It seems like more and more people are working to protect their peace, and for many of us that includes going no contact with friends, family, and even parents. The worry and anxiety that can follow that is overwhelming, and what do you do when there are curveball thrown your way while trying to manage an estranged relationship?
You see, I’ve got an exclusive membership that I don’t want. It’s not illustrious or anything, there’s no wait list, and it’s certainly not envied by anyone that I know. I’m a card carrying member of the “Dead Dad Club”. The hardest part of being in the club is that prior to joining I had been in therapy working on re-parenting myself and healing my inner child, when my brother showed up at my apartment one Monday morning in October, a cloud hung low above his head, with the news that granted me access to this club.
My father and I had a tricky relationship since adolescence and as an adult I was focused on managing the relationship as best as I could within a space that was healthy for me, which resulted in on and off periods of estrangement. We were in one of those periods when he passed suddenly and unexpectedly. There are times when I feel thrust back into those weeks following his death, when I forget that he isn’t just living in Florida, and that I haven’t heard from him in a while. As Kacey Musgraves sings in her song Justified, released the same year I lost my dad, “healing doesn’t happen in a straight line” and I had expected my journey through this grief to at least be some sort of roller coaster ride with highs and lows, but to at least have some sort of flow, but there are moments when I blink and I am back at the starting line.
The unexpected stage of grief
We all know the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. No one goes through a picture perfect grief period however, and those stages come and go in whichever order they please. On my personal grief journey, wedged in there somewhere between Anger and Depression, is Guilt. Everytime I find myself in that phase, it’s almost like there is a separate group of stages compounded on that, where the normal stages of grief come to screeching halt, and I have to put all my attention on working through the guilt before I can allow my body and mind to get back to processing the grief.
I feel an everlasting amount of guilt that the last few times that we had communicated he was angry with me. I had been trying to set some boundaries with him while I worked through things in therapy, and he was not happy with it one bit. He always struggled with boundaries, and took them personally. My mom and him had been divorced for years but she still held out hope that if I kept explaining my boundaries to him that one day, a light bulb would go off and he would get it. That was a feeling that was hard to let go of while he was living, and I thought I had, but when he died I had realized how wrong I was. My dad was one of mushy-love kind of parents while my mom wasn’t as attached her own emotions, so from my Dad it always felt over the top, but he always had to tell us how much he loved us, so that if anything ever happened, the last thing said between us was from a place of love.
My first introduction to guilt within this personalized grieving process came pretty quickly in the week after. It started as a little intrusive voice in my head, telling me that I wasn’t allowed to feel so sad, because my dad and I weren’t even talking in the year before his death. In therapy I had been coming to terms with the potential that my dad might not ever be able to respect my boundaries, and that he might not ever be able to be welcomed back into my life. I was already grieving the death of the relationship that I wanted to have with my dad, and in some way I felt that others were more justified in their grief. It had been me that was pushing him away, and because of that, I wasn’t worthy of being equals with my siblings as we walked behind his casket in church. I was there to support them, but as the estranged daughter, I was the odd one out. There was guilt the first time I genuinely laughed after his death. The first fathers day, on his birthday, on the first anniversary of his passing. The biggest was when I was moving into my first home, since my dad was a borderline professional mover. He could always be counted on to rent the truck and show up, ready to haul boxes and furniture.
Forgiveness is healing
The cycle of the stages of guilt, within the stages of grief, are still there but I have learned the hard lesson of how to better process those feelings. There is always the glimmer of guilt that I could have done better at maintaining that relationship, that I could have told him one last time that I still loved him, even though I needed space. That I could have explained more clearly that my boundaries were an effort to maintain the relationship, that they were not designed to hurt him. I remind myself that I did the best I could as the child within the relationship, that the anger I felt towards him is the anger from my inner Teenager after healing the inner child, and to give grace to that inner version of myself, to find “therapeutic forgiveness”, as my therapist calls it. I am here now, and the person that I would ask for forgiveness from for that, is no longer living. So as I am working on my own reparenting, I must also now forgive myself in his absence.
