I had rescued myself from my cruel and evil family with a great deal of help from professionals and fellow sufferers.  For five years I had nightmares of returning to the abusive situation.  The nightmares had my brother beckoning me with my sister sneering in the background.  In these dreams I was always offered a place to stay, under a leaky faucet or in a tiny dirty room away from the group of fornicators.  When I first learned of my brother's death I incorrectly assumed that he was with his wife and had worked himself into a heart attack.  I decided that I was wrong to think the leaking plumbing in my nightmares was a vile invitation to be humiliated and I thought I should have known he wanted me to help him with the plumbing.  If I had only realized how much he needed me I could have saved him from the heart attack.

Then I learned that he had been with his sister and that it was not just heart attack but stomach pains followed by a heart attack.  Then I knew my original interpretation of my dreams was correct.  They WERE attacking me on the astral level trying to get me to come back to be their victim.  I knew this because one of the ways they had abused me was to trick me into a taking a very heavy dose of their drug of choice at an important family event to humiliate me. 

Driving home I got gripped with stomach pains so horrible I had to pull the car over to the side and open the passenger side door so that I could stretch out my body, my feet sticking out of the passenger door, to ease the pain.

I don't know....  I have no proof...  I was not there..... but I am sure that my brother, taking a break from his marriage, visited my sister to enjoy their drug of choice and that he took so much that he got the stomach pains which, at age 75, was too much for his heart.

This relieved me of my guilt.  I know I did the right thing for myself and harmed no one by leaving my cruel and evil family.  My emotion now is a dull, thudding horror, the horror I have always lived with: the horror of coming from a family of reckless, wicked people.  And I believe this horror will fall into the reservoir of horror I have kept in abeyance all my life.  In other words I will survive this. 

It would have been much harder to survive the guilt which I was feeling until I found out he had been with my doper sister when he died.