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It's coming up on 6 months since my dad died. (Without rehashing the entire saga, which played out in real time in the Caregiving forum, I'll just say it was a relatively fast but complicated passing.) Spent the whole spring and summer consumed with wrapping up his affairs. Most everything has been done now.
Now it's fall and winter (a time when he was never around anyway, as he was a snowbird) and now I have a lot of time to drift back to the puzzling and sad and mysterious loose ends of my relationship with him and other family members' relationships (which affected me as well).
I've been having what I call "empty memories": little things which were left undealt with from the past, which in the back of my mind I always intended to bring up again someday in hopes of getting the resolutions I needed, yet... now these things will never get dealt with and it is pointless to think of them, yet I keep thinking of them.
Silly example: I keep flashing back to one time when I was in high school and my bedroom was right next to the living room and he insisted on having the TV up too loud, and I complained, and he was really unreasonable about it. I keep wanting to casually chat with him about this, "Hey dad remember that time when... and... do you now admit you were WRONG and should have turned the TV down on a school night?" But he's never going to admit he was wrong, because there are no chats with him ever again. The memory is empty, pointless, and I have to move on from it somehow.
That sort of thing. (And other people in my family might have much bigger unresolved things...)
I just still really can't get my head around how quickly and inexorably TIME RAN OUT for my dad. How much there was left to say and how he just waited too long and by the end, he was unable to speak. It wasn't supposed to end the way it did. Stubborn people in the family were supposed to get off their asses and grow up and talk to each other. We were there for him, and he decided to come back to be with us, but that's all there was, there was no clear communication other than that. It's really hard sometimes to accept that that's all we got in the end. He decided to come back to be with us and we were there for him. That's it.
Not everything has to be resolved, not everything is resolved, death does not exist for the purpose of resolving loose ends.
Resolution of your conflicts has to happen within you. You can forgive, you can continue to blame, you can forget, you can hold on to the feelings. Any or all can happen. There is no "supposed to." You have control of your own mind and the way you think about things.
That you were there for him speaks well of you. If anything speaks to resolving your issues with him, that does. You set them aside as insignificant to be there for him and with him.
Not everything has to be resolved, not everything is resolved, death does not exist for the purpose of resolving loose ends.
Resolution of your conflicts has to happen within you. You can forgive, you can continue to blame, you can forget, you can hold on to the feelings. Any or all can happen. There is no "supposed to." You have control of your own mind and the way you think about things.
That you were there for him speaks well of you. If anything speaks to resolving your issues with him, that does. You set them aside as insignificant to be there for him and with him.
Right on the money.
I have been thinking about this. My nearly-91-year-old mom fell and has a hairline fracture in her pelvis. She was hospitalized a few days and is now home. I am one of four sisters (two brothers also) that have been texting back and forth about getting her PT at home, a home health care aide, visiting nurse, etc., as she recuperates. Last month she was in the hospital for a gall bladder issue. Her mind is sound, but her body is weakening. She is on dialysis and had a quad bypass four years ago.
During our childhood, we all had difficulties with our mother. She was emotionally unprepared to raise kids due to the problems in her own childhood. She's not the same person she was decades ago, and neither are most of us. We've forgiven, changed, and moved on.
Except for one sister, the one who feels that all the rest of us (and the world) got better breaks in life than she did, etc. She is 67 years old and still angry with my mother for things that happened nearly fifty years ago.
While the other three sisters are texting back and forth about our mother and doing our part to visit/stay with her, make sure she has what she needs, etc., the fourth sister is sending pictures of the carrots from her garden and talking about the cookout she's going to on the weekend. She lives only 90 miles from our mother but has every excuse in the world not to see her. She sees our mom most years at Thanksgiving and again in January when we have a family holiday party, and that's it. She has no responsibilities and could easily come and stay with Mom for a few days, but suggestions that she do so go unanswered. The only reference she has actually made is "Well, you know Mom is always looking for attention." Yeah, when you can't walk because your pelvis is fractured, you do sorta need attention.
I often wonder about her "loose ends" and how she will react when my mother is gone. I've so often heard of the disengaged sibling who seems to fall apart when a parent dies. If she becomes that one who is wailing and causing a ruckus at the funeral, I think I will have a hard time not slapping her.
I have a sister like that too, Mightyqueen. Some people never grow up, due to problems of their own. They are who they are, though it is certainly frustrating. It's so good to have other siblings who are able to deal with situations as adults should, and their support is invaluable.
....I just still really can't get my head around how quickly and inexorably TIME RAN OUT for my dad. How much there was left to say and how he just waited too long and by the end, he was unable to speak.
My father was totally uncomfortably with loving feelings - with me (his son), his wife and even his mother. At home he was frequently glacially silent, and enforced his authority with bully proclamations.
When I was in my late twenties he died of cancer of the trachea. I was there for his final few days. He was able to get in and out of bed. He moved his lips, made rasping sounds and gusted voiceless air. But no words came. And then he got into bed, went to sleep and died.
For quite awhile I imagined that he had had things he wanted to say, but that ironically cancer had made intimate talk impossible when he finally wanted to. Then many years later I spent seven years where I was paired with terminally ill people who had requested it. Almost none made any miraculous deathbed transformations, they died like they lived with perhaps a particular aspect of their personality tweaked a bit higher.
And this made me think of my father. His habits were those of more than half a century, perhaps he had something special he wanted to say, but just as likely - I think - it was me looking for a Hollywood ending.
He had his good points, but he made them outside the family where he felt safer. He was well-liked in the community, very quietly and personally charitable and fiercely loyal to those people who depended upon his work. In his private life he died as he lived.
But I came to accept after working with so many dying people that my father was a good man among his peers, and an unsatisfactory father. And his book had closed very quietly in his hospital room, closed just as it happened...and the what-ifs were simply my mind making toys out of it.
The loud TV chats didn't work for me. My mother refused to admit that she was losing her hearing for years and kept me awake through high school. I have no idea how I managed to graduate. With two extracurricular activities and a part time job, I was a zombie.
My father was a quiet, amiable guy who shared with me during quiet moments, but there weren't many of those. My mother always wanted attention and would do anything to get it. I used to sometimes blame him for not stopping the misery that she inflicted on me, but then I wasn't so sure that he knew about all of it.
Probably not.
I got to force my mother to confront a few issues when she was elderly and ill. I was all that she had left. I wasn't washing her dishes the right way? You wash them. I didn't know how to do laundry. I was throwing out perfectly good (rotten) food.
We are stuck or blessed with our parents for a while, and good parents don't always end up with good kids.
The loud TV chats didn't work for me. My mother refused to admit that she was losing her hearing for years and kept me awake through high school. I have no idea how I managed to graduate. With two extracurricular activities and a part time job, I was a zombie.
My father was a quiet, amiable guy who shared with me during quiet moments, but there weren't many of those. My mother always wanted attention and would do anything to get it. I used to sometimes blame him for not stopping the misery that she inflicted on me, but then I wasn't so sure that he knew about all of it.
Probably not.
I got to force my mother to confront a few issues when she was elderly and ill. I was all that she had left. I wasn't washing her dishes the right way? You wash them. I didn't know how to do laundry. I was throwing out perfectly good (rotten) food.
We are stuck or blessed with our parents for a while, and good parents don't always end up with good kids.
I don't see any rhyme or reason to any of it.
I remember my own mother snapping at her elderly mother once, and then feeling so awful for it afterwards.
It wasn't that long ago either. 20 years ago, my mother was 71 and HER mother was 92 and living with my parents. My mother had a younger sister, born in 1934 when services for disabled children didn't exist. My aunt had cerebral palsy and was mentally retarded (she died before the term was gussied up), and my grandmother's entire life became my aunt. My mother's role as a child was to help her mother, to take care of her younger brothers, to keep house, to help with dinner, and when my grandmother suffered a "nervous breakdown" when my mother was in her teens (she cried all the time, couldn't get out of bed or function in any way) my mother was forced to quit high school and take care of her sister. My grandfather was a royal jackass who believed a woman's place was only in the home and to serve men. He spent time with his two sons, but barely acknowledged my mother except to give her orders.
In her old age, my grandmother was moved in with my parents, but my grandmother became fearful and wanted my mother in sight at all times. She would sit in her chair and call for my mother "just because I didn't know where you were." She once woke up from a nap and called 911 because my mother was "missing" when Mom had run to the store for 20 minutes.
My mother just snapped one day and said, "Listen, Mom, my whole life I had to do everything for myself because the only thing that ever concerned you was 'Jane'. You didn't care if I walked home in the dark or the rain, you didn't know where I was half the time or what happened to me, you didn't even take care of me when I was sick, and NOW that I'm in my 70s you are sitting here watching my every move and telling me you're worried about me?"
She later said the look on my grandmother's face was so stricken that she immediately regretted what she'd said, but a lifetime of resentment and sorrow came out that day.
My grandmother died three years later in a nursing home after my mom could no longer care for her at home, and my mother visited her every day. I believe she had resolved her feelings by then and was able to say goodbye peacefully.
My loose ends continue long after the loved ones passing.
I re-examine thru THEIR eyes and my how I owe them a huge apology if there is an afterlife.
which is why I am wise enough and truthful enough to say I have regrets.
People with no regrets are either at peace and made such with their life happenstances or they are heartless and care little for who they offended purposely or not. I'm working on the former.
My loose ends continue long after the loved ones passing.
I re-examine thru THEIR eyes and my how I owe them a huge apology if there is an afterlife.
which is why I am wise enough and truthful enough to say I have regrets.
People with no regrets are either at peace and made such with their life happenstances or they are heartless and care little for who they offended purposely or not. I'm working on the former.
That last line seems overly harsh. At the core of the error is the idea that responsibility for the feeling of offense rests only upon the one who is the offendER. There are countless examples where the person who was offended was simply in a "stuck" place and incapable of seeing the larger picture, so took offense. There are folks who were "offended" by men with long hair in the 1970s. There are those still offended by women in pants. People take offense oftentimes out of prejudice, fear, and/or a sense of loss.
One can easily be at peace with those you may have offended by focusing on and coming to an understanding of their overall experience of life. You can have no regrets for offending them, and still be at peace without being heartless. Having compassion does not mean you have to abandon your own values. Besides, the guys with the longest hair probably knew they would be bald by age thirty.
MQ, that is an epic post about a dysfunctional family. I grew up in one of those. I spent too many years thinking that I wasn't as valuable as the people who had more education, money, or friends than I did. I was often reminded.
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