Thank you for the edit, Iamhere.

 I am not surprised! Oh Boy!

                                             The courage to move on from that situation must have been stupendous!

We do end up re-inventing ourselves, slowly, over time... my friend...

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( wildflower )))))))))))))))))))))))

Thank you for sharing  this painful experience . Sending prayers and positive thoughts your way.

i AM so HAPPY THAT YOU FOUND MIP

Thank you DavidG.  Yes, moving on was very difficult.  It destroyed my belief system.  My husband at that time forbid me to tell his wealthy family about the murders.  He turned away from me.  He was ashamed of me.  It took me six years to finally leave him.  It took me that long to be together enough to do that.  I had a huge extended family who were very religious, but they did not offer any comfort.  Only my grand aunt Lottie did.  She was 45 years older than me.  I barely knew her when I was growing up.  But I had moved to the area where she lived, and I reached out to her, several months after the killings, she was there.  She came to the legal proceedings with me when she could.  But she was in her 80s by then, and was not always well enough to go with me.  It was a 150 mile trip.  Yes, I had to reinvent myself.  There was no other way that worked for me.  Thanks for understanding.  It's sometimes an ongoing process.

IamLynn, yes, it was heart-wrenching.  It was worst for my parents.  My brother's wife passed away way too young.  I'm sure it was from the stress of it all.  She had to raise two teenagers when she was devastated herself.  She coped by overeating and that stressed all the systems in her body.  She died in 2000.  My dad died in 1983, my mom in 2009 at age 91.  My brother, from prison, threatened to send one of his friends from prison when the guy got out, to the nursing home where Mom lived for the last three years of her life.  I had to tell the nursing home administrator about it, so they could protect Mom, just in case my brother did that.  He didn't want her there because it would spend away his part of the inheritance, and his kids wouldn't get anything.  She actually liked it there, after telling me for years not to put her in one, but she was so very ill.  And she fell in love with one of the other residents.  They were cute together, and then he passed, like her second and third husband.  Dad was number one.  My sister had a bad heart and died of breast cancer in 2005 because they could not give her the treatment she needed - it would have further damaged her heart.  She was a worrier, and she and her husband fought about my brother.  Aunt Lottie died in 2000 at the age of 97.  All the older family is gone now.  The ones suffering the worst effects now are my brother's two children.  They are now 50 and 54.  They've never been okay.  His son became paranoid and pulled away from the family, and his daughter became an alcoholic and pulled away.  I tried to help them, but it did not work.

Thank you hotrod, and for making me feel welcome.  One of the friends I made a few months after the murders was the professor in my master's program.  He said, "You belong to a select fraternity whose members never meet, the families of murderers."

Yes, I decided to try to make a difference in the world.  While before the murders I had planned to become a counselor, afterward I did not have the energy for it.  I had to heal myself.  I became a writer.  I started writing the story of what it's like in 1981.  It took until 1993 to have it accepted by a publisher.  Then the publisher butchered it.  I was devastated by what she did to it.  My literary agent said that no one wanted to read that much religion.  But religion was woven into my brother's story and our lives.  Anyway, years later I rewrote it and this time published it myself through Smashwords. It's an ebook.  And it's free.  Although on my website it says it can be purchased, I decided to make it free.  I've written twelve books.  At the moment those that are still in print are free also.  The murder story will remain free.  I'm not sure about the rest.

The world is spiraling quickly into a mess, and I want to help.  Since I decided to not go the traditional publishing route again because they can destroy the author's original message, I decided to do it myself with all of them.  I write visionary fiction.  Some call it magical realism.  I have reality mixed in with the fiction.  When I need to work something through I write a book about it.

I plan to upload a picture of my brother, one taken four years before he died.  I just found it online a couple of weeks ago.  He looks so lost.  And one of him when he was a kid.  If I can manage to do it.  I'll do it as a separate attachment, since right now I have to locate the most recent picture of him.

Thanks for the welcome, everyone.

Here is the picture of my family when I was a baby.  My brother was ten at the time.  The next picture is of him when he was 74, 4 years  before he died. 

IamLynn, thanks for sharing your story.  I don't mind it being long.  It's heart-wrenching that so many people drift into taking substance and that it destroys them and the ones the care about.  How old is your brother?  It's really sad when a person has to protect themselves from those they care about.  Your momma sounds like mine.  Mom said to never give up on him.  I do understand why your sister-in-law fooled around on him.  Sometimes it's the only release one has.  A person doesn't necessarily start out to do that.  It can just happen, when you are in such bad shape that you feel like you are drowning. One of the titles I had for my book about him was Trying Not To Drown.  I've attached the cover art I did for it.  This is how I felt.  I was drowning.

Do you have any support now other than here at Al-Anon?  You said you almost have to divide your thoughts about him.  I had to learn to do that too.  As a woman I had to learn compartmentalization to survive.  Otherwise, what was awful in one part of my life, messed up everything else.  It's taken a long time to learn.  Men do it more automatically.  Women tend to spaghettify everything, tangles of spaghetti from one thing reach over into everything else.

If you need to talk about your brother feel free to send me a private message.  My brother is gone, so I'm better able to settle it all now.  Your brother is still alive, and an ongoing issue.  I'm willing to listen.

IamLynn, thank you for sharing more with me about your mom and your brother.  It is interesting the way that the alcoholic does not think he/she is a problem.  It's true that getting too involved in the user's life can be so destructive.  I understand you wanting to protect your mom.  I wanted to protect mine too, but I couldn't.  She would allow him to call her from prison, and often he would tell her how horrible she was for not doing all the things he wanted her to do.  Then he would thank her for the things she did.  He'd abused substance for so long that, it permanently damaged his brain.  In prison he was forced to go without it, but 36 years later, he was just as messed up as when he was on the drugs and alcohol.  It's my assessment that he literally destroyed the necessary brain cells that were necessary for him to be "normal" again.

The color and the painting represent purity and innocence.  The house represents the house of one of the couples my brother killed. They lived in a rural setting on the side of a hill.  He visited destruction on purity.  It is basically the story about the impact of the murder on me...as well as my family.  Red is my favorite color.  For some reason it helps me find the energy to endure and overcome. So the woman is me being drawn into the affects of his hunting rifle and trying to swim through the air to get away from it.  The gun looked like that one.