somewhere along the way, my mom and Ron haphazardly begin dating.

Ralph moves in with Diana in early 1997.

And Ron proposes to my mom.

So, at this point it's been more than a year since Diana moved out of Ron's house; and they follow a split-custody agreement where they each have Kenny and Gina for half of the week (switching off every ~3.5 days).

And then, in July of 1997, my mom and Ron get married; and my mom and Kelly and I move into Ron's house—with Kenny and Gina living there half the week there as well.

So, suddenly our family tree turns into this labyrinthine convolution...

...and Diana immediately launches a decade-long campaign of Literally the Pettiest Bullshit You Can Imagine^TM.

Bear in mind that my mom was, for all intents and purposes, this woman's best friend in the world until like 10 minutes ago: Diana knows her and knows her well. She has trusted her with her children on numerous occasions across a span of literal years. She had given her a copy of her God-damned house key.

So, instead of thanking God for having been blessed with what should be every divorced parent's number-one dream—having your ex-spouse's new spouse turn out to be a step-parent who's not only not a threat to your children in any capacity whatsoever, but will also take an active interest in their development and well-being and treat them the same as they treat their own biological children—Diana elects instead to cut in with any and every piece of outlandish dipshittery she can come up with...

The best one by far though is the day that my stepbrother came home from school and—with all the tough-guy machismo of a nine-year-old—boasted to me,

And let me tell you what excellent good fun it is, not being able to retort to things like this—because the rest of us who were into our double-digit ages can all plainly see that Diana is precisely the type of person who's emotionally-bankrupt enough to weaponize her kids just to spite her ex-husband and ex-best-friend.

No one knows what it might take for her to attempt a stunt like trying to get full custody of the kids; so we all just say nothing.

Every. Single. Time.

Even while our inner monologues are screaming,

Where Does This Leave Us?

So all of this that we've covered thus far is a crucial context that I'm guessing most of my dad's and Ralph's whole side of the family have never had: I just can't envision any plausible means through which they would've had a real opportunity to see it...

My link to Diana is through my mom, and so I'm privy to a fair amount of the drama that's unfolding between them at this point in time.

Their link to Diana, on the other hand, is through Ralph—who is head-over-heels in love with Diana like a little lost puppy dog; and so he's likely blind to all of her faults, or at the very least emotionally disincentivized from recognizing their severity.

So, how could his sisters (my aunts) have known?

Let's be honest: That never would have happened.

It would have been the opposite...

And so, here we are in the summer of 1997 with a rift forming in MY family—in my dead father's family—because this shit-bag of a woman who all but flushed herself out of my mom's life with all her lies and deceit now wants to be forever bitter about it like she's the victim.

But, she's shacked up with my Uncle Ralph—the one of my dead father's three siblings with whom Kelly and I have had the closest relationship since our dad's passing. And not only does Diana have her talons irrevocably deep into him at this point; but now she's going to start trying to spin her web around the rest of his family.

...Because that's what alleged sociopaths allegedly do: They isolate. They gaslight. They twist things around to make themselves the victim, and they try to make their actual victims seem crazy.

And so begins the unraveling of my relationship (and Kelly's, and my mom's) with half of my father's family...

Changing the Plan

At this point, I have to assume that there's a lot of context I'm missing from "the other side" (as much as I hate framing that way even just for clarity's sake):

This is by now a full year after my mom has cut her ties with Diana, and Diana has been with Ralph all that time; and my Aunt Jill and Aunt Joan obviously still have a relationship with their brother... so, I can't imagine what their understanding might be of all that's happened and is still happening between my mom and Diana.

But I have to assume that their impressions have been formed largely by the one-sided information coming either from Diana directly, or about Diana from Ralph's perspective.

And that's not Jill or Joan's fault: That's just the reality of the situation. If you have no reason to believe that someone's master-manipulating entire swaths of reality, you're pretty much inclined to take them at their word for the most part. That's human nature.

And yet, it's probabilistically likely that Jill and Joan (and their families) are not getting anything close to the full picture, if for no other reason than that it almost seems to be some inviolable law of physics that literally everything that comes out of Diana's mouth must be a lie! And anything that comes out of Ralph's mouth—at least with regards to his charming new girlfriend—is likely to be whitewashed by the simple fact that the woman he loves can do no wrong in his eyes.

Whatever the case, we're still seeing all of my dad's family at least semi-regularly, Ralph aside. But there are also several instances by now in which my Aunt Jill, my cousin Jenna, and my grandfather Clyde have come to see us, but my Aunt Joan and my cousin Becky have not.

So, on one particular visit to our neck of the woods in August of 1997, Aunt Joan and Becky make plans to come see me and Kelly at our house.

Awesome!

But then, once they arrive in our area and stop at Ralph and Diana's first, the plan "mysteriously" changes all of a sudden, and Joan calls my mom to ask, "Hey, can Ralph and I take Kevin and Kelly out for pizza?"

Seeing this through Joan's eyes, your perspective would likely be, "Well, if we do that instead, I get to see my brother and my nephew and niece all at the same time. And Kevin and Kelly get to see me and Becky and their uncle. And we all get to eat pizza. And really, this sounds like such a better plan on basically every level."

And, you know what? If she lacked the context we had at that point in time, she wouldn't be at all wrong! That would have been a splendid change of plans, for sure... except that there was more going on that she couldn't possibly have known.

Obviously I don't have a verbatim transcript of the conversation, but I imagine it went something like this:

Mom's position makes perfect sense... if you knew everything we knew in that moment.

But, if you didn't? It would've come across as completely arbitrary and made absolutely no sense at all.

Context matters. Just a bit.

Taking Sides?

Again, I have to acknowledge the complete lack of context that I (and my mom and Kelly) have by this point when it comes to how Jill and Joan (being Ralph's sisters) are processing these sorts of little incidents.

My guess would be that Diana is framing them in a way that my mom is somehow the rigid, uncompromising party: No matter what idea they come up with, there's just some reason why it's not good enough for Catherine. I realize, however, that this is an assumption on my part. I wasn't there. I don't know.

But these next couple years is where things get really murky.

As hard as it is to imagine, Diana's antics don't improve in the slightest: In June of 1999, for example, my grandfather calls to let us know that my grandmother Helen had passed away; and when Kenny and Gina come over for Ron's half of the week with them the next day, my mom asks if they've heard the news from Ralph and Diana (which one would assume they had, with Helen being Ralph's mother). And Gina responds, "Yeah, we know; but my mom told me and Kenny not to tell you guys."

Then in July of 1999, Ralph comes over by himself to give Kelly a birthday present and to ask me if I'll be his ringbearer again like I was when he married his first wife Brenda back in 1991.

So, naturally, I decline the request.

And Ralph and Diana proceed to get married in October of 1999.

Kelly and I (but not our parents) are invited but obviously do not attend—despite the invitation's very generous and not at all shady offer to have a car come pick us up at home so that my mom and Ron wouldn't have to show up at the church.

In all seriousness though, somewhere around this time (I can't pinpoint exactly when, but it would be between the "pizza" incident in 1997 and the wedding in 1999), Aunt Jill relayed a comment to my mom that took an already terrible situation and made it even worse.

Much worse, actually.

But I need to preface this with a reminder about context—and an acknowledgment that my mom and Kelly and I do not have one for this.

(That will be crucial in just a moment.)

All I know for sure is that Jill and Joan must have had some conversation at some point in time about all of this bullshit and the turmoil between Diana and my mom...

...specifically regarding some aspect of how that bullshit had spread to damage Ralph's relationship with my mom and Kelly and me...

...and likely (though I don't know for sure) touching on the particularly odd reality that I have to imagine Jill and Joan would find themselves in whenever they came east to visit—and stopped at their brother's to unload the car, before having to turn right back around and say, "Alright then Ralph, you and your new wife sit tight for a few hours while we head 10 minutes down the road to see Kevin and Kelly, and Catherine and Ron."

That said, I understand that Aunt Joan intimated something to Aunt Jill, which Jill distilled down to a Reader's Digest version and relayed to my mom as the following exchange...

A Festering Wound

So, this final part will be the most difficult for me to write—not in the sense of being emotionally difficult, but in the sense of it being a sensitive aspect of this whole fiasco.

A few sections up, I mentioned how Joan and Becky would sometimes make the trip to see Ralph and Diana but not come to see us; and I said I'd circle back to that. So, the reason why this seems like such a huge deal at the time is for the simple fact that it's more than a two-hour drive for them to come see Ralph... and then less than a 10-minute drive to come see us from Ralph's house.

Thus, coupling this reality with Aunt Joan's comment (again, as relayed by Aunt Jill), this is a REALLY big deal as my mom and Kelly and I are first living through it: When Jill, and Jenna, and our grandfather are all still making the effort to come see us, but Joan and Becky stop, it's hard not to interpret that as a deliberate choice on their part.

And, absent a context, Joan's comment certainly comes across as an awful one. But context is everything... And we don't have one!

But, I'm 15 years old at this point—when this comment conveyed by Joan to Jill, and relayed from Jill to my mom, and relayed by my mom to me and Kelly. And I largely withhold—and have always withheld—my judgment of Aunt Joan to basically, "Well, that seems like a weird way to frame all of this and kind of a shitty thing to say, but I don't think for a second that there's, like, willful premeditated malice behind it."

Now, I certainly don't want to portray my mom or Kelly as emotionally overreactive—which they're absolutely not.

But my mother is very sensitive...

And as for Kelly, I doubt that she would disagree that she is a deadly combination of our mother's sensitivity and our father's stalwart headstrongness...

And so, they both took this comment as more or less a "choosing of sides" and a betrayal on Joan's part.

And, as far as I can see, their position has always been, "Well then, that's that—and the context actually doesn't matter so much, because whatever the context, Joan still framed reality the way she framed it, and said what she said."

But I remain unconvinced.

Think back to the first half of this little exposé, to when I noted that Jill and Joan couldn't possibly have had any real inkling of Diana's true nature: They were only seeing the side of her that she chose to show them (and I'm sure she was downright charming, as alleged narcissistic sociopaths always are), and they were only learning whatever Ralph may have conveyed from his perspective as Diana's boyfriend and then husband.

They couldn't imagine 99% of what we had come to understand through the experiences we'd had, because they had not had those same experiences.

So, why should we then assume that we have an understanding of the majority of their context—events that occurred, things that were said (especially said about us), and their respective interpretations of all of it?

It seems to me like a recipe for inaccuracies... and a premature judgment.

I've never been content with that.

The End

As I mentioned in the quasi-eulogy I wrote for Ralph last month, Kelly and I had an opportunity to sit down with him in 2007 and try to discuss things.

That was certainly an awkward lunch—essentially trying to tactfully convey, without hurting his feelings, "Hey, your wife's kind of a really dreadful individual; and honestly, how do you not see it? And even if you don't see it, how can you disagree that she basically sabotaged our relationship with you, and Joan, and Becky."

Tall order there. But at any rate, Ralph wasn't all that interested in hearing it: He genuinely seemed to think that nothing was wrong and it had all been a big misunderstanding.

He and Diana moved out to Arizona later that year anyway; so, who knows how much differently things would have turned out anyway, even if he had acknowledged any of our points or his role in the downward spiral of our once-phenomenal relationship?

Of course, by the time the 2000s rolled around, I was in high-school, and then started working, and then started college, and then started dating my ex; and Becky's the same age as I am, with Kelly and Jenna only two years behind, so we were all at that age where life really picks up.

For all we know, trips out to Gettysburg (or from Gettysburg) might have naturally become a lot more sparse anyway, even in the best of times: It just would have become harder to coordinate our respective schedules with work and school and everything else.

And by that point, there was enough emotional distance that I couldn't even imagine whether Joan and Becky would even feel all that strongly about having an opportunity to see me anyway; and I had to assume that they might well feel the same about us. So, our relationship just sort of died a soft, unspoken death by starvation.

But...

In March of 2010—three years after my mom or Ron or Kelly or I had last had any contact with Ralph or Diana, Jill relayed a comment that Diana had recently made, calling Ron an "alcoholic" and my mom a "wino."

I'm sure my mom remembers very well just how close 25-year-old me came to responding to that comment... via an open letter that I would have mailed to everyone in my dad's family, calling Diana out on pretty much everything I've detailed above (just with much more colorful language).

The only reason I declined to send that letter was because my mother literally begged me not to, for the sake of not potentially jeopardizing Ron's relationship with his (and Diana's) kids.

Surprisingly I listened to her, because her concern felt like reason at the time—though I've always found it to be an unfair position (even if an emotionally valid one) for her to have put me in.

But even more interesting is the irony in her essentially asking me to choose sides for the sake of appeasing one party at the expense of another.

That's water under the bridge: I know my mom's heart was in the right place, and I know that 25-year-old me wouldn't have retaliated so much to defend a perceived slight to my mother and my stepfather's honor, as to take the opportunity to stomp a bully I happened to find unpleasant.

(And, let's be honest: Ralph and Diana were still married in 2010; and his sisters would have been loyal to him; and Kenny and Gina were still practically kids, at ~21 and ~19. So... my sending out that letter would have created an absolute shitshow for all the wrong reasons.)

But, what I'd like my mom and Kelly to take away from this is that there IS in fact a context you can envision, in lieu of the exact context under which Joan might have been operating, to imagine the pair of shitty choices available in a no-win situation...

Or in Joan's case...

What's the correct answer to such a shitty question?

Perhaps Joan did consciously choose Ralph over us at some point on some level.

I can't say for sure, because I don't know for sure.

But I can say that, if she did, I am able to examine the past with enough objectivity to imagine why she felt that she had to make a choice, and even to understand why she chose the option she did.

Should my mom and Kelly ever find the ability to do the same, they can still have their pain if they want to—and I don't mean that mockingly: You can still grieve a loss just the same, even while understanding the underlying circumstances of that loss.

A New Beginning?

I don't intend for the takeaway from all of this to be a reignition of old wounds, much less a new source of anger or resentment toward each other; so, I hope that my relatives for whom I wrote this can embrace it as the closest we may get to a definitive source on which to base a decision to move forward:

It's not about some comment Aunt Joan allegedly made 25 years ago that she may well not even remember.

It's not about, well, how differently might things have turned out if Aunt Jill hadn't repeated that to Catherine?

It's not about putting my mom and my sister in the spotlight for maintaining a sense of outrage I don't share.

It's about the reality that if this wretched twat had never come into our lives, we never would have fallen out of touch. Period.

I regret that I cannot be more specific about most things after 1999, simply because that is when the distance really started to increase. If only I had a way of calling up every lie Diana ever spun throughout all of this, I'd gladly destroy each one.

Alas, that is impossible. And so, moving forward with each requires trusting with a bit of old-fashioned faith.

And of course, I realize that this is for now largely my personal take on events that transpired: So, if any of you involved would like your perspective added or emended in any capacity, feel free to reach out and let's discuss!

Ralph is unfortunately gone now. But the future is not yet written, and the rest of us still have a chance to regain what we've lost.

I hope we make the right choice.