• DillyDaily@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    7 hours ago

    My grandmother’s aunt fled to Australia after half her family died of dysentery. It was a very sad story for a very long time in the family and the town. Her husband moved the whole family across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada away from her immediate relatives in England because of a good job and land prospects. But their household was stricken with a bloody flux a few months later and sadly only the women survived, alone in a foreign country with nothing. It was just a sad and dark part of our family history growing up, we were taught to respect our great great aunt because she’d “been through a lot and faced it bravely” with watching her family die. As a teenager I could tell there was more going on by the way the older adults glanced at each other, but never knew what.

    I was 30 when mum told me that my great great uncle was an abusive pick who moved his wife overseas to isolate her so he could get away with more, and it wasn’t a coincidence that he and his “apple that never fell off the tree” son both shit themselves to death after eating a family dinner, but his wife was fine.

    • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      6 hours ago

      Sometimes a pot roast only goes bad on one side. Any cook’ll tell ya that,

      My family skeleton has nothing to do with abuse. My great grandmother got addicted to Laudanum, an old-timey pain killer opiate. To support her habit her husband Barney eventually mortgaged the family farm - which already had a mortgage on it that he didn’t tell the second bank about. He got found out and the sheriff came out to arrest him. Barney asked to go in the house and collect some clothes to take along. He then went into his den, poured himself a shot of whiskey, took a pipe he had smoked for years and scraped the glaze out of the bowl - a powerful storehouse of concentrated nicotine - which he dissolved in the whiskey. He downed this shot and gave himself a quick heart attack. Apparently this was a fairly well known method of suicide back then.

      • TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        6 hours ago

        Dieing from too much nicotine must be a hell of a way to die.
        Also imagine just being able to kill yourself at any moment by knawing on some gunk in your pipe. My ADHD ass would be dead within a week cause I HAVE to know what it tastes like 😭

        • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          5 hours ago

          Dunno how much nicotine it would take to kill you but dissolving it in a shot was probably a lot more pleasant than gnawing on it lol. I imagine your heart just gets cranking like a drum machine until it seizes up, probably in a couple minutes - might feel a lot longer. Less messy than a gunshot tho.