Adult questions own lack of grief after mother dies

Carolyn Hax

Question: I lost my dad in 2011, and my mom last month, after looking after her during a yearlong struggle with ALS. She lived near us for the last two years of her life because I thought it was important that my daughters (8-year-old twins) knew their grandma.

The strange thing is — I didn’t grieve for either of my parents. They died, and I felt nothing, except maybe relief that it was over. I could find reasons for that with my dad — he was a mostly absent, postwar father who never made time for me. But with my mom? She raised me as a homemaker and wasn’t a bad mother — she sat by my bed when I was sick as a kid (and I was sick a lot), she cooked my meals, washed my clothes and praised my school achievements. She also kicked me out at 18 when I burned a cigarette hole in the rug of my room … and I never moved back.

But still, no abuse, no meanness, just an ambitious middle-class home where I was valued only for my academic achievements and my looks. Why don’t I feel anything? Why do I know in the bottom of my heart that I moved my mom to our town only out of a sense of duty — without having a need to spend time with her, talk to her, share what was important to me? I feel monstrous. — Relieved

Answer: Why is it “monstrous” of you to have cared for your mom exactly as she cared for you?

Health tended, food provided, clothes washed, achievement praised. Dutiful. That was your childhood. If you were nurtured emotionally as well, then you make no mention of it. Were you?

The absence of neglect — or of abuse or of meanness — does not take you by process of elimination to love. With the possible exception of the sickbed vigils, your description of your childhood is a loveless one. Achingly so. And even the vigils themselves could have been dutiful for a mid-century American stay-at-home mom.

If this is accurate, and if you have not yet made peace with the legacy of such emotionally distant parents — if your feeling monstrous now is the beginning of such a reckoning — then please make sure the first thing you do is recognize their failure to bond with you was within them, not you.

Then connect these two dots: You gave to them, no doubt unwittingly, as you received from them.

Then end this cold legacy in one stroke through your girls: Love them, and say it, and show it.

That one stroke being a mosaic of a thousand tiny gestures and remarks and expressions and thoughts and hugs and efforts to listen to and appreciate and take your cues from them, which together say, I am here because of you — not because giving birth to you made it my job.

The absence of neglect — or of abuse or of meanness — does not take you by process of elimination to love. With the possible exception of the sickbed vigils, your description of your childhood is a loveless one. Achingly so.