My grandmother was the youngest of twelve children. I know, a lot, isn't it? She was a slightly older woman when she had by dad, and my dad was slightly older when I was born, making her pretty dang old when I came into the world. From what I remember of her, she was pretty crazy, really sweet, but crazy.

Follow up:

She made me cookies even though I really shouldn't have had as many as I did. This family tree is full of diabetes and obesity, on both sides, so my parents wanted to be careful. I loved her, she loved me, but she would sometimes give me these really weird looks. Then she would say that she was sorry to me, for no reason. When I was about six or seven, she started to lose her memory and get disoriented. My parents figured that it was old age...but something in me felt that something was wrong. That instinct was right. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's a few months after that. We would visit her at home, then at the hospital, and Dad would always take good care of her. She was in a good hospital, too. None of that abuse crap was going to happen to my grandma. I remembering freaking out when they said she was going to be moved to one of those places. I had heard about a lot of the bad things that happened at hospitals and assisted living homes. From the news, y'know.

During our last visit, she saw me and lost her mind completely. Started screaming and crying. She asked me if I was an angel who was going to take her to see God. Now, I was already upset, seeing as my grandmother was wasting away in front of me, and I couldn't do anything about it. It didn't help that she was so freaked out to see me. She loved me, right? I didn't really understand what Alzheimer's did back then, but it still hurts sometimes. Then something really weird happened. She called me Ezra. My name's Michael. She begged for forgiveness, cried and kissed at my hands, like you would the Pope. I backed away, ran out of the hospital room and waited for the visit to finish. I can still hear her scream "Ezra, please forgive me!" and it is incredibly creepy. Her tone was so desperate.

The service was...cold, and empty. Everyone was upset, of course, and I was still shook up from the visit. We got a lot of her stuff, old boxes of stuff we never went through. A year ago or so, Mom and me decided to look at them, sort them out. Stuff to keep, sell or throw out, that kinda thing. I found this photo of myself that really confused and suprised me. I looked like I was around six or seven, smiling real big. I couldn't remember wearing anything like in the photo, having my hair like that or even having a photo of me that looked that old. When Mom found it, she said that it wasn't me, and when Dad found it...? Oh, wow, I've never seen anyone go that pale that fast.

He explained that boy was the thirteenth child, my grandmother's kid brother. When he was around six, he died. It looked like he had been strangled, but no-one was convicted. Dad just left it at that, saying there was a rumor of who had killed him, but refusing to say who, saying he couldn't remember. While we looked through the photos, we found Grandma in a lot of them. In a lot of the older ones, she was glaring at Ezra, like he was in the way. It was understandable, Grandma was probably four or five when Ezra was born, taking the spotlight of being the baby away from her. I'm still unnerved by the fact that I looked exactly like he did when I was his age. The age when he died, the age when I visited Grandma and she cried and begged for forgiveness for what she did.

You remember that feeling I had before Grandma was diagnosed with Alzheimer's? I'm getting one of those feelings, this time it's about what Grandma did to Ezra.