Forgiveness In The Face Of Death

Most people who know me well knows that my mother and I had a complicated relationship, and that we were estranged for many years prior to her death.

We reunited briefly days prior to her death, and tried as best as we could to mend fences and say things that for far too long had been left unsaid.

There are times I think of these few days and all of the things I forgot to say or didn’t say and I hope that she now knows them now. Then there are days I think of all the things we said were forgiven and the same anger that builds up inside of me all over again so much so that I’m not sure they were in fact forgiven or if I just said that to ease her passing mind. I sometimes really don’t know. Maybe I never will.

There are so many emotions when a parent dies, it leaves you feeling vulnerable, orphaned and devastated, and while I was feeling all of these things, the truth of the matter is, I mourned her long before she died, and when she died, I was left to mourn the imagined relationship we never had and would now never have.

My mother had many demons, but her story is not mine to tell. One day I may decide to tell it, but for now, they belong to me.

Of all the emotions I feel not one single one of them is regret for my choosing to not continue in what was most definitely a toxic relationship, even if I did become the talk of the family, and anyone who would listen to her for having done so. And boy did I !

This is not so say I don’t have a certain level of sadness because I do. It makes me

sad (that) because of the things she did she wasn’t able to get to know the wonderful man I married or to see her grandchildren grow up. She didn’t get to see the woman I became, the one she tried so hard to hold back.

She’s been dead now for 12 years, and memories still play as a continuous loop in my head when I allow them.

Sometimes she comes to me in my dreams but most of the times she comes to me in my nightmares . . Maybe she always will.

Ive long since stopped trying to understand how a mother can do the things she did and to her own flesh and blood. I do however struggle with this at times because as human’s we always want explanations, because in this case there is no explanation that would suffice.

Whatever happens, I think I will always experience a certain level struggle.

The struggle to let it go, and the struggle to forgive.

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