My Mom‘s Death Was a Good Thing

Thoughts on grieving an abusive parent

My mom’s dead. Always knew I’d say that before most people my age. She suffered from mental and physical problems the doctors could never pinpoint. We hadn’t spoken in years.

She was a real winner before she went crazy. Called me fat. Stupid. Threw dishes at me. Screamed a lot. Ignored me for days on end. Only to turn around and try to enter me in beauty contests.

She made me keep secrets from my dad. Like thousands of dollars in credit card bills. Or the fact that she didn’t love him anymore.

How charming, I know.

Growing up was like living in a horror movie that never ended. Just one suspenseful scene after another.

But now that raging basket case is quiet. She’s ashes now. We never had a final conversation. I can’t remember our last words to each other. It was probably about something she’d seen on TV.

My mom never met my spouse. She’ll never see my kid. For the last five or six years, we had almost no contact. I didn’t want it. Her absence from my life was a great improvement.

There’s no instruction manual for mourning people. We base most of our behavior on novels and movies. Someone dies. Everyone cries and says nice things about them.

How are you supposed to mourn someone who abused you? Beats me. I’m figuring it out as I go. So far, I’m not sure I’d call it grieving. Lately, when I think about my mom’s death I feel an intense sense of freedom. For everyone. I’m free. She’s free. My dad’s free. We’re all free.

Getting away from them

When I turned 14, things got worse. The violence lost any pretense of reason. She started attacking me because I was a clone. Or an alien. She started hurting herself, talking about conspiracy theories. Suicide. Sometimes we called the police on her. Other times, she called them on us.

Part of me knows it wasn’t all her fault. Abusers have help from addictions and mental illness.

But that doesn’t change the reality. You have to get away from them. Love never even really comes up. Not the way normal people love their normal parents. So I moved out and abandoned my family. Had to.

Victims of abusers don’t know how fucked up they are at first. They’re just happy to escape. The aftermath comes later.

Sure, I could tell you about the recurring nightmares. Not every night. But every week or so. Throughout my 20s. I’d jerk awake from a dream about my mom strangling me, or stabbing me.

You’d think I’d be a nervous wreck. But I would look around and realize that I was an adult now. Had my own place, with a lock and everything. Danger was hundreds of miles away.

Imagine waking up from a nightmare to realize you’re actually safer than ever. It’s a nice feeling. For added security, I slept in a closet. It took me a little while to realize that sleeping in a closet was kind of fucked up.

Honestly, I didn’t even consider myself abused until about the age of 27, after reading other people’s memoirs and sob stories.

And I listened to other people talk about their parents in ways I’d never dreamed of. Like these days moms will travel with their kids to visit college campuses. They send care packages. WTF?

How you’re supposed to feel

After my mom’s “funeral,” people slapped all kinds of emotions onto me. I’m using air quotes because we didn’t really have a funeral. None of the clan wanted to come. It was just us — the husband and kids.

My friends and coworkers wanted me to feel sad, like they did when their moms died.

Honestly, I had no idea how I felt. Not even when staring down my mom’s emaciated, skeletal corpse. She looked like a horror movie prop. So I guess the main emotion I felt was shock.

Now, people want me to post tear jerker status updates on Facebook. They want me to talk about how I miss her. How I’m grieving. How I think about her on mother’s day.

Apparently you’re only allowed to feel one way about your mom. You have to love her. No matter what. Regardless of her mistakes.

But for most people, mistakes mean some harsh words. Maybe a bad fight or misunderstanding.

A mental illness raised me

Things are a little more complicated for abusive parents. You can’t exactly mourn them. But you can’t just forget them, either.

No matter what you try, you’ve got those memories. An abusive parent shapes you just as much as a halfway decent one.

For people like me, it doesn’t matter if we love our parents or not. They’re still our parents. We can’t burn them out of our brains.

Even if I could, I don’t think I would. My mom still taught me things. For example, you can never trust anyone completely. That’s a weird lesson to get from your mom. But it happened. It can’t unhappen.

Here’s the truth. I didn’t have a mom. A mental illness raised me. Whatever she suffered from, it ate her up and left us nothing. I don’t have any life lessons from her. No clever sayings. No memorable anecdotes. Just stories that would make most people cringe and walk away.

This mental illness prepared me for the worst in life. It taught me that you can lose more than your eyesight, hearing, or organ function. You can lose your entire self. You can become undead in real life.

Who do you talk to?

Most people don’t want to talk about mental illness. Friends and coworkers try to comfort me, but they can’t. They don’t have the skill set.

How many people have watched a loved one transform into a kind of monster that wants to kill them? The only people who really understand are the ones who’ve gone through the same thing. Believe it or not, I’ve got a few friends who dealt with the same weird shit. A kind of loose support group. They’re the only ones I can share my non-feelings with.

Not even my spouse really gets my situation a hundred percent. He wants to, but he can’t. And I don’t expect him to.

There’s good news, though. What’s left of our family feels stronger now. We all survived this thing together. We understand what each other went through. We’re just starting to realize that, and we can talk about our emotions. It’s like some kind of curse has been lifted.

I’ll never miss my mom, and I’m glad she’s dead. We’re all glad. She’d suffered for decades, and we suffered with her. Now, we’ve had our finale. For once, it feels like our family has a future together.