It’s after 4 am

and what’s keeping me awake is…

… the utter wrongness of la Narcisse’s actions towards me, personally, and towards all the members of my family.

She is a religious woman, who has always claimed the high ground based on moral intricacies of her own construction. But her actions have been callous and calculated, breaking all rules of correct moral conduct, and never more so than when there was a potential for financial gain.

When my grandmother was very elderly and her health was declining, my mother and La Narcisse lived a stone’s throw from my where my grandmother lived. Like so close you could literally stand on the kerb outside my mother’s and see my grandmother’s place. A short walk, less than a minute in the car. And as my grandmother’s health worsened, my mother stepped in, at first, to help. But la Narcisse was having none of that. She resented every minute that my mother spent away from their cosy little domestic haven, and refused to spend any of her own time with my grandmother. (She claimed my grandmother was boring, stupid and that she made nasty faces and, quelle horreur, expected to be entertained). 

To be fair, by that time, my grandmother had worked up some active dislike of la Narcisse, because she had been on the receiving end of la Narcisse’s calculated manipulativeness, which involved, among other things, la Narcisse borrowing several thousand dollars of my grandmother’s money and gambling it away and applying pressure to borrow more, and my grandmother’s savings had shrunk considerably as a result. Nonetheless my grandmother continued to make an effort to keep the relationship with my mother going, and would pop in when she was going past. But la Narcisse had worked up her own active dislike of my grandmother too, and she insisted my mother discontinue this daily contact. This meant they barricaded themselves inside their little unit, put locks on the gates, pulled the blinds down and ran the noisy airconditioner whenever they thought my grandmother might drop by. So when my grandmother started needing help on a daily basis, and my mother responded by popping over for an hour or two for several days in a row, la Narcisse launched a storm of tantrums, which escalated in histrionic severity until my mother stopped going to visit my grandmother, completely. And all the while la Narcisse was there, whipping every small encounter into a massive drama, goading my mother for every small act of caregiving, decrying it as toxic exploitation. 

During this period when she was refusing to see my grandmother and doing everything in her power to also prevent my mother visiting her own mother, la Narcisse worked up a hysterically false account about my grandmother roaming around in the scrub with drunken itinerants jabbering nonsensically because she was under the influence of alcohol or drugs or both. I asked my grandmother about this, once. There was an Aboriginal man from further up the street who often went walking past and would stop for a friendly chat when she was out the front checking her letterbox or turning the sprinklers on, and one time she filled his water bottle up from the tap. This illustrates how unhinged la Narcisse’s falsehoods could be, even though she uttered them with absolute conviction and would repeat and elaborate on them over time. 

(Where was I when all this was happening? Working everyday, attempting to study, largely dependent on public transport to get around, and caring for a friend who lived alone who was very, very ill, on the opposite side of town to where my grandmother lived. There was not a lot I could do on a daily basis, but I tried to get out there when I had time and I could get a ride).  

Without this basic daily care, my grandmother became quite ill and I don’t remember if she was in and out of hospital at that point but she started having regular visits from a respiratory nurse who kept an eye on how she was going, and organised some meals and someone who came around to do a bit of cleaning. And all the while her own daughter lived literally a minute or two down the street but she’d stopped turning up or having any active involvement in her care, because la Narcisse proactively assaulted their relationship until it became a battleground that required mediated sessions with a social worker.

When my grandmother eventually became so ill as to be hospitalised, it fell to me to visit her and bring her clean nighties and handkerchiefs, collect and bring her mail, to sit with her and write her cheques and post them off to pay her bills, and work with the social worker to plan where she would live once she left hospital. And once it was apparent that she wouldn’t be leaving hospital until a high-needs place became available, it became my responsibility to pack her things for her and organise the overland car trip to take her home to her home town, where she wanted to be, where she would be surrounded by the love and care of her friends, friends she had bravely left behind late in life to be with her daughter and her grandchildren. This involved a car journey of several days, and a huge logistical undertaking to keep her supplied with oxygen canisters, and I will be forever grateful that I was able to render her this kindness after my mother had checked out, completely, from providing any care or contact. 

Shortly afterwards, my mother and la Narcisse also sold their place and moved to her home town. They claimed they were going to build a granny flat for her, but you can decide for yourself how effective that model of care would have been, when they had literally installed locks on their gates to prevent her from entering their home when she lived as close as possible to their backyard without actually being in their backyard. (I shit you not). They even had a system of not answering the phone unless you rang and hung up and then rang again, and they used this to avoid answering her phone calls. A more cynical person might wonder if they hoped to seize the entirety of  her assets before she died, because by then she had changed her will so that all her grandchildren also received a share, deliberately to ensure “that woman” la Narcisse did not gamble the rest of her estate away. They certainly acted very quickly to plunder her bank accounts, withdrawing thousands and thousands of dollars in the days before and after her death. I know this for a fact because I worked for the bank in the area where irregularities such as activity on deceased accounts was flagged, and the team that looked after those accounts recognised her name and asked me about it. When I confronted my mother and la Narcisse about it, they first lied and told me someone must’ve stolen the transaction card while my grandmother was still in hospital. They later changed the story and said she’d given them permission to withdraw the money, in which case, one wonders, why the first lie was needed. They took possession of everything my grandmother had taken with her, all of her most precious things. Despite their disproportionate share, they never stopped resenting the smaller share of my grandmother’s (by then, much reduced) estate that my siblings and I received, and for a couple of years after her death, they continued to threaten to “challenge the will” or sue us to recoup the money. 

Before the funeral, my mother was still checked out of all but the financial arrangements. My siblings and I made the decisions about such things as the words on the memorial cards and the readings for the service, and we were the ones who verified her identity before the coffin lid was closed with her name plate attached. I do not recall la Narcisse even turning up for the funeral. My mother, in a pointed display of how “poor” she was and how grievously robbed of her inheritance, turned up wearing a tracksuit. A nice tracksuit, but a tracksuit. To her own mother’s funeral, when her mother was a seamstress and had lovingly poured hours of her life into ensuring her daughter was always nicely clothed. And the scorn that la Narcisse heaped upon my grandmother did not diminish after her death, and her revisionist retellings of events that occurred, that I personally witnessed, have become more and more noxiously false to support her continued claim to a life of upstanding moral goodness. 

Should I have been surprised, then, that la Narcisse did not advise me of my mother’s death, nor her cremation, nor her interment service? Should I be surprised that she is refusing to supply an account of my mother’s estate, aggressively insisting that even an enquiry will be met with a rough-shod trampling by her barristers who will then require us to pay their costs? Should I be surprised that she claims to have disposed of every last item that belonged to my mother, my grandmother, or even those remaining vestiges of items that belonged to me as a child? Surprised, no. Shocked, yes, still, even after all these years and every despicable, dishonest action la Narcisse has taken throughout that time. And given the very real disrespect and abusive behaviour that she served on my grandmother, it is especially galling that she is now either hoarding those things my grandmother most prized, or that she has disposed of them as if they were personally worthless. 

What kind of vile individual deliberately withholds the news of a parent’s death, simply to protect their financial interests? Particularly when my own track record from the time of my grandmother’s death demonstrates none of the self-serving manoeuvering or even the bold-faced lying that typified her whole approach? What, exactly, would she lose by handing over something like a box of old photos or birthday cards? It seems to me that she is behaving like a person who is concealing other assets, probably monies that we would have a lawful claim to. But I’m tired. I’m tired of unconscionable, un-clever, cruel, vile humans getting away with shit that they lawfully should not. And the longer I contemplate the many injuries visited upon me by this one person, real physical injuries as well as the psychological scars that came with being subjected to the kind of relentless control that she exerted over every aspect of my life for a decade during my formative years, and now the theft of so basic a right of being allowed to grieve my mother, the more I question what laws it is that she has broken. What evidence might there be of those crimes against me that are no longer guarded by statutes of limitation in the jurisdiction in which they occurred, and specifically what evidence exists now that they were of a sufficient severity to warrant a criminal prosecution.