feotakahari (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feotakahari) wrote2018-12-24 11:46 pm
feotakahari) wrote2018-12-24 11:46 pm
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My mother raised my cousin C for several years. The way my mother told it, my aunt was unable to take care of C during that time. The way my aunt told it, my wicked mother took C, and it took years to get her back. C very much wanted to believe that her birth mother didn't abandon her, so she took my aunt's story to heart, and she was never close to my mother in her adulthood.
My mother just got the call that C is dead. I have never heard such sounds of anguish out of a human mouth before. I sat beside her until she told me to go to my room, and one of the few things she said was that parents aren't supposed to outlive their children.
I never would have imagined that after all this time, my mother still thought of C as her child.
My mother just got the call that C is dead. I have never heard such sounds of anguish out of a human mouth before. I sat beside her until she told me to go to my room, and one of the few things she said was that parents aren't supposed to outlive their children.
I never would have imagined that after all this time, my mother still thought of C as her child.
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Every death is a tragedy.
After the first stage of "does not compute" where her behavior gets really strange and starts flipping coins where actual planning and decision making should be, you get the "angry about everything for no reason" stage where she will probably snap at you and everyone else with little provocation. One of the bedrock beliefs she has about the shape of the world has been violated, and trauma reactions are not uncommon. So she will probably be very untrusting, not letting you do things which before she considered perfectly safe, being very severe and forbidding if you argue, since some part of her knows she has no solid foundation from which to make those arguments.
When her belief system fully collapses, she will have to rebuild it and test it, from which springs another host of seemingly nonsensical behavior. The Bargaining/What Is Reality" stage was kind of treacherous in our family, because Mom was finally awake enough to be making rational decisions and acting like herself, but doing a bunch of things I didn't understand to test what was safe and what was not. Expect risk-taking behaviors like drinking and smoking and making unwise decisions financially.
The depression stage is different from person to person, but if you have seen your mother have a major emotional setback before, then expect more of the same and for it to last a lot longer, because this time there could be survivors guilt, which is the "It should have been me" bullshit that your brain will pull out when someone whose safety you emotionally depend on dies. She may also blame herself for negative outcomes of the reality testing/bargaining phase, especially in the longest part of the grief process.
Acceptance and getting on with her life are going to be different for everyone. In my family we just avoided subjects that led back to my brother and focused on doing things that had never had much to do with him. Mom mostly gave up reading scifi and instead started reading murder mysteries and fantasy books, I gave up sports and giving a shit about people I didnt know, we all tried to not walk on each others sore spots, though actually having a conversation about it didnt ever happen, not even after we all went through therapy when I was 13 and we were all still fucked up.
I hope your family has a higher emotional health baseline from which to fall, and that you have the financial stability to get therapy from the start. Because even with this tiny helpful guide, trust me, you are not prepared for this. No one ever can be.
Please do not blame yourself or anyone else for that. That, too, is a tragedy.