If anyone is part of an Al-Anon program — especially an Adult Child of Alcoholics program — it’s tough to figure out how to grieve when a parent dies, especially an abusive one whose never really owned up to their part. (Sometimes this type of parent is referred to as a qualifier in rooms, but you can usually find many people arguing on Reddit about whether the word is appropriate. ) Familiar resentments reappear — “Why am I being forced to do more emotional labor?” – and then new ones may follow, especially if there is a financial mess left behind. 

You’ll find out how some of our readers have processed this defining moment in their lives and their own personal recovery. Some of these are tough reads, so be forewarned. 

By The Small Bow Family Orchestra

Boy did this hit me right in the one feeling I feel like I have left this morning. My mother, my first, best, and longest-running enemy is dying. 

She too has dementia and took a fall last month in memory care and it's been downhill ever since. She’s in a nursing home on end-of-life care. It’s grim. My dad and I are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I think I’ve forgiven her for being a crap parent but I don’t know how I’m going to feel when she actually dies. The past five years have been one long goodbye and I say I’ve pre-grieved but I admit I haven’t thought about what comes next. One crisis at a time, you know?

When I woke up in my own bed in Los Angeles, after having flown to Boston to clean out my dad’s studio apartment in a building for low-income seniors just north of the city, I felt an almost ecstatic sense of relief. At first, I thought it was gratitude that he’d died in his bed, the way he’d wanted, without the months of declining health and increasing fear that were clearly on the horizon for him. But as I externally agreed with those friends who’d clocked my lack of grief and attributed it to my shock over his sudden death, I internally realized that my relief was for myself: my compulsive gambling, wannabe-mystic father would never hurt me again. Never again! Even better, I’d never have to feel my own attempts at emotional boundaries slip and slide the way they still did with him, even as I turned 50 and did my best to internalize all of those Al-Anon meetings and readings. It was finally safe for me to love him as I’d done since I was three years old — passionately, obsessively, without the discernment or self-protection that might have seen his mental health issues, addictions, and conspiracy theories for the interpersonal minefields they were. It was finally safe for me to see him for who he was without hurting his feelings and causing one of his shame spirals that would lead him to go dark for however long it took him to rebound — my greatest fear in our dynamic since I was a little girl.

It’s been a month since he died, less since the cops found him when I called them to do a wellness check, and my time with his papers, dream journals, notebooks of quotations from his favorite books, like Think Like a Shrink and The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act haven’t felled me the way I thought they would. Because he can’t ever hurt me again. And, yes, I wish I’d managed to stop him from hurting me when he was alive, but I did the best I could. And, somehow, finally, I can feel that to be true, because I can feel my feelings instead of always trying to feel his feelings, and it’s enough. I also have to acknowledge, with gratitude, that the man who once tried sleeping on the street to see if he could do it, if his gambling got that bad, died with a roof over his head. He had enough money in the bank for me to cover the costs of wrapping up his most recent incarnation, before he catapults into his next one. I can finally see he did the best he could, and it’s enough, thankfully, because it’s all we’ve got.

I’m not going to write down my feelings, because I have to deal with them in therapy, and that is hard enough. 

Every. Single. Day. of my life I wake up hoping to hear that my mother is dead. The amount of hatred and disgust I have for her is sometimes overwhelming. I buried so many things having to do with how abusive she was, but my therapist decided it was “healthy” to unbury those feelings and memories would be “therapeutic.” All it has done is exacerbate how I feel. I’m not happy about it, and talking about it, to me, is the opposite of therapeutic.

So — longer than I wanted, but that’s my story.

My mother died two days before I went to Budapest for a job. She had been in a swift decline for a few months and, despite the other stubborn pain points in our relationship, she unequivocally supported my career. Plus, I’m the breadwinner. I don’t go to work; the kid doesn’t go to college. So, between the I’m so sorry call on Wednesday and the flight on Friday, I did all the “bureaucracy of death” things in a wild frenzy. Well, all but the disposition of the body. She was to be cremated and then shipped but you have to sign for that kind of package in person. Which I guess makes sense. You wouldn’t want a soggy box of dead moldering on your porch.

As it turns out, she arrived a few days before I did. I asked my husband to put her somewhere dignified but out of sight. I didn’t expect my desk to be his choice. But there she was. A whole history, her whole life, collapsed into a box with a red “Human Remains” sticker on the side. 

She’s still in that box 15 months later.

I’m stuck. I’m the only child of a single mother. No one is left but me (and a few politically-challenging cousins who were tough to connect with even before January 6th). So, whatever the memorial is, I need to organize it.

Maybe a circle of friends in our barn. A Quaker “moved to speak” vibe. A walk to the top of the hill to release the ashes.  

I could handle that. It sounds nice, even healing. But it’s the doing it. Calling people. Setting a date. Hosting a party. 

Also, I feel so determined to grieve it all. The madness. The wildness. Her alcoholism. Her rages. Her brilliance. Her passions. Her beauty. The harm . . . the hurt . . . the middle of the night suicide threats . . . showing up at my high school performance drunk and calling out from the audience . . . at seven, walking her wobbly body back to some sad studio apartment she had rented us in Spain . . . not getting me to school for stretches . . . not living near people who could help us . . . But also, her love of words, her brilliance at the piano, her esoteric spiritual seeking, her passion for art and artists, her killer sense of humor, her utter originality.

It’s a lot. 

So, she’s a box. 

It’s not what I want for her. 

Maybe I’ll be able to free her soon.

Ten days before my dad passed (five years and three days ago), I found him in a pool of blood, unresponsive. We learned that his sugar crashed into the 30’s, and he injured himself on the way to the floor. All this time I have focused on the startling events of the fall, the blood, the aftermath, etc. I am only now struck by the irony that I had brought him dinner that evening (too late, apparently), as we lived together at the time. When I got home with it, he was in his bedroom with the door closed, and I thought he had just turned in unusually early so I put it in the fridge.  But then my dog barked at his door, which alerted me to check on him.

Along with the diabetes, heart disease, and lung disease we already knew about, it also turned out that he was "riddled" with cancer. (Google: “ACE study.”) That night, after following the ambulance to the ER, I helped the nurse try to clean the caked blood off his face. After they treated his blood sugar, he was mostly back with us, but he — and his mental status — gradually deteriorated over the next ten days. He died alone in a nursing home bed, because fucking COVID. I will never not be angry about that.

I remember him, and when I do it is often to miss him (oof, writing that hit a nerve), even after all the hurt he caused his family. He was my stepfather, but also the closest thing I had to a dad. He gave the very best he could, despite the scar he wore on his forehead and on his heart from the mayonnaise jar his mother threw at him when he was five and from the rest of the hell he grew up in. He was a superb example of how cruelty can transform a child into a good person who loves deeply, but caustically. While he never meant to, he passed that shit right along, all while simultaneously teaching me to be a better human in other ways.  

Hello, anxious attachment?

As much as I miss him, I am also quite often relieved that he’s dead. This, because it means I am no longer on the periphery of his perpetual, stinging, black cloud. That hurt for far too many years. But it also means he is no longer suffering under the weight of his pain, and that he no longer must struggle to be something we needed, wished, or expected him to be, that he couldn’t.  

Perhaps his greatest triumph was doing the best he could with what he had for his years with us, and at the end, having a well-deserved rest.

fin

ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN