Losing Someone Who Already Felt Lost

It’s a strange feeling when someone dies in your family with whom you had a tumultuous relationship with. My husband and I have both held what my dad called this “emotional Rubik’s cube” in our hands over the past year.

Two days ago, one of my grandmothers died. As a child, I thought she was strange, but as I got older and matured, I started to recognize that some of the behaviors I brushed off as odd were unhealthy. Now, I look back at childhood memories, as most of us do, with a new lens.

Everyone has that time. Whereas we age and cross from childhood into adulthood, we start to see the adults in our lives as less authoritative and all-knowing, and instead begin to see them as what they really are: flawed humans like everyone else.  At some point, we realize that the parent or grandparent who had all the answers may have given us a few wrong ones. That they have their own demons they wrestle with, and once we realize that, we see some of our childhood memories in a different context. 

My grandma was one such person. She had many of her own demons and she and I hadn’t spoken in at least 4 years and I had mostly avoided her for nearly a decade before that. She was unkind to my mother, she was inappropriate with my children, and my husband and I had decided early in our marriage that she wasn’t a safe influence for our family. We decided to keep our distance.

The truth is, though, that she was mentally ill and let her illness go undiagnosed for reasons we may never know, aside from the fact that she was very vocal about her mistrust of doctors. She lived through hardships we knew about, and many we didn’t. She lost her sister as a young adult, and then lost her only son at nearly the same age. In her elderly years and what should have been retirement, she was the primary caretaker to my great-grandmother.

When I first heard she was gone, I had regrets that we didn’t speak before her passing. Not because I wanted an apology or that I needed to apologize to her. But, I felt like I had an obligation to say goodbye that I had neglected to attend to. I felt the need to mourn that she was never the person I thought she could be. That she was never the person I wanted her to be, but soon realized that was selfish; to wish someone else had lived their own lives differently for your own benefit. So then I felt guilt. She was angry most of my life, and she slipped into unconsciousness as that same angry person. 

But rather than mourn she never changed, I’ve chosen instead to celebrate that she is now healing with God. That she is at peace.

The reason I chose to share this post is this: if someone in your life dies with whom you didn’t have a good relationship with, give yourself space to feel what you feel. It’s okay to be sad, even if you didn’t get along with them. Its ok to be angry because the relationship wasn’t what it could have been. Its ok to be happy they are at peace. What I realized in these last two days is that death isn’t our responsibility to make sense of, and neither is how someone else lived their lives. All we can do is control how we live our own lives and how we nurture the relationships around us that matter the most. 

I hope that if you too, have lost someone who had already felt lost, you can find peace in their peace.