Clearing The Heir

Seeing and talking to Barbara and Kathy was incredibly validating and liberating. To share grief, remorse, frustration and shared perspectives on an apparent dysfunction was illuminating. And freeing too. It let me break through that barrier of what 'should be said' and honesty. What should be said doesn't make it untrue it just means there are boundaries of protocol and social, ethical expectations. While honestly is just that. Saying I can love and care about somebody I can't live with is just a simple fact, and why should I expect to have stayed in dysfunction that everybody seemed to know themselves but never speak out loud about.

Turning away from the truth is absurd. It costs more than the discomfort of being open, exposed, vulnerable and simply human. Like we all are. The conversation we had was a turning point for me. It helped me immensely to sort out and put away the lingering baggage. It made me realize that it was not 'my problem' or 'my failure,' it drove home that it was about one person unwilling or unable to take responsibility for their role or their faults and failures. My perspective is my truth, and hers was hers, but at least I can say that I spent a lot more time figuring out how to make her truth mine instead of refusing to consider that I might need to rethink my truths. 

This also sets a new tone for how I will look at this. I'm wondering now if I'll even cry at the service. I might for others' grief, but emotions run raw at these, and I still wonder what their candid reflections might be behind the sorrowful facade. Ultimately we're all flawed. "I could be everything except for the faults that I acquired on my way." My need to get out, my recognition of a doomed state early on and my continued efforts to find some peaceful middle ground without the festering resentment feel like a conscious, thoughtful effort to succeed at finding mutual happiness. But it was never a mutual goal.

I'm still deeply saddened that she has died so relatively young, that my kids won't have a chance to know her in a more adult manner and perhaps resolve some of their demons doing so, and that she had to suffer through a year of declining health until her eventual last breath was taken in the loving presence of her children and their father. I am proud that I cared as much as I have and do and that I spared her from a far more emotionally painful, isolated and lonely ending. I worked with heartfelt sincerity to restore her sense of being valued, loved and cared for by all of us.

It's still surreal. I still feel oddly distant and removed from its finality, but I think I'm well aligned tonight with the path ahead being a positive one for myself and my children. Awful as it might be to say, if I am to be transparently honest, this comes as a relief in some ways. When faced with the projected nature of how the next 20 years might have played out and having my own experiences so directly validated by her own family's experiences and assessments, would anything have otherwise changed for the better?