Dealing with the death of an abusive parent.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Children of abusive parents often spend lifetimes, even into adulthood, unknowingly still seeking their parent’s approval. It’s a hard habit to break, for one, and for another it’s also a fallback position when life gets hairy and weird. Being under their roof is understandably a pretty big trigger I expect.

I would remind you of something you already know but may have lost sight of, as an adult whenever you are seeking approval, no matter how it appears on the surface, you are really seeking your OWN approval. The beauty is you have the power to give yourself that! I think your ambivalence is the ‘tell’, that you’re already aware. It’s pretty challenging to manifest that, and not the old ways, when you’re in the circumstance you find yourself in. Cut yourself some slack, go easy on yourself, lighten up a titch. And remind yourself you’ve done this work already, because I suspect you have.

Part of the ‘old ways’ is surfacing as resentment, you’re there, he’s not, yet he’s getting credit somehow. Resentment mostly always stems from expectation, ‘if I do this, I can expect that’. This thinking is a trap, as you well know, I think you can feel it’s misguided, exactly because you’ve already evolved past this and are just regressing a little.

Mostly you need to be reminded that you’re doing as you are, because of who you are. Not because of who your brother isn’t, and not because of need or circumstance. No. You are doing as you are, because of the good person that you fundamentally are, we can all see it, please don’t you lose sight of it. You’re doing this thing, because even though, it’s hard, brings up old feelings, can cause old resentments to surface, etc, you could not do otherwise. I hope you’ll take a deep breath and let go of any resentment the should crop up and just give yourself permission to be awesome you, freed from ANY expectations!

I feel for the difficult situation you’re in, and send you my sincerest Good Luck!

22

You don’t say much about your relationship with your mom, brother, and other family members, but if you care about their feelings and want to stay in their good graces you should support your mom when your dad dies (or even before), and you should keep your opinions about your dad to yourself. You may hate your dad, but he’ll be dead. Your mom and the rest of your family will still be alive. Not showing up wouldn’t be snubbing your dad, it would be snubbing the family. If you care about your mom, if you don’t want to be an outcast, then at least show up and express sympathy.

23

ooopsy, duplicate post, sorry!

24

My god. Thank you.

I really, really needed to hear that.

25

Something that is very confusing is how I feel about how my dad looks. I don’t like to look at him because he’s all sallow and sunken in. His eyes are yellow and red and his mouth hangs open even when he’s awake.

But when he was young, healthy and strong his face was very scary. There was always so much anger just waiting to explode. I don’t like how he looks now but I don’t like the memory of how he used to look.

I’m very scared. I’ve never seen anyone dead before and I’m definitely going to see him dead.

He tried to have some soup and it went up into his sinuses. I think his days of eating are over. His birthday is coming up. People often die on their birthday.

There’s such an atmosphere of doom here. We’re all just waiting for the end. I feel very bad for him. It must be really scary to know you probably just have a few weeks left to live. I suppose if he goes for the feeding port, he’ll last a while longer.

I get that some people don’t understand why I stay - I’ve heard it a lot over the years. Anybody who knows of my past just doesn’t get why I have anything to do with them.

elbows said it much more clearly than I can. This is who I am. Being in their lives is right, for me. For some people it’s better for them if they don’t associate with people who’ve abused them and I get that.

26

Are you getting home hospice workers in? Look into that. They will help you when the times comes.

Why not read to him? Not to be insensitive, I’d suggest short stories - Hemmingway?

Dead isn’t that scary; it’s just … gone. There will probably be a weird stuttering breath or two, and then, nothing. Just an almost imperceptible increase in pallor. His eyes will probably already be closed.

Whether there is a funeral or not, his body will probably have to be prepared by a professional. If your father is under a doctor’s care, the funeral home will send a hearse.

Have you spoken with a funeral home yet? Maybe you should; they will know all the practical details, if you’ve never been through this before.

27

He wants to be cremated and then have me hang on to his ashes till my mom passes away (she’s a very young 68 year old, so it’ll be a while) and then spread their ashes together somewhere.

I just can’t bring myself to talk to my mom about a funeral. When we’ve had relatives die in the past, we don’t really have a formal funeral. We usually just have a get together at a hall or someone’s home. I imagine we’ll do something like that.

I wish I could bump time to two months from now and have this all behind me.

28

Floaty I have a lot of empathy for you as I have walked a very similar path. My heart aches to know what you’re experiencing.

My mother in law was bedridden for several years following a stroke and during that time her BFF passed away. They had shared a lifetime of memories from being young war brides, raising their families side by side, through all of a long life. Even taking holidays to Vegas as elderly widows, they were spunky and funloving, laughing always whenever they were together. I had to deliver the news, knowing she wouldn’t be able to attend the out of town service. She could see I was extremely upset, and kept saying to me, ‘Death is just another part of life.’ It wasn’t the only friend she lost during those years, her demographic was shrinking of course. She repeated this each and every time. When she passed in my home her words rang in my ears in the weeks and months that followed. And it was somehow comforting.

As the end game approached I too was struggling. I came to this board and unburdened myself, trying to share my load. At that time another doper graciously reminded me of something that also brought me great comfort in the days that lay ahead. That was that death is not the enemy. For me, in that moment, these were very profound words.

I hope you can find a little comfort during the difficult times you are facing. You are much in my thoughts.

29

By funeral home, I mean whatever professional is required in your state to care for the deceased.

As for you hanging on to his ashes? I would strongly recommend you nod pleasantly and then ‘forget’ them on your mother’s mantle, or have them FedExed to your brother.

30

This says more about who you are, then who he is.

Do what you can, as best you can, and let go of everything else.

It’ll be ok, promise.

31

Waiting for the death of someone you love is horrible. It’s like being stuck in an awful loop and you want it to just end, but then again, you don’t want it to end because them the person will be dead.

When you overlay the complication of an abusive past, it’s even worse. Not only is that person going to be gone, so is any chance of having things work out differently. Even though there’s no changing the past, I think many people hold on to a small hope for resolution.

The swallowing issues are really concerning. Is he on thickened liquids?

32

and it’s better than all of the suffering. Really. It’s a relief that it is all done with, and the person (and everyone else having to deal with it) is free of it all.

You will always know that you are a decent person who has handled this better than many others would.

33

A worthless asshole for a father is a huge burden for you to have. It’s not a simple burden either, because you were forced to depend on him when you were too young to know what was really happening. It’s a bind. And now here you are actually taking care of this stupid bastard. Who could blame you for feeling conflicted, confused, angry, sad, everything? No one could.

34

We just ordered some from the pharmacy, it will be here on Thursday. Everything he tries to swallow just goes down into his lungs and now it’s going up into and out of his nose. That sure must feel horrible and a bit scary. It must feel like drowning in your food. He had a bit of luck earlier today with a spoonful of whipped cream.

The choking and coughing is almost non-stop. If he doesn’t starve to death first, he’ll probably end up with pneumonia. Today my mom said that, with food coming out of his nose, it might be time to look into hospice.

I feel guilty because the constant coughing and choking has me on edge so bad that I just want to yell “shut up!”. I’m pretty sure he’s done with it all and just wants the end to come. I do too.

My stomach is in knots.

35

Has his doctor mentioned palliative care?

36

However you feel. If you’re angry, that’s the right emotion to have. If you’re sad, that’s the correct emotion to have. If you’re happy, that’s the perfect way to be. Nobody can tell you how to feel, and the death of someone close to us is complicated whether you and they liked each other or not. Waiting for it is even more complicated, in that you often run into well-wishers who tell you “I’m sure everything will be all right” and it’s considered uncouth to ask them to come take care of Dad for a couple hours while you take a break, k?

When Dad died, everybody else broke apart so I was left holding the house together as so many times before, but this time it was in plain view of the rest of the world. How many times was I congratulated on “my serenity”, when I wanted to scream and punch things and people, but ah, I didn’t… so I was serene. U-hu.

37

You don’t. Do what your mother wants, as long as she doesn’t expect you to pay for it. He was her husband before he was your father. However the funeral makes him look is not your problem.

You knew they were assholes when you moved in, remember?

38

I hear ya, it’s complicated waiting out the death of a bad parent. In my case, at the end my sibs were in agreement, and one was with me at the deathbed. I was not the favored child, but in the end it mattered less than you might think.

The hard part is coming to grips with the fact that things will never be resolved. At this point, your father can no longer even apologize meaningfully. Concentrate instead on the fact that the abuse is ended.

At the memorial for my mom, all of her children spoke, accenting the positives we could talk about ( her strength, support of education, her talents at cooking, baking, sewing, etc) and cleverly leaving out her flaws. No one challenged us so I suppose either it went over their heads or they understood what I was talking about.

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I third/fourth/fifth whoever suggested Hospice. call one in your area

39

You know, I never have had an opportunity to participate in this thread and always felt somewhat cheated. That is, until the last 2 weeks (I kept meaning to come and post, but it just got away from me). Anyway, in last two weeks I have seen:

[ol]
[li]A Delica. Here’s theWikipedia (I had to look it up), the one I saw looked like this one. I saw this in a driveway in my neighborhood. [/li][li] A Corvair Truck like this. I drove past it on the interstate where somebody was hauling it on a flatbed. It was beautiful and looked pretty pristine. I did not see if was a rampside (or all of them rampside?).[/li][*] I found out that on of my daughter’s friends father has a unamog, an old one. Very cool.[/ol]

40

They were probably the they way they were because of somebody else (e.g., a parent) abusive to them down the generations. Just call it a sadness and let it go rather than dwell on it. Think ‘over’ it, with a view to the future.