This one is just for me.
I’d like to talk about my late aunt,Tamera.
Nobody knows her,she’s long gone, Tammy was a very sweet person.
Man ,there was an alcoholic in my house.
Mom worked nights and some weekends,and shit was,shit was not good. He owned it,but not until about 20 years later.
My cousins lived nearby,my uncle and my aunt, so I spent as much time as I could there,because there was actually healthy love in that house.
Then they started getting into this church,subtle at first,then we all started going to this church.
The messages got harder and harder,
fire and brimstone, spiritual warfare,end times,the shame of being born into sin.
Like, it just went deep,really fucking deep. Speaking in tongues,seizers,laying hands on the sick,etc.
The place was run by these two old women,in hindsight they were definitely lesbians. But the shit these two old women put people through,,,fucking nuts.
Then came the topic of “the healing blood of Jesus”,
Tammy had a congenital heart condition, and for a while she took meds, but at some point she stopped.And no one wants to hear it, but I know the church played a role .I would ask her how she was feeling and she’d cheerfully reply
“I’m healed by the blood of Jesus”.
Her husband is the uncle I take after the most, one night it happened.
I won’t get into details.
We lived in such a secluded part of the woods, it took the ambulance 45 min to respond.After they loaded her in, it was too late.
He screamed at the moon.
Long hair, long red beard, all the pain that the last hour had put on him.
He screamed at the fucking moon.
The sound of an animal.
The sound of a soul being cut.
Dell Burgess is a good man, he will be to the grave, best story-teller I’ve ever known.Doesn’t make it about him.
Tammy died incredibly young, and it could have been prevented.
The perverted church did that, and my cousins and I weren’t close after that.
The unity of family was over, no more running in the woods or fishing or laughing.
It’s hard, those were my people.
dawn 