A Tale Of Two Cousins (The End Part 2)

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Flash Fiction #163

This is the 22th part. The previous 21 parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21.

I don’t have an ending for this story because all the narcissists in my family, except those who died, are still engaging in various mind games to make people around them live in self doubt, antagonism, depression and emotional hell. Here I am going to list the body count caused by my grandma’s narcissistic “campaign” against her own family, which had lasted for more than 60 years. From the day she got married at the age of 19, she started to withhold emotions, shame natural expressions, set up impossible goals, train her kids to be savage workers just like her, force people to be indifferent and emotionless just like her. She wanted her kids to excel and outperform in an outside world that she knew very little about, and the ways she used to motivate her kids were mostly based on humiliation and guilt and isolation. She was the matriarch of my mother’s family, and I have been watching the wreckage caused by such a crazy matriarch all my life.

The first one was my mother, the golden girl of my grandma, who grew up equally narcissistic. Since narcissists attract narcissists, she met my father and fought a perpetual battle with him until the day she died. Almost every small item, every petty issue, every casual remark was utilized by them to “stab” each other. Whenever my mother was absent, my father would start to talk to me as if he tried to communicate with me, but I knew in my hart that he was weaving a story to disparage my mother’s family in a thinly veiled way. Whenever my father was absent, my mother would complain openly to me about my father’s heartlessness and selfishness. Whenever I was absent or I was present (it didn’t matter where I was), they would talk about my inattention to them and my silent response to everything they said.

The second one was my Uncle Big, the golden boy of my grandma, who was another narcissist. His narcissism caused him to make enemy and offend people wherever he went. Thus his business suffered. Anyway, Uncle Big’s wife committed suicide several times unsuccessfully, but she did succeed at last. She was chronically depressed. I was not surprised. Anybody who married Uncle Big would have been depressed. She knew she couldn’t get out of the marriage due to economic concern and social prejudice. Suicide was the only option for her. She would rather die than live a life with Uncle Big. Anyway, Uncle Big didn’t say much about his wife’s tragedy, but my grandma spread all kinds of rumors, most of which centered around the “fact” that the wife was so selfish that she inconvenienced Uncle Big with her death, so feeble minded that she didn’t know how to enjoy the material abundance Uncle Big provided for her, so ungrateful that she forgot that Uncle Big had rescued her from her terrible parents who had mistreated her.

The third one was my Aunt San, who was the cleverest among all my mother’s siblings. Aunt San was so starved of love and affection that she fell for the first guy who showed a little interest in her in high school. They got married and had kids right after their high school graduation, which prevented her from going to college. My grandma berated Aunt San for years and years. Whenever any topic related with Aunt San came up, my grandma would say, “don’t ever learn from your Aunt San.”

The fourth one was Uncle Small, whom I talked about in the previous post. He was never in very good health, which saved him from my grandma’s rage and demand. He married a loving wife and they enjoyed their life together, but this was not allowed by my narcissistic grandma, who convinced them to go through an in vitro fertilization procedure to produce a child. The technique was not mature at the time and doctors warned them of the high rate of failure. However they insisted on going through with it due to my grandma’s pressure. And my cousin was born who was mentally retarded very severely. My grandma talked about this as if she sacrificed herself at the altar of traditional value and she should get a medal for it. In her twisted narcissistic logic, she was forever a long suffering hero and victim rolled into one, who deserved other people’s endless adoration.

The fifth one was my cousin Arjin, who’s the son of Uncle Big, who’s the golden grandson of my grandma. He was so indulged by my grandma that he always thought he was above everybody else. He was sent to Australia to attend graduate school, but he didn’t like to study. He bought a small business there using the money my grandma saved for him, but the long hours and the endless repetitive labor was too much for him to bear. He sold the company six months later at a huge loss, and came back home. Arjin was a very sweet boy when he was young, but sweetness and natural humility were not allowed in this narcissistic family. My grandma would see to it that he was coddled to the point that he lost the sense of his own reality.

And there are many other victims, but I don’t have the heart to write all of them today. So it will be a topic for another day.

After my grandma died, the narcissism has been carried on as a family tradition by her children and grandchildren, who seemed not to notice how much damage they had sustained under the mad matriarch, who treated my grandma as a legend, who would fight anybody who “badmouth” about my grandma’s legacy.

There’s no ending right now for this story, but I am hoping that I can fight narcissism, and I am hoping that I may even win the battle…

(The End)