Dirty Grief

Losing an estranged parent - the psychic burn unit of bereavement

One day, when my sister and I were young, she cut her knee on a piece of playground equipment. She screamed. I ran to her and looked at her leg, and for an instant there was no blood, just the white flesh angling down to the glutinous pad of her kneecap at the bottom of the wound. Then the bleeding started, our parents came running, my father scooped her up and we all went to the emergency room.

It was a clean cut, they said, easy to stitch up.

Some bereavements are clean cuts. While all loss is complex, those that fall within the boundaries of accepted narratives can be easier to navigate. I was nineteen when my father died. My son died when he was nineteen. I loved them both, they loved me, and I grieved their deaths. Everyone understood.

When you lose a beloved parent, child, or spouse, you step into a cultural framework people understand. The story of your loss is like a good house, a sturdy structure. It exists already and you just step into it and find shelter.

My friends and I joked with dark humor that I could play the dead kid card now, because the card meant something, it was currency. Almost every person who finds out that I lost a child gets the same expression. The conversation stops, for a moment, but it is a cultural hat tip to trauma. I see you, bereaved parent. That conversational hurdle is difficult, but it is comforting to be acknowledged.

I thought all bereavement was a clean cut until my mother died in 2022.

My mother was a difficult person, and we were estranged for most of my adult life. It took years to strangle the hope that she would change, that she would get therapy or find recovery or leverage another vector for self-awareness. She never did.

I was often judged for choosing not to have a relationship with my mother, especially by religious people quick to quote the commandment to honor your parents. Some were threatened, worried their children would grow up and resent the inevitable parenting mistakes we all make. Others told me I was immature, that when I grew up or got enough therapy my mother and I would reconcile, there would be a great death bed reunion. People were obsessed with the death bed scene, for decades before she got sick. Surely, you will see her when she is dying, they would say, but the implication beneath their words was that only a monster would not.

Rarely did people get curious about what a mother could do that was so bad it was safer for me to have no contact with her. It is wrenching to leave a parent, especially the only one you have left, and it is not a decision made lightly, not by me or anyone I have ever known who has chosen that difficult path.

I used to try and justify my choice, trot out the stories of what she did, the greatest hits, searching for validation and permission. Is this bad enough? Does it make sense to you now? What about this? My therapist worked part time in prison, so he had heard some rugged stories. Once I told him something my mother had done, not even a greatest hit, and he got tears in his eyes. It helped me. If it’s so bad the prison psychiatrist gets emotional, then its real. I didn’t need to tell the stories as often after that.

I’ve heard the cultural fairy tales about parenting, and I am here to refute them. Not every mother loves her child. Not every parent does the best they can with what they have. That is the reality, however unpalatable it may be.

I looked forward to my mother’s death. Her existence on the planet, even though we rarely spoke, was oppressive. We lived in the same city for years. Once she showed up at my church, which was not her church, and when I left she ran screaming after me. I was always looking for her after that, vigilant.

I believed I had pre-grieved. All the years mourning the relationship I wanted but didn’t have, the sadness around each disappointed attempt at reconciliation. I naively assumed that I had pre-grieved sufficiently and when she did finally die it would be easier, and I would experience only relief.

I was wrong. It wasn’t a clean cut.

The cultural framework, the stories around bereavement, are different with the death of an estranged parent. The story I carried said that because I looked forward to her death I was a monster. I still judge myself, I still feel outside of the comforting narratives, exiled in some windswept wilderness reserved for those who wished their parents dead and now wander without communal shelter, connection or comfort.

Some wounds, like burns, require a process called debridement to facilitate healing. Unlike a clean cut, these wounds need to have dirt and dead or infected tissue removed, a process which can be quite painful.

Sometimes the foreign bodies in the wounds of bereavement are imposed from without, like the death of a child in a school shooting. Deaths of despair, racially or politically motivated killings, lives that end as direct result of failed political systems, the lack of gun control or the rapacious greed of the American healthcare industry – these are infections that exacerbate and prolong the healing process.

My grief for my mother was larded with resentment, anger, sorrow, and guilt. When she died, I was swamped with anxiety, overwhelmed with shame. My mother had a bad back all her adult life, and after her death my back started hurting, as if my body took on her suffering as a kind of penance. I fear I might become like her, worrying about a twist in my genetic material that just hasn’t manifested yet. She had no diagnosed mental illness or dementia, but I still worry something is in my genes. She was a heavy smoker who died of lung cancer, and I found myself looking longingly at the cigarette packs in the store, even though I quit years ago, as if shared self-destruction could build some bridge to her.

I am more likely to be angry than sad, to rage rather than to weep. I remember things that happened when I was a child more often now that she’s gone. It’s like a psychic door opened and I’m watching old home movies I never wanted to see again. The dreams I used to have about her returned, the nightmares where she is trying to kill me.

When you lose a child, you lose a future. My son’s best friend visited last week, a grown man nearing 40. He told me of the other friends in their group who are parents now. I grieve the children my son will not have.

I also mourn the past I could have had. My daughter and her husband have two children, my grandchildren, who live nearby. Since my mother died, I sometimes look at my five-year-old granddaughter and wonder what my life would have been like had I been raised by the kind of caring parents this little girl has, safe, secure, confident and loved.

We are meaning making beings, we need story and ritual to carry grief. We need community support after a loss, the casseroles, cards, and condolences. When that lifeline of connection is interrupted by judgement, when the internal or external narratives don’t have room for our experience, grief is harder to carry. Without story we are homeless, unsheltered, alone.

I want a place for us, for the bereaved who are navigating guilt, judgement, rage or regret, who flout the traditional expectations about who gets to grieve and how. The death of any loved one will put us in an emotional hospital, in need of care. But we should all understand that in that emotional hospital of bereavement, there is also a psychic burn unit where the grieving process is extended, messier, sometimes torturous. If you or a loved one is in that place, be patient and compassionate, see the complexity, and try to find the shelter of story and community, even if you have to build it yourself.