Personal stuff behind the cut - death and grief TW
Yesterday morning I checked my mail and I had received a letter informing me of my mother’s death.
So I called my brother, for the first time in ten years, to find out what happened, and what I could do to help him with settling her debts and getting her house ready to sell, and I have spent the last day and a half so fucking angry I can barely breathe.
Ten years ago, my mother called me to pick a fight. At the time, I didn’t realize that’s what she was doing, but it was. She wanted to make sure I voted “correctly.” (Read: for Donald Trump). I told her I wasn’t going to talk about that with her. It was 2016. I knew then that shit was going to be ugly for the next decade, and that my mother had likely helped make the world worse, but I wanted to at least maintain open communication, in the hope that she’d remember how she fucking raised me and back away from the conspiracies and rabid conservative politics.
She said “Sometimes I think you went to college and lost your brain.” So I told her that I loved her, wished her a Merry Christmas, and hung up the phone.
It was the last time we spoke. She never reached out to me again - no calls, no emails, no birthday cards, nothing.
Apparently I was just the first person that she decided to drive off. In the last ten years, she pushed away her entire support system - the guy she was seeing, her sister, her friends, her grandkids, my brother’s wife - everyone but my brother. She stopped paying her bills, racked up thousands in credit card debt. She was in and out of the hospital multiple times over the last two years, and my brother has paid nearly $50k in medical bills.
There were eleven animals living in her house. Half of them were so badly neglected that they had to be put down. The house itself was a biohazard. My brother pulled 42 contractor bags full of crushed beer cans out of that house - she’d been hiding her empties in all of the closets. It’s like she decided that she was going to kill herself, and in the process spite everyone who had ever tried to help her.
And I am angry. I’m angry that my brother had to put up with her abuse. I’m angry that she destroyed her life. I’m angry that she neglected her animals. I’m angry that she left us this fucking mess to clean up, just like the one my dad left when he died. I am an orphan, and I am furious about it.
I don’t know what to do with all this rage. I don’t know how to grieve the woman my mother became. I grieved the woman who raised me years ago. So I’m going to see if my therapist has room for me on his schedule again, since I need someone who can help me process this. And I’m going to go out to her house and sort through what’s left to see what’s salvageable, and help my brother get the property in shape so we can sell it and hopefully make enough to break even.
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