For months, I felt bad that the predominant feeling that I felt upon realization that my mother had passed was… relief. I didn’t have to worry about keeping Bub away from her any more, or what she would say next. All of that was gone. After awhile, I didn’t have to pretend to be sad that she was gone, because the people that were concerned about “why I wasn’t sad (enough) that she had passed” eventually stopped asking why I… wasn’t sad “enough” that she had passed. Some people say that when someone close to you dies, it leaves a hole in your heart that “can’t be filled”, but in a really peculiar twist, it was like her behavior toward my child caused there to be a hole in my heart that her passing completely ameliorated, because I literally did not have to worry what was waiting for me around the corner next, what she was going to say about my child to me next as I was performing whatever act of caregiving that she needed, all of that was just gone. And for months, I felt bad about it. I felt like something was wrong with me because I was relieved that I didn’t have to worry about any of this any more. It was finally when friends of mine began to repeatedly tell me that my emotions regarding this complex situation were completely normal and that I was not a “bad person”, that there “wasn’t something mentally wrong with me” that it finally… eventually began to sink in.

And then, months later, I began to feel bad again. Googling various… coping mechanisms regarding the death of someone that you were supposed to be close to, all of the websites out there talked about how you were supposed to forgive someone before — or even after — their death, even if they had done something really bad. I didn’t find any that talked about not being able to forgive that person. Finally being able to admit to myself that I would just never be able to have any positive feelings about her again, and having friends of mine tell me that was okay, brought me immeasurable peace. It was like finally being able to say that in spaces with my friends, and being validated by them as that being an acceptable response given the circumstances, finally allowed me to begin to do some healing that I had put off for… wait for it, months, heh.

At the behest of certain people, I did go to her viewing before she was cremated.

But it wasn’t for me.

I was “given time to mourn”, at which point I literally realized that there was a complete disconnect between me and this person laying before me, and that all that connected us were genetics. I used Pokémon GO to make sure that I spent “enough time in there” (yes, given the circumstances, I actually did that), and my last words to her for what she did to my child were actually “fuck you, bitch” before I left the room. Bub’s reaction to her, upon sight of her, was actually to scream at her and try to hit her, which got written off as “oh, he’s severely autistic,” but I knew better. He’s had meltdowns before, and many have been severe, but I mean… he’s never screamed at my face at the top of his lungs and come at my face with his hands, so… whatever.

Ironically, it seemed almost cathartic for him to do that. He did better once he got that out of his system, although he was escorted from the room after that point. I didn’t want him to become significantly stressed.

But she literally chose to die not apologizing to my child at all for how she chose to treat him. Just him.

It was a complete accident that I happened to be the last person that saw my mother awake and alive, and that I was the last person that she saw. (Although I said in a previous post that I wouldn’t have changed how I handled anything, if I could have managed to avoid being the last person that she saw, or being the last person to see her alive, I might have changed this, because I didn’t intend it, and it forced me to make one more decision with regard to her. As mentioned in previous posts, I didn’t want to have to be in this situation in the first place. None of it. But I was… so I had to make decisions based on the circumstances.)

The morning of my mother’s death — although, at this point, I’m referring to her as my mother rather than getting belligerent or trying to be dramatic and calling her “the one who gave birth to me” or something, because that would be belligerent and dramatic, and that has never been what I’ve been going for with this at all — I happened to see her awake as I was chasing her dog down, making sure that she had been let back in the house and that she wasn’t up to anything that she wasn’t supposed to be up to. After being released from the hospital one city over, she had been put on Hospice, and they had loaned us a bed… and the only place that we could put it was in the living room, so this involved me coming into the living room to find her dog, make sure that she was in the house, and get her settled down (again) for the evening. Or, shall I say, very early morning at this time. We had been told by the Hospice nurse that had come out to our house that my mother was beginning to enter the active stage of dying and that she did not have much longer left to live. Bub was actively avoiding going anywhere near her hospital bed, although it was peculiar to notice that before she had been transported back to the house by ambulance and loaded into the bed, he was just fine playing in the bed and was certainly curious about it… when she herself was not in it. But I digress…

At any rate, she saw me, and I saw her actually look over to me.

She said nothing.

I said nothing.

And then I saw Bub’s bewildered, hurt face in my mind as she screamed at him that he was a broken, retarded piece of shit. Her actually sitting up in bed after I had fed her, verbalizing “no” as she refused to apologize to him for what she had done to him. Remembering her asking me when I would “give up and institutionalize the sub-human piece of shit”. Realizing that my child, to that day, was not even worth an apology to her at any point. Realizing that everyone else in that house, more or less, was “fine” to her…

Except maybe me. I had told her that she was no longer my mother for what she had said and done.

Imagine telling the person that had raised you for thirty-three years that she was no longer your mother.

Then imagine literally turning your back on that person without a word and walking back to your bedroom, getting back in bed for the night, and going to sleep knowing that you will not see that person awake or alive again. There was no relationship left to repair. There never would be. I woke up once more to check on her dog because I’d heard her making some more noise, and in the process had to walk around my mother’s Hospice bed. By that point, she had begun to go into what I would later learn were agonal respirations. Once I’d settled her dog down (again), I would do the same thing — get back into bed, go back to sleep until dawn.

My mother died that morning, and for all intents and purposes, she died without a child.

I could have stood vigil beside her until she died, but her relentless disgust of my child made that impossible.

I turned my back on her because I walked toward my child, whom I would always, unquestionably choose.

To this day, I wish that it never had to actually be that way, but it did, and I wish that it did not have to be.

At the end of the last full month that she spent alive, my mother wound up contracting a severe case of opportunistic pneumonia. We thought that she had begun to spit out the apple juice that I had been feeding her, come to find out that the liquid in question was actually coming from her lungs — I knew enough from various biology and nursing courses that I had taken, getting my associate’s degree in it, to be able to keep her airway clear so that my dad could get everything ready to take her to the emergency room (knowing the back roads in this city well enough to be able to get her there quicker than an ambulance would, and knowing that I could keep her from aspirating on her own fluid as I had begun to demonstrate this for him).

In what would become our last meaningful conversation prior to this, I actually had to tell my mother that she was no longer allowed to have conversations with me that did not center around caregiving needs or requests because I was tired of her weaponizing these conversations — her way of getting around not letting Bub know how she felt about him was to let me know how she felt about him, and the straw that broke the camel’s back again was her asking me “when I would (give up and) institutionalize the sub-human piece of shit”. So I told her that under no circumstances would we have conversations beyond that point unless they had to do with caregiving, and that was it. She then tried to have a civil conversation with me, because I guess I wasn’t a sub-human piece of shit. I reminded her that I had laid down the boundary of absolutely no conversations unless they were centered around caregiving. She didn’t make another attempt.

She also knew that based on the hateful things that she had continued to say about Bub in the months that had elapsed until I laid down the boundary that she was no longer permitted to have conversations with me that did not center around caregiving that I would not miss her when she did pass, and that it was a direct result of the things that she continued to say about my child, singling him out and insisting that I know her opinions on him, while I did provide care to her. She did not appear to be bothered by this at all. Not one bit.

It was though it did not bother her that it would not bother me when she did pass, and the reason that it would not bother me when she did pass was completely because of her treatment of one of my children…

And we had to get to this point, and the reason that we had to get to this point was because of her.

At any rate, I was helping her keep her airways clear, both of my children happened to come in the room.

I told her that she would fight for them, because they did not need to be traumatized by seeing something happen to her. It was about them at this point. (She could die in the hospital, but she wasn’t going to die in front of them in a manner that would scar them. I was determined to see that through.) She looked at me as though waiting for me to add myself on, to ask her to fight for me as well. And she continued to look at me. I did not add myself on. The look on her face made it clear that she realized the subtext. She had not yet apologized to Bub even though she had, then, months where she had many lucid periods and could have…

I was not asking her to fight for me. I was not going to ask her to fight for me. We were sadly past that point.

Bub did not interact with my mother for the rest of her life. He didn’t make it known that he wanted to, and I was not going to push him to interact with her (or facilitate it at that point). As far as I was concerned, the person that I continued to provide care for was not my mother unless she apologized to me for her treatment of my child. I was not going to bring it up to her or mention it to her. She had many more periods of lucidity until her death, and she took advantage of absolutely none of them. I did not take back what I said about her no longer being my mother, because in the ways that mattered, aside from genetics, her behavior had escalated to the point that she was no longer my mother in any of the ways that mattered. Coming to that decision — more like realization — was not an easy one for me to make at all, because she had been my mother for the past thirty-three years. It was literally not something that I wanted to do, and I would have given practically anything for her to convey in some way that she was actually sorry so that we could walk over this bridge, Bub and her could begin to work through things in the limited amount of time that she had left, and it was not “something that I did to be dramatic”. She took herself away from me in all of the ways that mattered through her cruel treatment of my child and persistent refusal to apologize, let alone show remorse, for any of it. I had to choose my child over her. I had to protect my child from her in eliminating all subsequent interactions they might otherwise have had. (Remember, she treated my other child quite well.)

As the months that she had left drew on, and I could honestly see with my own two eyes that she was truly not repentant for any of it, that she was “not sorry”, I did the rest of what ultimately became emotionally distancing myself from her. For months after her death, I was blamed for “not being sad enough (that she died) because she was my own mother”. I should have been “more mindful” that she’d had a brain tumor removed, that she’d been going through cancer treatment for a year at that point. Then, finally, I should have “gotten over it” (even though, of those who have said this to me, “wanting to live the rest of my life never having to think about her again” was apparently not the correct answer). I became jealous of friends of mine who had positive experiences spending months with their loved ones making memories before they died.

I knew that I wouldn’t get any of that, and that I would spend years of my life having to forget all of this.

She would live like this for several months with periods of lucidity, being taken care of by my father and myself, not being allowed to talk to my youngest child but making sure that I knew how she felt about him in random conversations that she would have with me (that I would ignore as much of as I possibly could).