So, my father passed away recently, and I am really struggling with how I feel about it. I was able to share some special moments with him just before his death. My father and I had been somewhat estranged for many years. He was very verbally abusive to me throughout my childhood, and I wound up distancing myself from him for many years. As a result, my daughter and husband both only met him one time. This reality makes me sad, but I am not sure what else could have been done about it.
My father was mentally ill, specifically with Schizoaffective Disorder. If my family found this blog, surely they would know exactly who wrote this post. My father was highly intelligent but had a difficult time separating delusions from reality. He was extremely skilled at taking many different unrelated events and connecting them into a seamless story that occurred consecutively. There were often elements of truth in his words, but the reality was very distorted. Mental illness and staying healthy create a tricky path to walk.
Two years ago, I took over guardianship from my aunt because I am an only child and there isn’t anyone else. During those two years, I had to block his phone calls because he called two times every day and wanted to talk for 20-45 minutes for each call. The calls were rarely pleasant and were often negative and draining. My husband once commented, ‘That is odd that he calls at 4 pm every single day.’ I said, ‘It isn’t at 4 pm; it is that all the messages are 4 minutes long.’ My father would talk until my voicemail cut him off. Regularly, my phone would alert me that my voicemail was 95% full, so I would have to move all his voicemails off my phone. Many were marked as unopened. This also made me sad, but the voicemails were usually the same and very negative.
His doctor once told me that they had to block his emails and set boundaries for him because he would swamp everyone. In my email, I had to set up rules to move his emails to a folder. One time, I received 19 emails in one day. Sometimes they were poems, but more often, they were complaints. He would send emails to attorneys, congressmen, and the President of the United States. Writing this actually made me smile because he kept everyone on their toes. So, now that he is gone, I find myself feeling guilty that I blocked his messages. However, he was not going to change his behavior, and I had to create the boundaries to maintain my own sanity.
My father lived in a psychiatric hospital for the last 7 years of his life. This makes me truly sad. However, there was no facility that could handle his psychiatric issues and his health issues. My father was also extremely uncooperative with the places he lived. Before the psychiatric hospital, he lived in 5 different places within 4 years. None of those places could handle him.
My father passing away triggers many memories. Some are real, and some are not. What is not real is that I find myself missing our conversations. Then I challenge myself. Really, what do you miss? The conversations were very one-sided with my father complaining, and me listening. Some days I would argue with his delusions, which would often make me feel a bit crazy. He really believed his delusions, and my arguing with him about them makes me question my own sanity. Some days, I would just listen, and he would occasionally ask me, ‘Are you still there?’ If I said too much, he would say, ‘You need to honor your father’ or ‘You babble on incessantly.’ So, what am I missing? At times I wonder if I am missing what never was.
Through my grief, I am mourning something, but it is not the reality. Perhaps it is normal to mourn the relationship that never was. As I recall, when I divorced my ex-husband nearly twenty years ago, there was a period of mourning what never was. However, I do really appreciate my father’s talent even more now. My father was extremely talented and probably greatly contributed to my own talents. Perhaps I can appreciate is gifts more now than he is gone. It is sad there will be no more poems ever again.
A quote from Grief in Common that sounded a little like what I am going through.
Losing and grieving for a loved one we had a complicated relationship with leaves the same void in our lives as other losses, but it can leave with it even more unanswered questions and unfinished business. – Grief in Common
Image by Joachim Mayr from Pixabay
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