What To Do When The 'Wrong' Parent Dies And You Have To Move Forward

Grief cuts deep, but losing the 'wrong' parent feels like a scab repeatedly salted and picked

Jul 28, 2024

My mum will hate me for writing this. It’s possible she already does.

Dad died at the end of 2021 from cancer and COVID and it’s one of the hardest experiences of my life. I had no idea back then it would split my family apart.

We don’t talk about grief enough. We don’t talk about resenting the ones that lived at all. That’s 100% taboo.

I must be a monster.

How could I even think such things? The truth is, I do.

I’m not proud of myself. I sometimes loathe this part of me. But I need to give it space to breathe or it’ll eat me alive. Perhaps you need to air it out too.

If you require it, this is permission to do so.

Grief makes your weird, intrusive thoughts the only thoughts

I had many weird, intrusive thoughts about life, the meaning of it, and how others are affected by grief.

I’ve always had intrusive thoughts. You know the ones - go on, touch that hot hob, how painful is a boiling kettle, really? Ugh this woman is really boring - I wonder what’d happen if I just walked away….?

Thankfully, I keep 99.9% of these in check, being a sensible, non-misanthrope, going about my business in my life.

During complex and elongated grief though, all bets were off.

There were so many questions floating around in my head during those early bereavement months:

Is my grief the same as someone who loses their dad as a child?
Is my grief different to someone who loses a parent when they’re both old?
Is my grief different to someone who loses a parent they hate?
Is my grief going to change or feel like something I exist with?
When will I know the grief has lifted?
Will I see him again when I die or will I be worm food?
Am I a bad person if I enjoy myself when dad’s still dead?

I shut myself away for months as grief took hold of my life and half-existence.

I didn’t want to live anymore. It all seemed so pointless. What’s the point of going on if he won’t be there to see it with me?

Drifting. Devastated. Done.

Whilst I was losing my mind, mum insisted I was still on rescue her duties.

She can’t cope now that dad has gone.

I don’t know how hard she’s got it.

She never had to fend for herself like this.

Of course.

Silly me.

Mum had hopes and dreams once, but they were stolen by the victim within

Mum has had a difficult life.

She was sent from her home, parents, and their farm in the Bangladeshi countryside to the capital Dhaka at 7, to live with her oldest brother and his family.

She never felt wanted or accepted.

At 18, she was married to my dad after meeting him twice - neither wanted that by most accounts. When I was 5, she had an accident on the stairs that damaged her spine and she was never the same.

Our family was never the same.

She fell into a victim-and-chronic-pain-and-depression narrative that became her well-worn identity ever since.

Every time she made small steps forward, the victim reappeared like cement shoes tied to her feet, keeping her stuck in a tragic moment in the ‘80s.

I never felt she was there for me after that. My needs became secondary.

I knew she loved me - she’s told me as much. Just not enough to get past whatever was troubling her, so that took over. Consumed in her own pain, suffering and resentment at a hopeful, healthy life stolen away like every other thing she’d known.

I’m painfully aware she’s never felt settled, stable or secure. I have compassion for that loss and insecurity. It hurts to realise I’ll never understand the true depths of her pain because she can’t fully articulate it to me in words or actions.

That doesn’t mean I don’t deserve stability and security too. Duality exists in this space - these opposing concepts can and do co-exist.

Through years of therapy, I eventually realised, and tentatively accepted, mum wasn’t the mum I wanted or needed her to be.

She didn’t have it in her. I grieved that loss starting many years ago, and am reminded of it often.

It’s strange letting go of someone who’s still here.

Mum goes large on being high-maintenance mum

Mum lurches from being sweet, curious and kind, to upset, angry and manipulative super fast. I still don’t catch it on time. My peace of mind is pierced by confusing, circular conversations and guilt-trips.

Oh man, the guilt-trips.

There’s nothing quite like a disappointed, Asian mother, and how she guilt-trips you within 15 seconds of answering the phone.

It’s a superpower. Marvel should hire her to reignite the MCU with Deadpool & Wolverine.

Within minutes she’d bring out the I can’t believe you don’t love me, the person who gave birth to you. Don’t you know how painful this is for me? card if I don’t do something she wants. It’s a unique, niche card to be fair.

You’re right, mum, I’m a despicable human being.

How dare I keep breathing? Anyway, how’s the garden looking?

I even respond to her like this now, just to see if she’s listening.

Often it doesn’t register. And if it does, she takes it literally. I’m too sarcastic for my own good, it seems. Oopskies.

I realise this doesn’t help our relationship anymore, but I’m too tired to play the game. We’re not speaking right now. It has been months since this recent blow up, and it’s easily the worst yet.

The confusing thing about grieving a relationship with someone who still exists, is your mind has moved on, but theirs hasn’t.

They don’t understand why you’re not responding as upset as they are.
They don’t understand why you’re not as hurt and rejected when you step away.
They don’t understand why you’re not balling when they cry in front of you.
They don’t understand they never noticed when you did the same things as a child.

In the end, you lose hope they’ll ever notice. You know they won’t.

So you grieve, and make your peace with it, however fragile that is.

You look like a heartless, ice-cold person, but it helps you survive.

When being close to dad worked against me

My friends and family recognised how close I was to dad, and how much I adored him. We were in touch every day, sending WhatsApp messages to each other. Pictures of cats, flowers, birds, urban foxes, and other rando things we enjoyed. We talked almost daily.

He’d assigned me his next-of-kin for treatment decisions ahead of mum and older brother. Even when he was so sick, he knew I’d handle it better than either of them. The nurses confirmed as much.

I’d relay snippets of the doctor discussions to the family, knowing they wouldn’t understand or feel settled with the details. I held onto that trauma myself. Mum later told me she was anxious and couldn’t sleep due to what I’d shared. My instinct was right, as I’d kept so much of the worst stuff back.

My family were hard to manage during and after his swift demise. They didn’t have the daily hour long discussions with the doctors, learning how COVID was ravaging his system. How his organs were failing. How he became unconscious and they struggled to offer the best treatment options because it’d make other symptoms worse.

I’ve never really processed that experience. It’s in a dark, mental box somewhere, along with the ‘did I make the right choices for him?’ whispers that linger in your soul.

After he died, I kept sending those WhatsApp messages to his phone for a while. I couldn’t get out of the habit. It felt wrong. I missed him terribly and wished he would reply somehow. The habit stopped eventually, but grief is your brain relearning how to exist without that part of your life in it.

Mary-Frances O’Connor, grief researcher and author of The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, gives a handy if mundane analogy - it’s as if someone has stolen your dining room table.

For a while, your brain still expects it to be there.

You go to put a cup on it - you can’t.
You move to avoid the corner hitting your hip - it’s missing.
You go to send messages to your beloved dad - he’s gone forever.

Dammit. That’s annoying.

People are cocky and flippant about COVID now, but if you haven’t witnessed those protected hospital zones, and the traumatised, haunted faces of the staff, you did well.

I was furious with dad for leaving me behind

I was the last person in the family to see him alive before he slipped into unconsciousness and ICU finality. I’m so glad the doctors encouraged me to go visit him that Friday - they sensed it would likely go one way.

He was still partly lucid by the time I’d made the 1.5 hours to the Chelsea and Westminster hospital. I had some hope, but a small part of me felt it might be the last time.

My brother and I got to see dad after he died the following weekend (only 2 people were allowed). Since he was in a COVID ICU isolation red zone in the hospital, we wrapped up in layers of protective clothing, like a cheap Christmas present made of loo roll and gauze.

We sat with him, balling our eyes out, and snotty-nosed (getting trapped in layers of paper and plastic mask - ick). I realised all I was saying to him in my head, over and over again, was ‘How could you leave me here with these a**holes?’.

Wow, that’s harsh.

Definitely unexpected. Not what you’d want your last thoughts or words to be to a dead parent. I’m sure I said other, healthier and kinder things too.

I’m not that awful. Am I?

Perhaps I realised deep down how everything in my family life seismically shifted from the moment he died.

I was alone. Truly alone now.

I’d lost the one person I was closest to on this planet. The one who showed me real, unconditional love. I’ll never have that again. All other love feels so conditional. Realising this still chokes me up so much. It hurts - in my heart, body, and soul.

We’re not meant to feel alone.

He kept our teetering family balance in check, and made me feel like I wasn’t just made to fix and rescue others.

He understood the sacrifices I’d made, and appreciated them. He was the glue that kept our family together, no matter how tenuously.

Geez, I miss him.

You have to feel the difficult feelings, especially with grief

Recently, a few friends have lost a parent. I’m at that age where it becomes a familiar experience. We’ve all felt various versions of the story above.

We lost the parent we were closest to, and are left with confusing, emotional baggage we never wanted, or expected, about those who remain.

I’ve noticed you must let yourself feel the pain and discomfort of grief. Whichever form it takes. And I mean let yourself - you know you’re holding that tsunami back because it scares you. If you allow it, will it ever stop?

That’s how powerful this force is. It’s so fundamental to who we are, at a physical, mental, and spiritual level. But that energy must go somewhere. If not expressed, it festers within.

Several of my burnt out coaching clients lost a parent prior to their symptoms worsening. We immerse ourselves in work so we don’t feel the pain. Busy = numb.

Everyone does a form of this - throwing yourself into isolation. You lose touch with the deepest parts of yourself, and zombie your way through life. Autopilot is a mood.

Only when I allowed the depths of grief to be expressed throughout my entire body, did it loosen its icy grip on me.

That makes sense.

How can we love someone for decades, and expect their loss to be handled in days or weeks?

That formula doesn’t make sense.

You and your nervous system need time to relearn a new reality. It’s effortful, necessary, and sad.

I found solace in art-journalling and creative expression to make sense of my world. The complexity, the conflicts, the hurt, the good memories, the confusion, the hope. It was all rendered on paper in front of me. I got perspective, and noticed insights I wasn’t aware of.

A hidden part of me was seen.

Key takeaways

If you take one thing away, let it be this: your thoughts and feelings are normal.

You’re not a monster.

You’re not a despicable human being.

You’re not a heartless, ice-cold person,

You’re not awful.

You’re a human in pain.

Mourn the love lost - whenever you lost them, and whether they’re alive or not.

Allow hurt, pain, disappointment, devastation, anger, and yearning cloak you in a sheet of grief. Share it in your own creative expressive language - writing, art-journalling, music, constructing, science, sports, play, dance…

You’ll take the life-saving steps towards making sense of your experience, find meaning, and it’ll move you forward. You might be limping but it’s progress.

The late Queen Elizabeth II said one of my favourite quotes about grief and loss:

Grief is the price we pay for love.

Queen Elizabeth II

The larger that love, the larger the grief.

That formula makes sense.

In time, you’ll find your form of peace. Trust me, it will come.

Feel free to share your personal, difficult or painful experiences in the comments. You’re not a monster here. And if we are, let’s be monsters together.