Merry Christmas, Detachment and Grace

Vol. 2, Issue 9

Last year around this time I detached from my parents so we didn't speak very much during the holidays. It was long overdue after years of what I considered emotional abuse and torment and their inability to see it, so I decided it was best to keep our communications to a minimum. All my new sobriety and recovery work initially made our relationship worse because I had all these ugly new memories to process. I always thought it was strange how all the 12-Step newcomer literature overlooked this fact. There should be one pamphlet that says, Welcome, Now The Real Pain Begins.

I detached from my parents right before Thanksgiving. In fact, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, my mother's oncologist called me and said that my mother should begin hospice care. The shorthand version was: "She's not doing what she needs to do to get better. The chemo isn't working. Your dad can't take care of her. Six months, tops."

That's sort of grim news. More than sort of.

But I expected it. My mother didn’t do what she needed to do for a decade, since the last time she had Stage-4 cancer. She never exercised, so her muscles atrophied. She could only get around with a walker and she seldom did because she was so afraid of falling. She had terrible knees, a weird stent in her head. A couple years ago she had the early signs of Parkinson's. Her eyes were bad. She was incontinent and needed diapers. I couldn't keep up with all the bleak outlooks and the recommendations from her various doctors and healthcare aids. Her physical deterioration went down both slowly and quickly--depending on how you look at it. She was also achingly unhappy and completely (co)dependent on my father. She slept a lot and barely interacted with anyone, let alone me or her two brand new grandchildren.

My father also didn’t do what he should have. He was in a constant search for a second opinion, but I think he just wanted someone to lie to them about her prognosis a bit longer. When she was in remission a few years ago they moved away from the Philadelphia suburbs where all their family and friends were within 50 miles down to Jupiter, Fla. where they didn't have very many. They lived in a weird gated community in a tacky condo with an okay view of the ocean and the beach which neither one of them ever walked on anyway. But my father loved to boast about his ocean view, probably because the real estate agent cajoled him into believing it was a huge perk. They didn’t stay very long. They both got sicker and needed more help so, reluctantly, they moved into an assisted living facility about three blocks from that condo. They got another room with a view, this time of the Intercoastal waterway. It's still water, my dad said.

***

I always considered my mother a secondary qualifier to my dad and pretty much anyone else in my life. That's both accurate and cruel adjective for my mother: secondary. My dad was the real monster. She was just complicit and untrustworthy, but she hadn't been a huge part of my life for the past decade when I needed her most so it didn’t matter. I hadn't spoken to my mother for longer than five minutes since at least the mid-2000's.

When we did, my father usually initiated our conversations. I had no interest in talking to her because I thought she had no interest in talking to me. Still, my father would dutifully call and then put us on speaker phone, she meekly asking how I was doing the same way she always did. I'd struggle for a safe response, she'd feign enthusiasm to whatever it was I'd share, then she'd cough loudly and have to hang up. Sometimes I'd make more of an effort, but in recent years I just stopped trying.

Last year, when she had six months to live, I made peace with the idea that we'd probably never be able to repair our relationship. What relationship, anyway? I completely forgot what her personality used to be. My wife only met her a handful of times in the past four years. When she inquired about what my mother used to be like I had trouble describing her. I think she was funny and observant. I think she was an excellent cook and had multiple friend groups. And she absolutely killed it at Christmas time. She went overboard on everything: new ornaments, presents, garland, lights, stockings. She left hoagies and beer for Santa on the chimney stoop. But that was forever ago.

I always thought she was depressed for the past decade–like, clinically depressed. Most of her sisters and friends agreed that even when she was physically on the mend from all the chemo she was withdrawn and distracted. Blue. That was what people said. She always seemed blue. I urged my father to take her to see a therapist. He was rude and clueless in his refusal.

"Of course she's depressed! She has cancer." Every time he applied this logic–and he did so multiple times during both bouts of cancer–I'd go silent. Dementia creeping into his voice, his temper would rise and he'd reshuffle all his thoughts but his memory would nonetheless become lost in an unforgiving fog. He'd snap out of it, recoil back into pig-headedness. The last time a conversation about this topic took place I just hung up on him.

"We saw a hypnotist a couple months ago! It didn't work," he yelled. A hypnotist.

After the oncologist called I wanted to give my parents one last chance, maybe repair pieces of the past, but mostly I wanted to give them some measure of enjoyment now.

"Move to Los Angeles. Come live in our guest room," I told them. “Enjoy the time you have left with your new grandchildren.”

Even though that idea was the worst thing possible for my sobriety, marriage and my sanity, I wanted them to be part of my life for a little while longer–even if they were lousy parents.

But they wouldn't budge.

"California is too far away," they said. "Our life is in Florida. We like it here. We have a wonderful view."

I was dumbfounded. Why were they not taking this six months seriously? Why did they want to spend the rest of their lives surrounded by strangers in an assisted living facility?

I pressed harder. "We have an ocean, too."

I sounded so pathetic. I couldn't take this rejection again.

"You really don’t want us there anyway,” my father said.

And then I remembered why I never felt like these two people loved me very much.

***

I did so much Al-Anon work this year to help me let go of my parents. I learned how to detach from them–with kindness, as the literature suggests–even though my mother's time was half-past nigh and my father's coherence kept dimming. My therapist agreed that it's okay to create a healthy distance from my parents even if my mother was dying and my dad was closer to full-blown Alzheimer’s. It was time to parent my children better and, most importantly, re-parent myself in order to effectively and healthfully parent my kids.

I needed to let them go.

So during the back half of 2018 and the beginning of 2019 I hardly ever spoke to my parents. I'd call them on Facetime and stick the phone in front of the faces of my small children and then brusquely cut them off after five minutes. They had no idea I'd detached from them which was its own stark reveal. I thought I would feel guilty but I did not. Detachment from my parents was wonderful and exactly what I needed.

***

I mourned the loss of my mother while she was still alive. Our emotional chasm had grown so wide that I felt invigorated by the shortness of her life. Maybe death was the best way for us to restore our relationship? I did worry that I was now too callous to grieve. I told my sister I was afraid I wouldn't be able to give her eulogy. Maybe I'd detached too much.

Last March, as we inched up to the six month mark, I put the detachment on hold and invited my parents out one more time. They hadn't met their second grandchild yet. Maybe this time it would be different and I could reconnect with my mother again. They came and it was the same; she barely spoke to me or her grandchildren or my wife. The flight was too hard on both of them. She had trouble with her walker on the steps. She couldn't make it to the bathroom on time. They were both difficult and disrespectful. When they left I was relieved. God, I'm so glad they never wanted to live with us, I thought.

***

It's been more than a year and my mother's still here. Actually, that’s not true–a new version of her is here. And it’s crazy. As my father's dementia worsened she’s somehow regenerated. And not by a little bit–I'm talking like 900 percent better. She doesn't use a walker anymore. She ditched the diapers. She has made a whole bunch of new friends at their assisted living facility. She cooks more. She's in a Scrabble club. She’s vibrant and funny, more so than I ever remember.

She calls me from her own cellphone. She emails me, too–old recipes, old memories. We talked for an hour and a half last week and it could have gone longer.

I had to ask her "What happened? Why are you back? This is strange."

She had no answers other than to say that she just woke up.

"We have never talked like this,” I said.

"I know and I love it so much, " she replied.

Part of me wants more answers from her. I still want some reparations and explanations about all the abuse my father dished out. I want to know why she stayed with him and why she never said anything–or did– anything. But all of these little resentment shards I'd collected didn't make much sense to carry around anymore if she's going to be reasonable and contrite.

Both of my parents are here in town this week for Christmas, something I never thought would happen again. This is actually the second time in the past three months she’s been out here. She loves her grandchildren, she loves all of us, she’s effervescent and alive in a way that doesn’t seem real.

I keep comparing my mom's resurgence to the movie Pet Sematary and then my wife, Julieanne, reminds me that it's not exactly a good description because my poor mom wasn't buried and reanimated into a half-zombie cat. Julieanne said it's more like Awakenings, like she was in a coma and then one day she just popped up and caught a tennis ball. But really it's more like Cocoon.

Like my mom jumped into a secret magic pool of rejuvenation.

I don't bother with asking too many questions anymore. She's here now, for however long. It's wonderful. I never expected her to be back unlike she ever was even during her mother-years. I was supposed to re-parent myself, but then my mom showed up, just as I got used to the detachment.

– AJD

Merry Christmas, TSB readers! There's no feature this week. There probably won't be one next week, either, but there will be one more long-ass monologue before the end of the year.

I know this newsletter has switched from a semi-traditional publication to a bunch of funny-sad essays by me, but I hope we can go back to publishing work from other contributors on the reg again in 2020.

Next week's newsletter will be the last one published on MailChimp because we're switching over to Substack. I don't think you'll notice the changes that much, but we will lose this beautiful Georgia font.

Stay safe, sober, and sane, whatever that looks like for you. Just don't give up.

Thank you for your continued support of The Small Bow.