Losing My Long-Lost Relative

Some relationships are better left in the past.

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

The first time I met Aunt Rhonda was in San Francisco. I was two years old and Aunt Rhonda, my uncle and my grandmother flew across the country to get a good look at me. My mother had just told her mother that I existed. My parents, her pregnant with me, ran off together a few years earlier to California to start a new life together. Apparently, their old lives were…