Don’t Be Sorry for My Loss

Come now, O Final Hour;

On wingèd messenger, arrive.

Pray, find us worthy before thee;

Lift us into eternal peace.

---

My mother died recently.

We buried her a week and a half ago, and the funeral went exactly the way a funeral should go.

People came from everywhere. I saw relatives I hadn’t seen in decades. I saw a cousin undergoing chemotherapy for brain cancer who could barely walk, but who came anyway. I saw another cousin I may not have seen in twenty-eight years, and she looked phenomenal.

Everybody gathered, hugged, talked, remembered, and repeated the thing families always say at funerals: it’s terrible that this is what it takes to get everybody together. Maybe. But I’ve been thinking that perhaps these are precisely the moments when we most need to see one another.

I’m fifty-four years old now, and by God, I feel better about my life than I ever have.

I don’t say that to beat my chest or advertise some triumphant version of myself, and I’m certainly not trying to manufacture a moment out of my mother’s death so people can shower me with adulation. I mean, seriously - I’ve never particularly enjoyed public displays of personal milestones. Business, maybe, because I gotta make that money, but when it comes to personal stuff, not so much. Like, I don’t even put my birthday on social media. Birthdays, for me, are not opportunities to collect congratulations from people I barely know. Instead, I would rather put the phone down, sit somewhere quietly, and take inventory of where I am, where I’ve been, what I’m doing with the time I have, what I mean to the people around me, and whether I’m the best version of myself for myself and the people in my life.

My mother’s death has turned into one of those inventory days, except this one has lasted for months. Years, even. And here is the part that is difficult to say publicly because our culture has such a limited vocabulary for what happens when a parent dies:

I am not devastated.

I am not overcome with grief. I do not feel some enormous hole where my mother used to be. I have barely cried. And I don’t feel guilty about any of that.

My mother and I had a difficult relationship for most of my life. My parents were unhappy with each other almost as far back as I can remember, and I knew as a little boy that something was wrong in our house. The temperature in our family could turn dark without warning, and I learned early to anticipate it. My mother acted as a barometer on occasion, but warning and protecting are not the same thing. I experienced things in that house that I would never describe as a normal childhood. There was physical punishment that crossed lines, there was fear, there was anger, and there was the constant instinct to stay out of the line of fire.

When I was six years old, I was already asking my mother when she planned to divorce my father. She would tell me she couldn’t do it yet because she was afraid he might take my younger brothers. Looking back on this yearly answer, I'm not entirely sure this was true, but it worked. She knew this answer served more than one purpose every time she said it: it closed the conversation down with a material piece of info she knew I'd never question or repeat, and it reinforced the anxiety I felt around my dad.

Eventually, in 1985, they did divorce, my brothers stayed with my mom and me, and I thought everything was going to get better.

A year later, my mom, my brothers and I moved to another town, and something extraordinary happened to me: I met families who seemed to actually LIKE one another. My friends’ parents TALKED to them. They gave them ADVICE. They asked them questions. They appeared to enjoy having their children around, and some of them even seemed to enjoy having me around.

I remember being astonished by this.

At home, meanwhile, my mother was raising three boys alone, working, trying to build a new life, and carrying whatever burdens and wounds she had accumulated from her own upbringing and marriage.

Eventually she met Jim, the divorced man who lived down the street. He had children of his own, and they married in 1990. From all appearances, they found in each other something they both desperately needed. By then, I was doing everything I could to be somewhere else. Religion had become an increasingly powerful force in my mother’s life, and so had conservatism. Neither provided much comfort to me.

In fact, for nearly two years in high school, my family would walk into church on Sunday morning, everybody would head toward their Sunday school classes, and I would quietly turn around and walk back out the door. I’d walk around town until it was time to return for the main service. Eventually I was caught, and at seventeen I told my mother I wasn’t going back to church and dared her to make me.

Then there was my overseas trip the summer before my senior year of high school. I spent a month in Russia and came home wearing an earring. My mother greeted me happily at the airport, but once we were home she lost her mind over the earring. She gave me the choice to lose it or move out, so I moved out, at least briefly. The earring eventually came out only because my ear became infected. I went back home and barely spoke to her for weeks.

That became something of a pattern between us. I wanted independence, and she wanted something from me that I never completely understood. Whatever role she imagined for her oldest son, I apparently never materialized into it.

When it came time for college, I was obsessed with one thing: not becoming a financial burden. I had planned to attend Tulane’s architecture school. We visited New Orleans, I came away unimpressed, and the finances were daunting anyway. My mother seemed enormously relieved when I said I wasn’t going. I ended up starting at a cheaper college, then transferring to the University of Tennessee. After a year of out-of-state tuition, I figured out how to establish residency and pay in-state rates.

I was always calculating and planning, always trying to figure out how not to cost my family money. I wanted financial independence as quickly and completely as possible, partly because I thought that would make everyone’s life easier and partly because independence meant nobody could control me with money. I don’t know whether my mother ever understood it that way. I think I spent much of my youth believing I was a burden to her, and the sooner I could remove myself from her financial orbit, the better off everyone would be.

As the decades passed, my mother and I became increasingly distant. Holidays made my entire nervous system tighten. I would call on birthdays and Mother’s Day and other occasions because that was what sons were supposed to do, while she literally never called me. Our conversations followed a familiar pattern: I would ask about her, she would tell me things reluctantly, then gradually begin talking, but she never asked about me. Eventually some old story would surface about something I’d done as a child, as though she were trying to locate an earlier version of me that she understood better.

When Carl became part of my life, I simply brought him home. I didn’t really ask anyone’s permission. That, too, was part of who I had become in the family. I didn’t ask permission to live my life. I announced what I was doing and did it. Maybe that was part of the problem between my mother and me. She knew she couldn’t control me.

There were holiday blowups. One Thanksgiving I said in the family group chat that I wasn’t coming home and she became furious. This past year I received the familiar expectation disguised as an invitation: “I haven’t heard from you about Thanksgiving. I assume you’re coming.” It wasn’t, “I’d love to see you.” It wasn’t, “I hope you can make it.” It was an expectation, and expectations between us always seemed to carry consequences.

By then I had spent years learning that distance made me healthier. Being around my mother could produce a physical response in me. Once, after an especially difficult episode, I had a panic attack severe enough to send me to the hospital. So I stayed away when I could.

Then came this year.

Around Easter, I went home. Partly because our birthdays are close together and partly because I felt the old obligation to appear, satisfy the expectation, and let her check the box saying I had been there. And something had changed. I walked into a bathroom renovation that had become a disaster, but it wasn’t really about the bathroom. The bathroom was evidence.

Something was wrong.

Not the old something that had always been wrong between my mother and me. Something new. Something structural. Something dangerous. I knew her health had been deteriorating, the house was becoming difficult to manage, and I was pretty sure finances needed attention. Projects were apparently getting away from them. And I knew Jim was exhausted.

A week or so after that visit, my mother texted my brothers and me that during a power outage that afternoon, she had been unable to get out of her electric reclining chair and had soiled herself. That was the moment when I told my brothers we needed to go home, sit down with Mama and Jim, and conduct a situation analysis. We needed to understand what was happening medically and financially with her, what they both could still manage, what they could no longer manage, what would happen if things got worse, and which one of us was going to take responsibility for what.

My brothers came, and we began.

A few weeks later things deteriorated again, and I came back with Carl and my brothers to help get my mother into the hospital. From that point forward, our family went into crisis-management mode, and something happened during those three months that I will probably spend years reflecting upon: my brothers and I divided the work, and we got shit DONE.

My brother Stuart carried almost the entire medical burden. I watched him put enormous portions of his own life on hold. Hospitals, physicians, procedures, decisions, rehabilitation, medications, phone calls, impossible choices. Again and again, he showed up. I learned more about my brother during those months than I had learned in years. I learned what frightens him, what matters to him, how deeply he loves his sons, and how much he values the partnership he has built with his wife. I became enormously proud of him.

Michael participated differently, and through him I learned something equally important about boundaries. I learned to hear what he meant when he said, “I can’t do that.” I learned that two identical twins can construct remarkably different lives while still being much more alike than either probably realizes.

I learned about Jim, too. I saw an eighty-five-year-old man who had spent years serving the woman he loved. I saw how tired he was. I saw how much he adored her and how much she could simultaneously drive him crazy. I saw a man who had made service almost the organizing principle of his marriage, and I saw what that service had cost him physically and emotionally by the end.

And I learned something about myself.

I run toward certain kinds of fires. I am good at chaos when the chaos can be converted into a spreadsheet.

There was a contractor who needed firing, so I fired him. There was a bathroom that needed finishing, so I hired someone else, managed the project, and got it finished. There were finances that needed organizing, bills that needed paying, companies and salespeople and questionable solicitations that had worked their way into my mother’s financial life, so I started cutting them out. There were legal documents that needed attention, so I convinced my mom to give me power of attorney, and I dealt with them swiftly.

The house was solely in my mother’s name. I helped get the deed structured so that Jim would be protected. Their monthly income was not going to support the kind of care either of them could soon require, so I helped arrange a home equity conversion mortage that would allow their paid-off house to become a tool for their own care rather than frozen money just sitting there trapped in the walls. I covered expenses when things needed to be done immediately, and some of that money I will never see again. That is fine.

It wasn’t generosity in the sentimental sense. It was problem prevention. I could see the mess coming down the road, and I knew that if I could get ahead of it all, spend money in the right places, sign documents, make calls, and use my real estate expertise to solve things now, I could prevent a much larger catastrophe later.

That is one of the ways I love people. Not everybody recognizes it as love. But I do.

During those months, something unexpected happened between my mother and me. She trusted me. I would sit beside her and speak quietly and slowly about what I thought needed to happen next. I wasn’t asking her to become a different person, and I wasn’t revisiting old arguments. I had no interest in collecting apologies or proving that I had been right about anything. I would simply tell her what the situation was, what I thought we should do, and why.

Most of the time, she listened. And then, when I was done laying out the black and white of it all, she would simply look up at me, and say, "OK."

For perhaps the first time in our lives, the very thing that had caused friction between us became useful. She knew she could not control me, but she also knew I was in control of myself. And in the end, perhaps that was exactly what she needed.

At her funeral, the pastor said something that made the congregation laugh. “If you knew Jan, you knew there was Jan’s way to do something, or the wrong way.” Everyone laughed because everyone knew exactly what he meant. For one moment, sitting there, I felt an unexpected sense of recognition. They saw it too.

Of course they didn’t experience it the way her children or husbands did. They didn’t have to grow up inside it or navigate it for half a century. But they knew. There is something tremendously validating about hearing an entire room affectionately acknowledge a trait that, inside a family, could be profoundly difficult.

My mother wanted control. She could become extraordinarily angry when circumstances refused to conform to the outcome she had already decided should occur. There were times during her final illness when that side of her came out with tremendous force. Stuart saw it. He told me later that I had warned him it would happen, and that when it did, he recognized the version of our mother he remembered from childhood.

Illness may have intensified it. Medications, carbon dioxide retention from her pulmonary fibrosis, delirium from being intubated for days on end while being in and out of the ICU ... fear, exhaustion, and the loss of independence may all have played roles. I don’t know, and at this point I don’t need to diagnose it anymore. I lived it. That’s enough.

And now, it's simply... over.

That sentence may offend some people. But I suspect there are many others who desperately need permission to say it.

---

You know, when people find out your mother just died, they naturally say, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” I understand why. It's kind, and it's what we say. But some private part of me sometimes wants to answer, “You don’t have to be.”

In fact, there are moments when I almost want someone to say, "Congratulations." Seriously. Not congratulations that my mother is dead. I mean, yeah, that would be weird. But congratulations that I made it through. Congratulations that after fifty-four years of navigating a relationship that frequently hurt me, I managed to arrive at its end without abandoning her when she became helpless.

I guess I just want someone to understand the feeling of accomplishment that I have right now in reaching the finish line after having done the work. I got the legal work done. The finances were stabilized. Jim is protected. The house is secure. The bills are paid. With Stuart's leadership and Jim's help, medical decisions were made. The funeral happened beautifully. Family showed up. We did everything we knew how to do, and there is no unfinished emergency waiting for us.

The best metaphor I can find is leaving a job you needed to leave years ago. You don’t storm out one afternoon and burn the building down. You plan. You finish the work. You organize the files. You prepare and maybe even train the person who comes after you. If you cared about your job, you make sure nothing essential has been forgotten. You close your office door, and then one day, for the first time in years, you realize you don’t have to go back.

That is approximately how I feel. I don’t feel loss. I feel release.

And because people expect grief to look a particular way, I sometimes feel as though I am supposed to hide the peace.

I won’t.

Because here's the honest truth: complicated parents create complicated grief. Sometimes the grief comes twenty or thirty years before the funeral. Sometimes what dies when a parent dies is the final possibility that the relationship could ever become what you once hoped it would be. And sometimes even that possibility disappeared long ago.

None of this means I hated my mother, and it does not mean that her friends or the rest of my family were wrong to love her. My brothers are entitled to their own grief, and their relationship with her was not mine. One of the most important things I have learned is that two people can know the same person and legitimately know two different people.

Someone can be a wonderful friend and a difficult mother. Someone can be admired professionally and deeply challenging at home. Someone can be generous to a community and controlling within a family. Someone can be loved deeply by one child and experienced very differently by another. All of those things can be true at once.

We see this all the time. A couple divorces and everyone says, “But he is such a wonderful guy.” Maybe he is. To you. You didn’t marry him. Relationships happen in the space between two particular people, and nobody standing outside that space ever sees all of it.

My relationship with my mother belonged to my mother and me. The simplest description may be the truest one: we did not get along.

I don’t know exactly why. Maybe I was never the son she imagined. Maybe independence felt like rejection to her. Maybe my refusal to be controlled felt threatening. Maybe I reminded her of someone. Maybe she simply did not know how to give me what I needed and I did not know how to give her what she needed. There may never be an answer.

But here is what I know now: when she needed me, I came; when her world began falling apart, I helped put it back in order; when old resentments could have become weapons, I put them down; when my brothers needed help, I helped them; when Jim needed protection, I protected him; when my mother could still make decisions, I helped her make the ones that would protect the people she was leaving behind; and finally, when there was nothing left to fix, I stopped fixing.

At last, when she died, I knew that I had done my part.

Maybe that is why I do not feel grief the way people expect me to. I am not being chased by unfinished business. There is no conversation I am desperate to have now that it is too late, and there is no argument I wish I had won. What I feel instead is the strange peace of having anticipated the emergency, entered it when it arrived, did everything I was capable of doing, and stayed until the work was finished.

I spent much of my life learning how to survive my relationship with my mother. During the last months of hers, I learned how to serve her without losing myself. That may be the closest thing to reconciliation we were ever going to have. And for me, it was enough.

---

So if your parent is getting older and your relationship with them is complicated, I want you to know something I wish people talked about more often. You are allowed to help someone without rewriting history. You are allowed to care for someone while still remembering the ways they hurt you. You can establish boundaries and still answer the telephone when the real emergency comes. You can love someone in the only way you know how to love them safely, and when they die, whatever you actually feel is what you actually feel.

When it's all said and done, here's the bottom line from one end of the candlestick to the other: (1) there is no moral superiority in being destroyed by someone’s death, and (2) there is no moral failure in surviving it peacefully.

In other words, grief is not a measure of love, and devastation is not proof that a relationship mattered more.

My mother died. My family came together. We buried her. And I did right by her.

And now, for the first time in a very long time, the relationship between my mother and me asks absolutely nothing more of either of us.

I am glad it is over.

I am glad I stayed until it was.

And I am at peace.