I felt horribly guilty for over a decade after my father died.
Although I was still a minor, I wasn’t at home, or even in town, when it happened. I was away at Summer Ventures, on the campus of Western Carolina University*. I’d talked to Dad during the evening after the session’s last Monday, when he’d told me about my newborn cousin and I’d teased him by calling him “uncle” at the end of the phone call. On Wednesday, a co-worker of his called to tell me he’d gone into the hospital following some chest pain at work, but reassured me that things were fine. The next evening, as we were preparing for the farewell banquet, the program counselors came to me and told me I was going home.
Right then. On an airplane.
It was an hour’s drive to the Asheville airport, and then about four more to fly home. At the time, I was a fifteen-year-old ward of the state. But I was old enough to understand that the Division of Social Services wouldn’t have gone to that kind of an expense without a very good reason, especially given that I’d already been scheduled to ride home with a classmate on Saturday. As soon as I got off the plane, I saw my caseworker and my mother standing in the airport lobby.
“Dad’s dead, isn’t he?” I asked.
My mother nodded.
My immediate reaction, the first thing I felt once it was confirmed, was an overwhelming sense of relief. My father had been suffering from diabetic complications since I was a baby: retinopathy, neuropathy, strokes, renal failure. He was actually at a fairly stable point that summer, but the years of medical issues had taken their toll, and his body simply wasn’t able to handle a heart attack too. In most other people, it would have been relatively minor, as such things go; for him, it ultimately proved fatal.
When he died, all the medical issues were finally over and done with.
.jpg)
It took over a decade, and no little amount of therapy, for me to understand that my relief happened because I loved my father very much. In fact, I loved him so much that I was willing to let him go — even though I wasn’t quite grown up yet — if that was what it took to end his suffering. I missed him. I still do. But there was absolutely nothing wrong about wanting his pain to end, and he had been in pain. A lot of it.
Two things came as a result of that realization. First of all, I forgave myself for being relieved; that meant letting go of over ten years of self-flagellation. Second, I was able to let go of my anger at God, and in the process I began to understand the Catholic attitude about death. That left me wondering about the common American reaction, which is something approached with fear, denial, and premature grief. People go to great lengths to avoid death. Why do we do that, if we supposedly believe in life after death?
A few years later, when I was in my early thirties, my mother had a stroke-like event that left her in a coma for a month. When she came out of it, she had to re-learn almost everything, and not all of that re-learning was successful. The woman who had taught me how to balance a checkbook was now asking me questions such as, “five and seven make fourteen, right? Or is it thirteen?”
That was the beginning of a long decline — physical, cognitive, and emotional — that ended with her death this past June. By the time she died, she was housebound, toothless, incontinent, and only vaguely aware of her surroundings. As happened with my father, I wasn’t there, although this time it was because I lived two states away. But I was in regular contact with her hospice provider, and they’d asked me to say my goodbyes via telephone speaker. I knew that the next call I was likely to get from them would be the one where they told me she was gone, and I was right. It was.
Once again, my immediate reaction was relief.
Mom had told me years ago that she had made her peace with God and was ready to go. My brother and I had had to argue with her providers several times about her so-called “suicidal tendencies” when she would refuse to get medical care. She wasn’t suicidal; she was simply no longer interested in anything except relief from pain and discomfort. The proximate cause of her death was blood poisoning; but as with my father dying from a heart attack, that doesn’t tell the whole story. She died from disease and decline, hastened by systemic problems and whatever had happened to cause that non-stroke.
Fortunately, I had gone through that therapy to deal with my father’s death. Also fortunately, when the very end started, my husband said it to me out loud: “You just want her suffering to be over. And that means you love her.”
I’ve cried since Mom has died, although not as much as most people might expect. Most of my focus has been on the logistics of closing out her estate. My brother and I only met with the funeral director once, and that was primarily to make arrangements for the disposition of her remains. She didn’t want a funeral service, and we were both just fine with not having one. Both of us had primarily reacted with relief that her suffering was over.
None of this means I (or he) didn’t love her. I still have to remind myself not to send text messages asking if she’s all right, or to look for messages and phone calls from her. I still wake up in the morning startled to realize that my brother and I are now the oldest generation on that side of the family (my mother’s siblings predeceased her), even though we’re only in our late forties. I’m grieving. I’m just not devastated or overwhelmed by that grief. I’m able to recognize it as normal, and to understand that an end to her suffering was a good thing.
Being an adult, with an adult’s understanding of emotions, is also helping. I knew I was in for a rather complicated emotional reaction, particularly because I was in foster care off and on while growing up. But a lot of it, I think, is the realization that I have no reason to feel guilty or, worse, ashamed. I didn’t when my father died, and I don’t now that my mother is gone.
Instead, I’m at peace. And that, too, is a good thing.
* At the time, rising NCSSM juniors could attend SVSM. The program locations also included WCU.