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My aunt* Mary died sometime this summer and no one bothered to tell my mother. She knew that Mary had been ill because someone else (a caregiver maybe?) answered to the birthday card my mother sent her that Mary was not feeling well, but she only heard of the death when she recently got a somewhat generic letter saying that the prior tenant had died and here's your Christmas present back. (The new tenant didn't know there had been any family relationship.) I don't have any particular feeling about this, though; like my uncle Walter, who died earlier this year? last year? from lung cancer (which also got my grandfather Warren when I was four - don't smoke, kids!), I hadn't seen Mary in about 20 years.
The count of my immediate family is now down to ten: my mother and father, my father's brother and wife and two daughters, my father's sister and her husband, and my mother's brother's wife and son. Actually, I guess, still eleven, since my cousin Shelley recently had a baby. Although I suppose if I counted Mary as "immediate", I should also count my father's cousins, but they're all back in Ohio or Pennsylvania or someplace like that and I think I only met a couple of them one time, when my great-uncle Joe (the father of the cousins in question, that is, my dad's uncle) died many years ago now.
If we were a nation we'd be Canada, or something - losing population due to death and emigration faster than we can recoup it through birth and immigration. Heh. I am going to acquire a whole mess of family when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
enotsola and I get married, though, because he has mother's family, and father's family, and step-father's family, and some of these people were parts of large numbers of siblings, which means lots of cousin-type descendants. Yikes. Fortunately a lot of the gaggle is back in Nova Scotia and I shouldn't have to deal with them much. ^_~
* - actually my ...second cousin? I'm not sure what the name is for the relationship between oneself and one's parent's cousin. Because of the age difference (60+ years) I always referred to her as "aunt".
The count of my immediate family is now down to ten: my mother and father, my father's brother and wife and two daughters, my father's sister and her husband, and my mother's brother's wife and son. Actually, I guess, still eleven, since my cousin Shelley recently had a baby. Although I suppose if I counted Mary as "immediate", I should also count my father's cousins, but they're all back in Ohio or Pennsylvania or someplace like that and I think I only met a couple of them one time, when my great-uncle Joe (the father of the cousins in question, that is, my dad's uncle) died many years ago now.
If we were a nation we'd be Canada, or something - losing population due to death and emigration faster than we can recoup it through birth and immigration. Heh. I am going to acquire a whole mess of family when
enotsola and I get married, though, because he has mother's family, and father's family, and step-father's family, and some of these people were parts of large numbers of siblings, which means lots of cousin-type descendants. Yikes. Fortunately a lot of the gaggle is back in Nova Scotia and I shouldn't have to deal with them much. ^_~* - actually my ...second cousin? I'm not sure what the name is for the relationship between oneself and one's parent's cousin. Because of the age difference (60+ years) I always referred to her as "aunt".