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Shredding my mom’s papers.  There are still bad feelings from the relatives some 8 years later after my mom died.  They hate me for “slapping her in a nursing home and just watching her die”.  They forced their way into her funeral arrangements.  They demanded that I go against my mom’s wishes for disposal of her remains.  I wasn’t torn up enough. I just didn’t meet their expectations of what a grieving daughter should act and be like.  What a bunch of hypocrites. 

She had cancer.  She couldn’t take care of herself.  My sister was several states away.  I had to make a choice.  I often wonder if she thought she was in purgatory or some hell that she couldn’t escape those last few months.  The cancer had gone to her brain and through some strange quirk, she outlived her hospice care.  She was delusional, in great pain, heavily medicated, incontinent, and dying by inches.

My sister told me a few years later Mom would call and ask what she had done to me to deserve this.  I wonder at my sister’s motives for telling me this so many years later.  It wasn’t like she was ever around for the hard decisions.  Maybe guilt? Anger?

The relatives all wanted me to do something.  To be there for my mother.  They still to this day, think badly of me, because I didn’t have that lovely relationship they all wished we had. I didn’t seem to have the right reactions.  Before Mom went into the nursing home, each aunt would schedule time, connive to get us isolated together somewhere, so we could ‘just work it out’ because they knew that we were just too stubborn for our own good.  My mother abused me.  They never knew.  Little did they realize that I had already made my own way and peace with it.

There is no law that says you must like your parents. I believe self-preservation is a must.  Why do we follow our instincts with anyone else but family?  Why do you all let the ones that raised you treat you like dirt?  Sometimes the only way to stop the bleeding and heal, is to cut them off.  If that means you move on and detach from the situation, then do it.  If it means not allowing yourself to play into the emotional blackmail, then do it.  Do what you have to do to be right with yourself.

So now that the papers are shredded and the last physical vestiges of my mother are shredded, I still wonder if anyone will understand?