My mother died this Sunday.
By which I mean: The human entity which gave birth to me more than half a century ago left this mortal coil.
She’d been in assisted living for several years. Late last year, she was classified as being in hospice. Last December, just after Christmas, my brothers and I (as well as my wife and son) trekked out to see her; her facility was on the other side of the state, a three hour drive.
To back up some more: In the mid 1990s, I told her that I didn’t want her in my life anymore. If and when I decided to talk to her again, I’d reach out to her. Until then, though, that was it. I remember that phone call vividly: Where I was, who I was with, what was said. At one point, she asked if I was cutting my father off as well, since “he messed you up as much as I did”.
For further context, and to risk speaking ill of the recently dead: My mother had a severe personality disorder. My father wouldn’t call it narcissism; I believe he said it was Histrionic Personality Disorder. I suspect she had Munchausen’s as well, or comorbidly. She gaslit people. Everything was about her suffering.
I cut her off because I was struggling through a very dark time myself, and she just keep laying on how much everyone had betrayed her. Her complaints were not entirely without merit, but they also were not independent of things she’d done to create them.
She was deeply, irrevocably mentally ill in a way that caused anguish to anyone she got close enough to. It would be grossly unfair to call her evil, but she was emotionally abusive, and for the sake of my own mental health, it was important for her to not be part of my life.
When my son was conceived, I reached out to her for the specific purpose of paving the way for him to have a relationship with her if he so chose. My wife and I made it clear to him several times that it was his choice, and we visited her a few times, one of the last of them being to move her from her apartment to her assisted living facility. He ultimately decided that she wasn’t someone he wanted in his life either, and that was that.
So last December, knowing that she was in hospice, being told it was a matter of weeks rather than months, we went out to say goodbye.
One of the things that had been hanging over me for the last three decades was: Had I misjudged her? Had I been unfair? How much culpability did I have, how much obligation to reach out?
That visit, last December, with her clearly suffering dementia, mostly bound to bed, a tragic figure dense with pathos, I received from her a definite message: What little of her that was left was still as vicious and spiteful as she had ever been.
That was my closure. That was what I’d needed to see, and I returned home with the knowledge that, when the eventual phone call came, I would be at peace with it.
One thing I feared, though, was how I would be seen by others.
One of the features of my particular installation of Autism is that I don’t grieve the way others do. Externally, I may even seem sociopathic in my emotional detachment. I have spent my life forcing myself to put on a Grief Mask, not even knowing that I was Autistic. I figured something was deeply wrong with me because others were full of emotional outbursts at funerals, and so I tried to adjust myself to match, to the point where I believed my own masking.
This time, I decided: I would grieve my own way. If that meant no real external grief at all, so be it.
When people face potentially emotional crises, we make a point of saying that it’s okay to not be okay. Talking to a colleague this week, though, I came to realize: It’s okay to be okay, too. I don’t have to go through the “stages of grief”; indeed, I pretty much already have, stretched out over the years as her body and mind degraded but her mental illness remained intact.
Here’s the thing: When a parent gaslights a child as much as she gaslit me, I never even really knew who she truly was. The mother that raised me died when I cut her off, when I realized that she had never even existed in the first place. She was a phantom, and my grief involved accepting that the phantom that I loved and the person who occupied her body were two different people.
I accepted that long ago. So there wasn’t much for me to grieve this week.
I told two people, and only two people, at work this week, because I didn’t want the inevitable outpouring of unwanted sympathy. Even when my father died, I did tell HR and take several days off, but I told HR not to disclose the reason for my time off. This time, I didn’t even tell HR.
I don’t want to have to pretend to appreciate the heartfelt sympathy, lest I be seen as a monster. My mother did enough to make me feel like a monster; I don’t need more judgment.
My brothers are struggling, and I feel for them both. An Earlier Me would have hidden my own detachment. But I’m not that Earlier Me, and I truly am okay with being largely indifferent to this one fact:
My mother died this Sunday.