A complicated grief — self-compassionate reparenting after the loss of a difficult parent
I held a secret for a very long time as a child. I never really felt like I had a normal mother. She didn’t volunteer at my school, attend my dance competitions, or do a lot of the things I saw other mothers do. Even as a young child, I knew more than I should about her own issues — a difficult childhood, alcoholic dad, a challenging relationship with her immediate family and a tumultuous life that contained more drama than I ever saw in my friend’s houses. There was always a hunger for more, a desire to be fully seen, understood, and cared for by her. It felt as though she never really knew me, and had too much going on in other areas to be present and nurturing in her parental role.
As I grew older, I became fiercely independent. I look back now at the years of holding down a job, getting good grades in AP classes, serving on the student council and school newspaper, doing a community theatre production, and I wonder how I did it all. One thing I didn’t have was pressure from my parents to do any of these things. I wanted to do them, so I did. With the perspective I have now, I can see how doing it all was a wise and beautiful way for my nervous system protect me — by filling my time so the incredible pain of feeling alone in the world wouldn’t crush me.
My relationship with my mother waxed and waned through my teenage and young adult years. As I got older, we became more like friends than mother and daughter. We shopped together and ate out, and she tried to be nurturing at times but it always felt awkward — it just wasn’t how our relationship had been. Our relationship was shallow, but I took whatever I could get.
I had my first child and then a second, and as much as she loved the idea of being a grandmother, she didn’t visit much after they were first born. She was diagnosed with colon cancer shortly before my daughter was born and so began 6 years of chemo, surgeries, and eventually pain control before her medically assisted death in the spring of 2019.
For 6 years I was finally forced to confront the most confusing relationship of my life, and the complicated grief that accompanied it. I wish I could go back and tell myself that it would be a long and challenging road, but through the support of many people, and the practice of self-compassion, it would ultimately result in a transformation of my inner landscape that would create an environment for flourishing.
At first, it seemed that I should drop into the culturally accepted role — drop everything and be there for your parent, regardless of the difficulties you faced in your relationships. That worked for a while, but no matter what we did, it was never enough for her. As the disease and her pain progressed, she began taking large doses of painkillers and eventually turned to cannabis oil to ease her near constant pain. She was forced to confront her life during this time too — and became angrier and angrier as the years passed, at the trauma she endured during her childhood, at the lack of depth in her relationships with her children, and lost the bits of humour and fun that made our visits enjoyable.
Our visits left me physically and emotionally exhausted. I never knew which Mom I would get when I went to see her. Would I get the lighthearted humour and shallow conversation that felt safe? Or would I get a dump of information that I hadn’t wanted to know about the abuse she endured as a child, or a re-hashing of all of her issues with my father. I can look back now and see that these endless stories about all the awful things that had happened to her were her way of reaching out for connection, and I can also see that it took me way too long to set clear boundaries to ensure my own mental health.
Out of her three children, I am the oldest and took the role of peacemaker and caretaker seriously. For a long time I held space for her, listening to her endless complaints about her husband, her medical providers, her neighbours, and even my own siblings. After reaching a state of emotional exhaustion, my therapist asked a me a question “Would you tell a child in your care as a teacher that this is their job?” I realized I had to start saying no. My inner child, age 10 at the time my parents’ marriage fell apart was still playing this role of listening and engaging with all of her problems — and the truth was — it was never and should never have been my role at all.
I decided that the optimal level of contact for me was a phone call once a week and a visit once a month. It was the minimum I felt was fair to continue our relationship as she was dying, but reasonable enough to continue if the dying went on for a few more years. At this point, she had been “dying” for 4 years and it would go on for 6.
Setting boundaries with a parent is challenging, but setting boundaries with a dying parent felt like the meanest thing I could ever do. I struggled with the way it looked to other people who didn’t know the nuances of our relationship, and mostly struggled with the guilt of not being the perfect daughter who can drop everything and somehow peacefully repair this troubled relationship before her death. I am sure this idea of the happy ending of a mended relationship as one approaches death came from the movies and yet, some small part of me held on to this idea that we might get our reconciliation before the credits rolled for her.
The boundaries were challenging to enforce at times, she would call often, and my heart rate would rise and my throat would constrict. I remember tearfully recounting it to my brother, how much this was affecting my mental health — the guilt of not playing into her need to involve me in the intimate details of her life…because if she was dying, could I not just make her happy for a little while longer? And realizing that I couldn’t — she would never be happy.
With the support of my partner, therapist and friends, I maintained my boundaries, as hard as it was, and found my capacity to be compassionate with her increased. Brene Brown writes that “The most compassionate people are the most boundaried” and it rang so true for me in this case. When I maintained my boundaries, I could be present and compassionate with her when I visited. I could acknowledge her pain, listen to her with presence, and kindly let her know when topics came up that I wasn’t comfortable talking about. She didn’t always like it when I refused to engage on certain topics, but she learned quickly that I meant what I said and wouldn’t budge like before.
From her diagnosis to about 2 years before she died, I must have gone to her house at least 10 times with a serious call from her husband that she was in a lot of pain and it felt like the end. These happened over the years with more frequency. I have never seen the process of death in someone else and it did seem each time that the amount of pain she was in could end in death (to her). I confided in a friend who is a nurse, and she assured me it would be very rare for her to die in the night due to pain, that it would likely be a slower process of her body shutting down, and that she would very likely be in hospice care or the hospital at the time of her death. There came a point where I finally started to say that I could not come over to say my goodbyes — that I would see her tomorrow. She didn’t love that, but it was a way to assert my boundaries once more.
She knew early on that she would want to control the time and date of her death, and medically assisted death was an option in our province. In the Fall of 2018 she made an application, picked a date, and then ultimately decided it wasn’t time. It was another quick ride on the emotional rollercoaster of preparing to face her death, only to have the time extended once more.
In the early days of 2019, she began to talk about assisted death again. I was seeing a therapist regularly to make sure I was taking care of myself while I looked for a sense of closure and peace around her death. I remember in February talking to my therapist about a piece of writing I had done two years prior when the end felt very near, a eulogy of sorts and how conflicted I was about sharing it with her. I thought it best to remind her as she picked dates, about a trip my family had planned for Spring Break 2019. We had booked it the year prior, not thinking there was a chance she would still be alive, with how sick she was then, and the number of difficult hospital stays she had, and doctors who told her she had only a few months left. A parallel to her early life, she was resilient and persevered through great pain and lived much longer than anyone else in her condition.
I told her the dates we would be gone, letting her know that if she wanted me to be there for the assisted death, she would have to keep those dates in mind. I made sure to do it on a day where my husband and her husband were present, just in case my words were misinterpreted. Sure enough, a few days later, she called me screaming to “enjoy my f’ing vacation” and to let me know how mean spirited it was to insinuate I would not be changing our travel plans to accommodate her death. At this point we were months from our vacation, and she was in the medically assisted death process, but had not yet chosen dates.
My compassionate self reminded me “You are doing the best you can. You and your family have had a difficult year and need this vacation together. You are being compassionate by sharing the information with her so she can make plans that include you if she wants you there. This is her anger and fear talking — be kind to yourself”
That conversation haunted me for a while. Should I change my travel plans? Was I being inconsiderate? Did I owe her to stay home and wait for the assisted death?
She finally picked a date for her death, and it was a few days after we were booked to fly out for our trip. Ultimately, given the many false starts we had with her, we decided to take our trip as planned. Weeks before we left, she was in the hospital again, finally having found a doctor that she connected with and telling us she truly felt ready for the assisted death. I visited her a few times that week, once with my husband and twice on my own. It was starting to feel like the final, final goodbye was coming, and still, nothing was clearer than it had been 6 years prior. I still found our relationship confusing and hurtful, and was unsure what a final goodbye should look like for us.
My second to final visit with her was a heartbreaking one. Not because of the emotionality of the visit, but because I arrived to to her hospital room, and was interrupted by the arrival of a friend from the pub who quickly took over the conversation. I wondered why my mom didn’t interrupt this lady and have her wait, but when they kept talking without involving me, I excused myself to the lobby to wait for her to leave. I sat there stunned, wondering why her own daughter didn’t take precedence in this situation, especially nearing so close to her assisted death date. I waited for an hour in the lobby, hurt and embarrassed, and headed back up once her friend left for a short and shallow visit, mostly small talk about the flowers people had brought, the stories of all the nurses and doctors and very little about our relationship.
When I arrived for my final visit on Saturday, a day before we would fly out for our trip, I remember walking into the hospital with a pit in my stomach. At this point I wasn’t sure that she would actually do the assisted death on the date she had chosen, given the many false starts we had, but still there was that possibility and it felt like a moment I would remember forever. How do you prepare to visit your mother for the last time before she dies? What do you say? What do you hope she might offer to you in wisdom to take forward? I walked into the hospital filled with all the hopes I had held onto for my whole childhood — maybe, in this important moment, she might turn into the mom I had wanted all along.
I had recently read a list of life lessons from one of my favourite Buddhist nuns, Pema Chodron, someone who I adopted into my spiritual family after reading When Things Fall Apart at just the right time. I had printed it off to share with my mom (I had lent her my highlighted book a year prior) as a way of introducing a conversation about any wisdom she could share with me.
I knew from experience that I had to steer this conversation to achieve my desired outcome — a sense of peace about our final moments. If left to her devices, we might talk about flowers and doctors again, and I didn’t want that.
I arrived in her room and sat down beside her, taken aback once again by how frail she looked in her flannel pyjamas — skeletal beneath the wide legs and arms.
We made small talk for a few minutes before another visitor arrived, and I prepared myself to need to leave again. It was her therapist, who had become a good friend, and thankfully she was kind and inclusive and came into our conversation in a more natural way. It ended up being perfect that she arrived at that time, as I was preparing to share a video of my kids with my mom, after deciding with my husband that having them visit was not a wise idea. I had told her that I wanted them to remember her as the fun grandmother she could be, and I was also wary of them coming because she could be so unpredictable with the things she would share and we didn’t want to take the chance that their last visit with her would be traumatic for them in any way. I knew she was hurt that they would not be coming, and I feared that she might blow up at me in the hospital room and ruin the peaceful visit I had envisioned.
I showed her the video and breathed a sigh of relief that she didn’t get angry. Having her therapist there made me feel safe — she was always on better behaviour with someone else around. With that part of our visit over, I was ready to start asking some big questions in her final hours with me.
I shared the Pema Chodron article with her and asked her if she had any wisdom to share that she might have learned during the last 6 years of her life, or even before. What had she learned along the ways that she wanted her kids to carry forward?
She struggled with the question. She talked a bit about hanging laundry on the line, and learning to make pierogies, but kept getting distracted and going off on other tangents. After a while, her therapist left and it was just her and I left. I asked again, in a few different ways, if she had anything to share with me, and she didn’t. I remember looking at the clock and realizing we only had 15 minutes left together. As she talked about cannabis oil and conspiracy theories in our last moments together I finally felt a sense of peace. This is who she is, this is what she is capable of. Small moments of presence, a little bit of her life lessons, even though they did not resonate with me — I was able to finally accept her for who she was, and to let go of the hope that her literal death bed would somehow change the fabric of her being into the nurturing warmth and wisdom I hungered for my whole life. This was the mother I had, she brought me into this world, she tried her best, we had some good moments, and we had more than our fair share of bad moments, but regardless of the stories spun by the movies — a death bed teary reconciliation was not in the cards for us.
When it was time to go I gave her a hug and she sobbed on my shoulder. Was it a lifetime of unfulfilled dreams of the mother/daughter relationship we didn’t have? I know she tried to make it better than what she and her mother had, and I am sure it was, but now the flag was passed to me, to make my relationship with my daughter more meaningful and nurturing. She even said something like that but I cannot remember her exact words.
I went to leave and then hugged her again. Then went to leave and hugged her again. It was too much to leave for a final time. It just felt so very final. Finally, the fourth time, I stood at the door, looking at my frail mother, told her I loved her and walked down the hall, passing her sobbing husband on the way.
I didn’t think she would actually go through with the assisted death. It had been such a rollercoaster of terrible health and bouncing back over the years that I thought this might be one more rise and fall.
She had asked me to send her some pictures from Hawaii, and I did, though it felt very impersonal after our final goodbye to correspond through Facebook Messenger. She responded to the photos with “paradise, nice”. I had terrible nightmares that night of her crying out as a needle drew close to her, frantically messaging me in Hawaii to save her.
I woke early to the tropical coolness of Maui, and did the math to figure out the time that she planned to die back home. I took my daughter to the coffee shop and watched the clock. I can still hear the music “Fade Into You’ playing, the detail of the plants, the smell of the surf mixed with the sharp smell of coffee. My feet planted in place in what felt like the other side of the world, letting go of the person who brought me into it. I can remember the hot tears filling my eyes, as I looked at my beautiful daughter sitting in a chair as the soft, golden morning sun shone into the shop and right onto her face.
We got our coffee and banana bread, and I sat across from my 5 year old, hung on her every word, and silently promised to be better to her, more present, more nurturing, and to do the work to not let my trauma hurt her.
We spent the day at the beach, the kids frolicking happily and me feeling numb. I couldn’t really verbalize how I felt, except to say it felt weird. Weird to be so far away and know when I got home she would be gone. I stared out at the crystal blue ocean, a scene I had never seen before that trip in my life and struggled to reconcile that this wasn’t just another dream. I saw a mother and adult daughter walking along the beach, hand in hand, talking to each other and smiling, and began my familiar wishing that I could have a relationship that felt like that. Connection, laughter, ease. I caught myself mid-lament, and gave myself a moment to feel the grief of never being able to have that with my mother, realized, I could have that….only I would be the mother, holding my daughter’s hand.
I decided I wanted to honour the day my own way. My daughter and I dressed up and put flowers in our hair. We got in the jeep, just the two of us and drove to a fancy hotel. We took pictures together, enjoyed fancy drinks and a beautiful dinner. I held her, I stared at her, I adored her. I took so many pictures and when I look back at that night, I can see such a mixture of grief and hope in my eyes. I had always cherished my daughter, and in this moment I was more confident than ever that this was the beginning of a new chapter, bringing even more mindfulness to being a parent who truly sees, hears and understands their beloved child.
Growing up without the nurturing mother figure has meant that I needed to become my own parent in many ways. Through the practice of self-compassion, I have been able to lovingly reparent myself so I could become the person I needed as a child.
I learned to validate my own emotions, and now I can hold space for the big emotions of my children.
I learned to get curious with the stories that my mind spins, and now I can help my children when they are struggling with limiting thoughts or worries. I can remind them, as I do to myself a lot, that our brain is a natural weaver of stories and can craft an epic tale with just a few bits of information. Thankfully, the author spinning these tales is a fiction writer and they rarely resemble reality. I can also remind them, as I also do to myself a lot, that it’s so natural and common to struggle with the voice in our head.
I learned to ask myself what I need, to listen carefully to my body and to tend to her needs. Sometimes I need a walk, a cry, a connection, a breath, some movement, time to write. My nervous system is soothed by many different things depending on the situation, and now I try to prompt my own kids to listen to their bodies and to ask for what they need.
Every day, I am slowly and imperfectly shifting my inner voice to become the nurturing wise parent I longed for. It feels safer in my inner world now — a much healthier environment for growth and flourishing.
I love an inspirational story, but I always think about the practical — how do I do that? One practice that has been especially powerful for me is the act of writing yourself a letter from the perspective of a wise and nurturing friend. This is a practice I learned from Kristin Neff’s book “Self Compassion”. In this practice you write with the voice of a good friend who knows you and loves you deeply. This person sees all that is going on in your life and the unique context of your history. Writing to myself daily about how this friend views my struggles, reminds me of my successes and encourages me towards my goals felt a bit weird at first (of course I would write this warmly towards a good friend, but towards myself felt forced and awkward for the first while) but has morphed into a life-giving practice to remind me to be kind to myself and give myself the same grace, support and nurturing that I would a good friend. Looking back on previous letters and letting the kind words sink in is a balm to my often tired soul, and has done more to shift my inner voice than any other practice I have tried.
This practice is one of many ways that I care for and reparent myself, and begin to embody all the traits I wanted in my own mother. It’s now been two and a half years since she died. When I think about who I was at the moment of her death, and who I am now, I see a much softer, vulnerable human. Now that I am safe from being hurt by her, my body has been able to release a lifetime of pain from our complicated relationship, and I have begun to rewrite many stories I had believed about myself and my worth. I am finally safe, seen and soothed — not by my own mother, but inside myself. It has been hard to work through this unique grief, and I am so proud of myself for using the practice of self-compassion to validate, get curious, and care for myself through it all. There is still work to be done, but I am confident that cultivating an nurturing inner mother within myself is the key to my flourishing.
