My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then there was my twin brother and my sister. We had two aunts as well, my father's sisters. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me.
My childhood was kind of complicated. I have an older sister, but my father, my mother's husband, died when I was four years old. So I only had my mum and sister, really.
I was very attached to my family when my father died. I was 19. I was about to go live with my father right when he died, so it was very intense.
I chose to embrace the spirit of my mother, who, though she had too many of her own dreams denied, deferred, and destroyed, she still instilled in me, her child, that I could have dreams and that I did have a responsibility and the power.
The person that was closest to me growing up was my sister, who died at 19. She was an incredibly powerful girl, deeply committed to art and literature.
When my father died in my arms it had such a profound affect on me that at that very moment when my dad passed I realized that I needed to face my own fears.
My house is full of paintings by my mother Pam. She was a fantastic, prolific artist but had no confidence in herself, thanks to my father running her down. They married during the war when she was 19 - she had planned to go to art school. But my father didn't want her to work, so she became a housewife.
After Huguette Clark died in 2011 at age 104, 19 relatives challenged her will, claiming she was mentally ill and had been defrauded by her nurse, attorney and accountant.
When my mother died when I was 15, it felt like the end of my dreams of becoming a dancer - I had a sister and a brother and we had to pull together to look after the house and my father.
I had the experience of having my grandmother in a nursing home at the end of her life, and had dementia set in with my father. He was in a nursing home with dementia at the end of his life, but it happened for me personally 10 years ago. My father was much older than my mother, so I experienced it as a pretty young person. People's parents die at various ages, but my father died of mortality. He died of being an old person. Illness and stuff happened, but essentially, he was old and he was going to die.
After my mother died, I learned that she'd had a scholarship to the University of Nebraska, but - in kind of a tradition that females don't do things like that - her father prevented her from going. She always said that she wasn't allowed to go to college, but until she died, I never knew that she'd had this scholarship.
My father died when I was 10; my sister got polio a couple of years later and was paralyzed. So there I was - my sister in a wheel chair, my father gone, and my mother a quiet little mouse. You see, it was the '30s in the South, so my mother was not prepared to cope. So I was scared to death. And being that scared, everything afterward became a struggle not to go down the drain. Struggling became a way of life for me.
Most of the bio men on earth were born to women, so it's pretty ordinary! But I think because I had come from a matriarchy - my father died when I was young, and I only have a sister and a stepsister - when I told my mom and my sister that I was having a boy, they were both like, "That does not compute within our family relation!" It was like, "Girls only here!" Now that all seems very strange to me.
My dad died when I was 17. He had heart and other problems. He was a good father, lots of love. But he was affected by it. When he died, mom picked up the reins and raised six boys all on her own.
I grew up believing my sister was from the planet Neptune and had been sent down to Earth to kill me. I believed this because my sister Emily convinced me of it when I was a toddler. I think she'd seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers and her imagination ran away with her. There's a part of me that still believes it.
I’m sick of being everyone’s regret. My mother died in shame because she’d borne me. My father and brother despise me and my sister can barely look me in the eye! (Acheron)