26. Sometimes, you never truly know someone.
“My grandmother’s cousin married a man she met in college. They had a daughter and were married for maybe 40 years. 3 years ago, he passed with cancer. We were not shocked at this. After all, he was approaching 70 and had a bad form of cancer, and it was spreading fast. We were prepared for this.
What we weren’t prepared for was that after he passed, his wife found a journal of his which explained that for 35 years, he was having a another relationship with a man.
It was a shock to all of us. He was so committed to his wife, that he never left. But at the same time, it must have killed him to stay silent for such a long time.”
27. Seems a bit hypocritical, Karen.
“When I first started dating my girlfriend, I was invited to her very conservative Catholic parents’ 25th wedding anniversary party. I was hanging out with her and her 24-year-old older brother afterwords, and she was talking about how her mom found her birth control earlier that week and lectured her about how wrong premarital sex was (we weren’t having sex). I quick did some mental math and said, ‘She shouldn’t talk since your brother’s birthday is in 5 months.’ They both looked at me with a crazy amount of shock on their faces. They had never figured that out.”
28. “Because they’re all inbred.”
“Found out through an angry vent given by my mother, that most of my cousins aren’t legitimate, and most of my aunts had lied to their husbands about the true father of their children. Also found out that there was a very large niche of the family I had never met and that no one really admits to – because they’re all inbred.”
29. No one told him what happened to his brother?
“My grandfather had a younger brother who was mentally disabled. He pretty much took care of this brother completely until he was about 18, when he left for college. He came back and the brother had been put in a mental institution for months/years. No one had told my grandfather. My mother only recently found out about him.”
