old griefs, old guilt

It is over 30 years since my mother died. My father had died a few years earlier. I did not stay with my mother more than a few days when my father died--I had moved across the country a few years before this and hated the city I'd grown up in, and being there or around all the struggles and (Cold War era) crushings that the place and my mother brought up made me feel as if my identity were at risk. And so I left her to her grief. And when, three or four years later, she came to visit, I was preoccupied with a broken love affair and was rude, very rude, even though I could see she seemed sick. And when I learned six months later that she was going to die of cancer "in a few months--though she'll be better now for awhile, so don't hurry back here, it'll only frighten her if both you kids come to visit now," I delayed going back to that city to, as I thought would probably be necessary, stay with her. And then there was the telegram that she had died.   And when I was a child, I stayed home from school playing sick and so she had to stay home with me, and I was a rude teenager, and I avoided, as a kid, helping her with chores, and my cat, when I was a young teen, made her extra work.   And I wasn't there for her--only one hug, one day, on parting--when she visited me, the last time, before she went home and no longer could fight being ill.    And now I have passed the age at which she died, and am even older, and the guilt (no, not rationally, but the old child's guilt and (more rationally based) young woman's guilt) remain, and the grieving, never finished.

[Judy246]

Hi Polly,

Please don't torment yourself with the past.  The past is just that the past. Your mother would not want you suffering, especially over 30 yrs.  It's time to forgive yourself and know that you and your mom have a bond that death can never break and one day in God's time, she will come running to you from the gates of heaven and be that guiding light to show you the way.

Live your life and I don't know if you are religious, but go to confession and have absolution followed by communion. God will grant you the peace that you need.

Judy