Unfiltered Story #272527

A few years back, my father’s side of the family, due to how it was balanced around a few figures that had recently died, had started to atomize visibly each passing year: in particular, my grandma and her sisters were at each others’ throat to fight for the affection of us grandchildren, as well as get “the final word” of who grew which of their children. My grandmother used to be distant and financially abusive towards my father and my uncle in their youth, but pretended to not having been so once they moved out and started families; while one of her sisters (thus one ofm y grandaunts) did all the work in rearing my uncle and supporting my father. As such, there was a strong rivalry between the two.

One day, during a family reunion in Summer, the supportive grandaunt had, with some help from my paternal uncle’s wife, cooked dinner for us all, and invited us to eat on the porch. However, my grandmother said she wasn’t going to partecipate in it and she was going to stay in her apartment on the last floor for some reasons. So, without giving it much thought, we set the table and start eating.

Suddenly, as we are serving the pasta, we hear grandma shout “I’m sick!” and then we hear something crashing. Everyone turned around to see that there was a shattered rooftile on the curb, and that my grandmother was busy stripping rooftile away from the roof, throwing them down on the ground as she kept shouting “I’m sick!”

When we tried to ask what was all that about, she just repeated that she was sick and needed help, but never specified what was her deal (and, frankly, she looked way, way too active and strong to be in much distress). In the end, since there was a very real danger of her slipping off and falling to her death, we decide to send somebody to appease her: that somebody is one of my eldest cousins, who gets promised an extra round of food for his service.

Soon after we see our cousin helping her step down the roof onto the balcony and husher her inside, so we all go back to eat. When he comes back two-three hours later, he tells us that she wanted somebody to tune her TV on a channel she liked, as well as somebody to listen her ranting about how her sister stole away her children. I was scolded by my father for laughing about it, but given that pretty nobody was taking the situation very seriously, I feel like it was the appropriate reaction for an act of jealousy like that.