I am sorry that it took me so long to cut off your siblings from my life. I could have saved myself so much heart ache and stress if I had given up on them a decade or so ago. In the 8th grade, I wrote a letter to my future self as part of a Language Arts assignment. That teacher mailed us those letters when we graduated high school, and in that letter, 14 year old Lara wrote, “This is the year you realized that your mom’s family doesn’t care about you.”

Thirty+ years later, I finally had enough. I blocked all of them and have no intention of ever talking to them again.

Your sister, although i do believe she means well, has never gotten to know me. In my limited interaction with her, she always asks if she could have the bedroom set that YOU wanted me to have. She’s asked me about that more than she has ever asked about my illness or basically anything about me. All that matters to your sister is that I have something she wants, and she refuses to let it go. If this gets to your sister, I want her to know that the bedroom furniture will go to my future stepdaughter, or I’m going to smash up the wood and throw it in with me when I get cremated.

When I was 18 or 19, I remember being on the phone with her and she asked me if I still went to church. When I said no, she told me that you’d be so disappointed in me. Maybe you would have been, but who’s to know? However, I think you would have been more disappointed in your siblings for ignoring your children as they grew up without their mom. When she said that to me, I was so angry at her but I kept my cool and just said, “I think my mom would just want me to be a good person, whether or not I go to church.”

Your brothers are not good people. They are the ones who taught me the N-word when we were in Panama City Beach when I was 7. In my early 20s, I got into it with your younger brother when I was down there for a wedding. He and your cousin J were talking about black people in a disgusting way (“White is right”), and I got so heated that I was told to walk away from your brother and cousin.

Your other brother took items from your parents house instead of evenly dividing the belongings between the rest of the family. All the heirlooms and family keepsakes just had to be given to his daughter. Screw the rest of the grandkids, right?

My final straw was your younger brother lying to me about an interaction we had in Texas around 2016. He tried to goad me to talk about Trump, and I repeatedly said I wouldn’t talk politics with him. He was almost gleeful in his attempts to rile me up. Well, I reached out to him to ask if he is happy as a clam now that his boy has been back in power. I brought up that 2016 interaction and he denied that it ever happened. (Your one cousin, P, confirmed to me that she remembered that happening too.)

Then he went on the defensive (“You’re calling me a liar”) and I came close to responding by cursing him out right back. Instead, I just blocked him. Then I blocked your other siblings and a weight lifted off my shoulders.

I’m almost 46. Instead of carrying this hurt and resentment with me about them, I’m just going to cut them out of my life. I didn’t want to because they are a connection to YOU, but I realized that they actually aren’t. They don’t know who I am, and I never got that connection to you from them. I wanted to hear stories about you, and find a way to get to know who you were to them. I wanted another piece of you to put away in my heart.

They are the same people who hemmed and hawed about coming up to see you while you were dying of breast cancer. They would do the exact same thing to me, so why do I need them in my life?

I’m done. I don’t care if I never talk to them again for the rest of my life, even on my deathbed. I want my loved ones to be around me, and they aren’t part of that club. Because of who they are and what kind of people they are, I have a pretty solid will, so they cannot be the vultures they are and claim ownership to anything I have.

They will get absolutely nothing from me.

(P.S.: “S” if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. I don’t know you but apparently you have tried to keep track of me. I have no ill will toward you because I honestly don’t know you. Your husband can go fuck off, though.)