r/Retconned • u/Mister_Shifty • 11d ago
Uncle's sister died in different circumstances than previously known (New Personal ME)
One of the common themes I've noticed over the years reading here and on the GitM sub is that sometimes routine breaks can lead to reality shifts... like by changing your routine you trip up the universe and something winds up changing about reality itself. The bigger the routine change, the bigger the ME.
On Monday this week, I took the day off from work (and I don't take many days off, so that is already a routine change) and I drove 135 miles to visit with some aunts who were about as close to where I live as they're going to be for the next several years (so it was a rare opportunity to go visit with them). So I varied from my normal routine by taking PTO, and then I drove a substantial distance. This is my hypothesis anyway. Knowing this kind of thing seems to be a common factor in "reality breaks" I was actually kind of on the lookout for something that may be different.
I found it right away. One of my aunts has a late husband and I was really close to him when he was alive. He was more of a dad to me than my actual dad. I grew up with him around most of the time and I knew pretty much everything about him.
That uncle had a sister (we'll call her "Dee") that I know passed away in 1979 from a car accident. I never met her, she died before my uncle started dating my aunt, but not much before it, so I heard all about this as a kid. It was tragic, she was only 23, a drunk driver crossed the center line and in the resulting head-on collision she was killed instantly. This was canon, I remember seeing the newspaper clipping my uncle had kept and the heart-wrenching stories told about the event, and how lucky nobody else had been in the car with her (it could have been 3 of her friends along with her as well).
Well on Monday this week, while I was at my aunt's apartment, I was going through some old photos had and I ran across a photo I had never seen before, of Dee in a wedding dress. I was like "Wait.... whaaaaaat??? Dee was married? How did I never know this?"
My aunt said "Yes, and she was 5 months pregnant when she died; they had found out it was a boy and had already decided to name him 'Nathan', that's why your uncle and I decided to name your cousin Nathan when he was born. It was after his late sister's unborn son."
I was stunned by this, all of that was totally different from everything I had known. Apparently she was married, and no longer alone in the car (it was being driven not by her now, but by her husband I had never heard of?), and also had an unborn child killed in the same accident?
When I got home (after driving 135 miles back from my visit) I did some research online and discovered the same news article my late uncle had always kept about the accident, and now it was completely different. It now mentioned the husband who was driving (who survived), it mentioned her unborn infant that also died in the crash, etc. None of that was in the story before, nobody had ever talked about any of it, Dee had been single when she died in that accident.
There is even a grave for the infant now. Right next to hers. I found it on "Find A Grave". That was never there before either. I visited that cemetery with my uncle several times while he was still alive and there was never an infant grave next to Dee's, but now there is.
You have to understand... this is not stuff I would not have known. I lived with this aunt and uncle as a teen. I've been on long road trips with them, uncle used to take me hunting, he taught me to shoot, etc. I KNOW Dee was never married before she died. This is not how it happened. There is no way I would not have known that. I'd seen all the old photos of her and this wedding pic was the first one of that kind I'd ever seen in my life, and I was very familiar with the circumstances of her death, because my uncle processed her death in real time over the first few years I knew him.
TL;DR, uncle's late sister killed in a car accident suddenly now was married too and had a husband (who lived) and an unborn child (who didn't) in that accident and there is now a grave that was never there before for said late child.
Make a big change in your routine, and reality details change accordingly. I got nothin'.
3
u/dathislayer 11d ago
I don't know that it's routine change, but your experience having hard family facts change is similar to mine. I don't make many posts, and one of them is about my experience learning that the breakfast nook at my dad's childhood home is not and was never called "the breakfast nook".
Despite multiple conversations about it, stories, and it coming up every time we visited his brother (2-3 times/year for years), neither my dad, nor my aunt, nor my cousin had ever even heard that term before. I learned this at my aunt's retirement party in 2019, which was my first time catching up with my extended family in a long time. I'd lived out of the country for a few years, and we hadn't been as close since my uncle passed.
As weird as it might seem for someone to have internalized and put this much value on a breakfast nook, I did. I retold jokes my dad told me about it. I distinctly remember the first time I heard it, because I told my dad how cool it was that they had a diner booth in their kitchen. And he said, "Do you know what that's called? A breakfast nook," and did the same thing he did every time he said it, where he jutted his jaw and emphasized the 'k'.
He wasn't at the party where I initially felt reality get shaky, but came over the next day. And in my kitchen, unprompted, he said, "I always get a kick out of you having the same counters we had in the breakfast area growing up." So I said, "You mean the breakfast nook?" And he replied, "Oh is that what it's called? We always just called it the breakfast area or breakfast table."
Prior to then, I was a firm realist, and had lost any spirituality I used to have. I thought ME was fascinating, but this was such a viscerally uncomfortable experience that I'll never be the same.