I fear I’ve failed my suffering family

DEAR BEL,

I AM 54 and have been married for 34 years, with two children aged 20 and 25. My husband hasn’t been easy to live with, coming from a dysfunctional family and being abused by his alcoholic father.

Our relationship has been volatile at times, but we have endured — and love each other very much.

Unfortunately, our children have perhaps suffered as a result of our relationship. Our stunning, intelligent daughter has become a heroin addict after years of cannabis abuse and our son has developed a cannabis habit, too.

Eight months ago, my husband was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and is suffering. He feels he’s been a failure: we have nothing much materially and he carries guilt for his daughter.

I feel history has repeated itself. My parents have been together for 65 years, adore each other, and my mother put my father (a complex but wonderful man) first when we were young. I have one brother who is sensible and successful, but my elder brother committed suicide at 30, leaving a gaping hole in the family.

I developed a drink problem which persisted throughout my 20s. Depression has been a factor in my brother, me and my daughter. My mother and I are living parallel lives, with men whose needs we perhaps put first.

I am my husband’s carer, and my mother has to make a heartrending decision about putting Dad into care, as he has Parkinson’s, and she cannot manage.

But they promised each other they wouldn’t put the other into a care home. Both of us are in emotional turmoil, trying to keep our partners alive.

I feel I have failed my children, and I’m heartbroken at my parents’ situation, and I feel desperately sorry for my husband.

I know I have to be strong but there is so much pain and I don’t know how I will manage.

LUCY

YOU are so desperately burdened with pain there cannot be a reader who doesn’t join me in expressing deep sympathy for your troubles.

In a way, there is nothing more to say than that — nor have you asked me a specific question.

But your letter is a reminder that many unhappy souls carry a weight of sorrow, anxiety and/or guilt — perhaps putting our own into perspective.

what’s more, each one of us may be required, at some stage, to understand and accept that there is nothing else to do but endure.

you’ve tried to make sense of the patterns within your two families. your husband’s horrific background must have made him very vulnerable, needy and self-centred. Doubtless you identified something similar within each other; no wonder you clung together against the world.

you are devastatingly honest to wonder, with hindsight, whether one result of this love was (in effect) to exclude your two children from your imprisoning circle of mutual need.

who can say? I am sure you have examined ways of tackling both children’s drug problems, so I doubt there is any point in me going online to suggest websites because it is easy to do.

I can see that right now you might lack the energy because you are so wrapped up with the parallel situations you and your mother find yourselves in.

That is totally understandable — but can I gently suggest that you have an arguably greater duty towards the young living than to the older dying?

That will seem like blasphemy to those who stick rigidly to the contentious (and obviously untrue) mantra: all lives have equal value.

Grieve as you will, you cannot arrest the course of mortality — but your children are only 20 and 25 so you could focus on turning your burning sense of failure into a determination to help them.

This is perhaps your greatest test and I wish you the strength to face it. Because it is too late to change the complicated past but you might save your own mental health by concentrating on theirs.