We spent this past weekend saying goodbye to my mother. My brother has a ton of anger towards her, all justified. I won’t go into why. But it saddens me because he has so much anger towards her that he frequently directs it outwards. Fortunately, not towards me most of the time, because he sure used to direct his anger about both our parents towards me a lot when we were younger.
I’ve had many years of therapy dealing with my anger and sadness towards my parents, and my brother, and my dad’s second wife, and my ex-wife, etc. The good news is that I’m closer to my brother than I’ve ever been in my life.
Saying goodbye to my mother was hard. She was present at some of the happiest moments of my life, and some of the biggest accomplishments in my life. But she also left me bitter and abandoned several times in my life as she went on to other things.
When I heard she was dead, I didn’t cry. I barely felt anything. It had been coming for a while. When I went to British Columbia last week, I didn’t cry. I walked around her property and sat on her front porch and looked at her garden and her bird feeders and cried a bit. When we went down to the ocean to spread her ashes, I tried to think of something to say and nothing could sum up my complicated feelings. But when Brad and James let her ashes go into the ocean, I really did cry hard.
I’m still pretty choked up about it. Goodbye mum, I’ll try and remember the orienteering and skiing and backpacking and canoeing and forget the multiple multi-year periods where you couldn’t be bothered to talk to me.