I’d like to say that I’ve done a fairly good job setting out doing what I want to do, which is beginning to forget about the person that gave birth to me, raised me, and spent as long of a period in my life as she did. But when people ask me about forgiving her for what she did to my child (which I have written about in here for anyone who might be curious, and do not intend on rehashing since it has already been mentioned), or whether or not I have forgiven her yet for what she did to my child… a lot of people don’t ever seem to put themselves in Bub’s shoes, which was a point that I tried to make in my last post when I stated that I didn’t know if I could forgive her even if she had apologized to me for whatever reason before she had passed away. At the end of the day, it wasn’t really about me, although I could have — and did have — my own opinions on the matter, and ultimately came to the realization that even if she had apologized for what she did, I personally could not forgive her because I would never know under what circumstances she had apologized and would never really know if I could trust that apology. But as I think I’ve made clear, Bub is free to feel about her whatever he pleases. If he’s forgiven her, that is just fine with me. And it’s just fine with me if he hasn’t yet, or if he never does. Because all of this took place to, or with, him. All of this involved him.

Imagine being close to someone your entire life, loving and trusting this person, and then having this person’s behavior out of the blue push you away. Even if it had a distinct pathology, that still does not make it right, because she had periods of lucidity where she knew better and should have taken some kind of responsibility for her actions, and no one else wanted to help her take responsibility for them — if anything, they wanted to make every single excuse under the sun as to why she was “doing what she was doing”.

I don’t think Bub has forgiven her as much as he has more or less forgotten about her, and in time I aspire to completely forget about her as well. But I’m not going to give her the luxury of retaining good memories about her until that point comes, and we are at that point now. I no longer retain any good memories about her at all, and I am fine with that. In the interim, I don’t mind people knowing how she was before she died, though. I can give her the luxury of taking “a good death” away from her in the same sense that she took away from me the ability to make good memories of and spend peaceful time with her in the six months that led up to her own death. While I’m forgetting her, she should be remembered exactly as she chose to go out.

The more that I think about it whenever she does get brought up, or something gets brought up that makes this relevant, the more I wonder: if my mother had apologized for anything that she did to Bub, would I have forgiven her for it? I mean, the entire point is moot because she never did. Given what she said and did to him, forgiving her for all of that after a simple apology would have been quite the tall order… and as I think about it from time to time, I’ve come to realize that forgiving her for that might not be “my job” to do. Furthermore, it would have been something that I would have wanted to stay out of if possible — I would have wanted her to apologize to Bub for what she did to him, because she did everything mentioned to him.

But with my own personal opinions on the matter though, I’m not sure that I could personally have forgiven her myself for the repeated transgressions that she made. This wasn’t just one thing that she did to my child. This was a series of things that she did to my child, and an initial refusal to apologize to him because he was not “worth it” in her eyes. So even if she had eventually “come around” for whatever reason, even if that reason was a fear of leaving things unsaid before death, I’m not sure that I could have gotten over that for anyone’s sake. And I didn’t feel like I owed her an apology because of her health, even because she was probably going to die soon. Talking to friends of mine that cared for individuals who were diagnosed with dementia at varying points, a lot of them said that her behavior was indicative of someone who had dementia, and that this might have meant that she had these opinions about Bub for a lot longer than we could ever have known about… and this made it all the worse to me. If she had been able to hide “her true feelings” about my child for years, until her health had degenerated to the point where she no longer could, that made it even worse. And you know what? My friends were probably right. It just made a lot of sense…

I would then have had to question her apology and whether or not it was sincere, or whether she was just apologizing to me thinking that she had to tell me what I wanted to hear, or whether or not she was apologizing to me “to tie up loose ends”. That was another thing. I would always have wondered about it.

When most people have a loved one who is dying of an age-related infirmity, or something that they know is going to happen where they’ve had time to prepare for that person’s death, they get to make memories with them and things tend to be pretty peaceful. Although arrangements have to be made for the person’s death, they get to spend time with them and things are… a lot happier than how they played out with my mother. I had to make peace with the fact that I was “shafted” of my mother giving me a good death. I didn’t get to prepare for her death even though we knew that it was coming, even though she didn’t actually get on Hospice until days before her death, because she had turned into such a vile person with what she had inflicted onto one of my children that I actually wanted her to die and looked forward to the time in my life when she would actually no longer be in it. I didn’t get to make memories with her as she was getting ready to die because I wanted her to be gone. And although I’m at peace with the decisions that I made leading up to her death and am at peace with the fact that she is no longer here and that I will never have to interact with her again, I used to read stories on social media of friends of mine getting this good experience with their loved ones and was jealous that I got the shortest possible end of the stick with my very own mother.

What brought me closure was the fact that I chose my own child over her because she made me, that I would — will — literally never see her again, and that I will never forgive her for what she did because not doing so brings me immeasurable peace. But for awhile, I was jealous reading these stories of friends having loved ones who they got to make memories with before they passed and that, even though it culminated in the passing of their loved one, things were as happy as they could still make them. My mother took that away from me, knew that she was taking that away from me, and turned into a monster before she died.

But giving me even a modicum of that would have involved her actually apologizing for what she did, so…