My Dear Cousin - The Sick Young Boy

2^nd May 2021

My dear cousin,

In my last letter I talked about how my parents broke up. The sad truth about that is that you know what comes next. There are still a few surprises in store for you, but I can guarantee you’ll wish they weren’t true.

I started having health problems at this point. I kept puking after seeing my old man. People said I was “throwing up my feelings” but I think he just gave me so much candy that I couldn’t take it. We would go to Pick and Save and buy all the candy we wanted, and I being young ate too much.

Then there was the fact that mom had some trouble finding a babysitter, and my two siblings were rather rough playmates. They had a game where they would ambush me on the couch, strip me naked, and than pull me off onto the floor. This happened over and over, and the part of me that tended to hit the floor was the back of my head.

As a result I have what doctors now call transient brain damage. It impacts my ability to see words. Even now I couldn’t write this coherently without programs to read it back to me. I also lost the ability to see faces for a few years. From kindergarten until high school most people were just lumps of clay to me. I couldn’t see a face on top of a head, and so I would often need to wait for someone to speak before knowing who they were.

I still have trouble with faces to be honest. It’s not as bad, but I’ve adapted. Then part of this may be that (Pickle) and I slept in the same bed, and he would keep me up all night. I’ve never slept well and that can really impact a man’s brain development.

Two years after the divorce the old man remarried to a woman who he knew had been a prostitute in Nigeria. She came with a small army of children older than us and all kinds of problems.

About a year before she died mom had me in therapy for my brain injuries. She never knew how I got them, but to be honest she had her own problems. She enrolled us in music classes and the world was good. Then we went on one last vacation. We canoed the Colorado River. When we got home she had a massive bruise where she had been sitting in the canoe. She went to the hospital where she stayed until she died some months later. 

 

My life just isn’t all that cheery,

 

Richard Leland Neal