Grief After Estrangement: Is it Legitimate?
I wake before the sun. I sit up in bed. I notice the half-light and lay back on the pillow.
My husband Joe shifts beside me and sighs in his sleep. I wonder what he’s thinking, if he’s dreaming. I look over at him. His face is relaxed. His goatee is more silver than dark.
I think of her. My mother. I reach into the side drawer for my notebook.
It’s been nearly a week since she passed.
At the same time, it’s been a decade.
To me, good writing means you’ll see a piece of yourself inside my words.
Great writing will change, however infinitesimally, the way you live your own story.
Though I have no assumptions about where I fall on this sliding scale of letters to page, I offer them to you anyway.
Take what you will from this mother-daughter elegy. Leave the rest.
Maybe you’ll feel validated, curious, upset, confused, hopeful.
This is not an essay about making amends. I don’t have anything to say about amends. Perhaps I never will.
We were fractured, she and I. Estranged. We didn’t call each other on birthdays. We didn’t call each other at all.
Every morning, I lace up my sneakers. Through winding back roads, I run. Past the farm on my right, a wide field on my left. The horses stand still in the heat.
Grief is loud until it is quiet.
It is exhausting.
It is ordinary and messy.
Estrangement is never the first choice. It is important to me that I make this point.
It is not a teenage huff, all slammed doors and rolled eyes. It’s not because we disagreed about politics or religion.
I did not ghost my mother. I did not cut her off. There was no line I drew in the sand. There was a falling out that led to space, and our gap never quite bridged again.
It was not what I wanted.
But the toxicity bloomed between us, the way a spill on the rug turns to a crimson stain.
Estrangement is wandering by the card aisle on Mother’s Day. It’s standing on the periphery of your friends and their mothers, wondering if there is something inherently lacking in you.
It’s a heightened alert for your own children, wondering if the legacy of brain wiring may land within one of them.
My son Jack has autism. And while their diagnosis was different, the presentation is often the same. Anxiety, paranoia, a tendency to conspiracy theories mixed with a smidge of righteousness. For him, we introduce all the things her generation rejected: counseling, medication, open conversation. I refuse to let his spirit be ravaged as hers was. I refuse to lose him to it.
I turn at the stop sign at the top of the hill. I think of Jack, tucked into a summer program hours away, waiting for the phone call about his Grandmother. I pause to tie my shoe. I begin again, one foot in front of the other. I’m not ready to tell him.
I guess I’m trying to find legitimacy for my grief after a relationship long gone dormant. Dormant, yes, but always vibrating below the surface, a proverbial mother-daughter volcano.
Perhaps the not-nicest thing one could say at a time like this is, “But you weren’t really close to her, right?”
Forgiveness, guilt, regret. These are words lobbed my way, but it will be a while before I untangle the syllables.
For now, I am flooded with memories. Popcorn on New Year’s Eve. Her silhouette in the bathroom mirror, applying eye liner. The navy blue sweatshirt she wore on the weekends.
And though her advice was rare, I’ve always clutched tightly to the kernels.
Don’t order seafood in a diner.
Once you go all the way, you can never go back to holding hands.
You can’t trust a dentist.
That last one may have been lost on me, seeing as I married a dentist. Or perhaps that was the start of the Great Unraveling. After all, it’s hard when you’re asked to choose between husband and mother.
Somewhere, in the recess of my mind, maybe I thought we had time. It’s not something I articulated, even to myself.
I have a deep sense of loss. I just don’t know what it means yet, or what shape it holds.
As I make my way back home, my breath is a little uneven. I think about the phone call I stopped to make, once I was past the farm, the field, the made, to a tall boy miles away. As always, he takes me by surprise.
“Mom. I’m sorry. I know how much you loved Grandma.”
I did.
I did love her.
July 17, 2023 @ 10:22 am
I am so sorry for your loss.
It’s a loss of not just your mother but the loss of the potential, of a relationship that perhaps should have been more but wasn’t, and now will never and can never be.
It’s a deep and profound loss and you have a legitimate right to grieve.
May you find comfort…
July 17, 2023 @ 11:52 am
Perfectly said.
July 17, 2023 @ 10:29 am
Carrie,
I think, perhaps, the key thought is you and your mother did the best you could. What more can anyone ask of us than to do our best? You were put in a position where you had to make a choice. What other choice could you have made other than choosing your husband and your beautiful children and the family life you and Joe worked so hard to create and maintain? We all long to be part of loving relationships. That’s what we hope for. As long as we live, we dream that dream. When the “distant” one dies, the hope of face-to-face reconciliation dies too. It’s the end of that particular hope that we grieve.
Following her wishes regarding service etc. there is nothing to stop you from gathering with your family (siblings and your own family) and honoring her memory. It could be anything that might bring you some comfort.
Your writing is lovely and very insightful. You’ll come out the other side of this stronger and lovelier than you already are.
July 17, 2023 @ 10:39 am
Everyone gets a “Clean Slate” in Heaven.
July 17, 2023 @ 12:47 pm
I’m an estranged mother. It’ll be 9 years next month. I know how you feel, I went through the same when my father passed. My mother who left me when I was in diapers is still on this earth. I’ve prepared for her passing and the grief I know will come as I struggled with a hard depression after my father passed. My concern is for my daughter who refuses to even try to talk. She got married last week. I wasn’t invited. 2 weeks before our estrangement, she told me I was her best friend. She moved out at 18 bc I handed her ass to her for being a teenager and pulling that “I’m 18 now” act (she was being a real shit—her brother will even attest. He & I are close) I hate this animosity for her! I truly do and I’m afraid for her grief as I know how I struggled and I almost didn’t stay on this earth but I’m glad to know you care……that means she must too. Always holding out for hope.
July 17, 2023 @ 10:27 pm
For a moment, I thought you were writing my story. My story is similar to yours. Summers on Cape Cod. Mom screaming and dealing with her psychiatric illnesses. She had a tough life. She was a single mom of two. No child support. We were close until I decided to grow up and get married. We loved each other. I was her guardian, her caregiver. I did everything to make her happy. She was never happy or satisfied. She had vascular dementia and advanced COPD, severe aortic stenosis. She died on 6/22/2022. I miss her so much. I’m told it’s complicated grief due to the type of relationship we had. I’m struggling. I miss her. When I lost her, I lost my entire family. No one will speak to me.
Thank you for writing your story about your mom and your relationship with her. It was very similar to my story. I wish I was able to move on and feel better but it’s not that easy for me to do.
July 19, 2023 @ 10:16 am
I have been on both sides of this issue. My estrangement from my family lasted 10 years. Next year, it will be 10 years since my entire family has heard from our child. I taught my child well. I taught my child dodging issues and blaming others was the way forward.
I did not realize the devastation I had caused by my decision to “take care of myself”. Only after my family welcomed me back did I feel their pain. To this day, although my family is back together, it is forever broken. I did that. I will pay the price, but would rather be with them, then to ever walk away again.
We will not welcome our child back. It may seem cruel and hypocritical. So much has changed. We now have 6 grandchildren. My family took a vote last year to decide whether we needed to let go, or try to save it. I was to vote last. I never had to vote. It was unanimous, none of them wanted our child back.
Estrangement is a slippery slope. Plenty of advice can be found to get out of a family. Not much can be found regarding the damage it causes. Not much on the depth of pain. Not much if you changed your mind.
I have read thousands and thousands of reasons to walk away. But I never hear the person that walked away take any blame. It is “what was done to them”. My generation was far from perfect. So was the one prior to us. So are the ones looking forward. Forgiveness is tough, so is admitting you were wrong. I was wrong and will pay the rest of the way.
August 5, 2023 @ 5:56 pm
Incredible writing!
Our daughter has also chosen to be estranged from us. Similarly to what Mike has intimated above, we’ve apparently done some things that she and her husband find objectionable; we don’t know what and even offered apologies. It’s been almost seven years and I feel numb. It’s when I read such poignant words about estrangement and alienation that I awaken from my numbness. Truly, we all do the best we can, the best we know for the time.
Gratitude to you Ms. Cariello
July 31, 2023 @ 2:58 am
This is the first of your writing I am reading. It is moving, beautiful and true. Thank you for sharing. I am sorry for the loss of your mom.