Dysfunctional Childhood

At age four, Diana manages her family's banking, grocery shops alone, and befriends the town drunk. Her father is too busy chasing skirts and throwing fits to notice what she does. And her mom is too mentally absent to properly parent. While Diana's narcissistic dad terrorizes and exploits her, she works harder to please him. Estill, an award-winning humor author, shares an honest and comedic look at her dysfunctional childhood. As an adult, she struggles to reclaim her power while caring for her dementia-impaired dad.

Her Last Death begins as the phone rings early one morning in the Montana house where Susanna Sonnenberg lives with her husband and two young sons. Her aunt is calling to tell Susanna her mother is in a coma after a car accident. She might not live. Any daughter would rush the thousands of miles to her mother's bedside. But Susanna cannot bring herself to go. Her courageous memoir explains why.

When adult Levonne Gaddy returns to the rural North Carolina community where she was born and raised to attend her mother's funeral, the director bars her entry to the viewing room, assuming she is white and therefore not related to the “colored” woman in the coffin. A sad, funny, and poignant story of childhood emerges as memories surface of racism and of the dysfunctional family life she left behind. Turmoil during the 1960s' racial integration of southern schools fill her mind, as do the challenges of her first job, at age 11, as the live-in caregiver for an elderly white woman.

When Gail Gallant was five months old, she died. A year later, she was reborn. Or so her mother said. The crash occurred on a July night in 1955. The truck hit the Gallant family's car head-on; a few weeks later, newborn baby Gail died from her injuries. Mad with grief, her mother prayed feverishly for Gail's return, convinced that God would bring her child back to her. And when she gave birth within a year to a baby girl who looked identical to her lost child, she believed her prayers had been answered. She named that newborn baby Gail.

Einer der Gründe für Beziehungsstörungen in der Familie ist, dass Eltern mal mehr mal weniger dazu neigen, die Liebe, mit denen sie ihren Kindern von Beginn an begegnen, an bestimmte Bedingungen zu knüpfen – so wie sie es selbst schon von den eigenen Eltern erfahren haben. „Ich liebe mein Kind besonders, wenn es schön ist, oder klug, oder sich um andere kümmert, oder sich mir unterwirft.“ E