As I approach sixty (in my sixtieth year now), I admit to feeling almost no remaining guilt, anger, or regret whenever I think about my parents. There are just a few whispers, but my attachments to them are long gone.

As a kid, living with them had been both exciting and scary. As an adult, I found that their deaths made me feel real closure and relief.

My Dad

When my dad died, I was 23. It was a painful, rending loss of a person whom I’d once admired, loved, feared, and finally pitied. A year or so after he died, I learned about the full extent of his abuses in my family and I grew to bitterly despise him, his hypocrisy, and his total lack of accountability. He’d raised me with words like respect and responsibility, but his nature contradicted that: He tended to want to sweep his failings under the carpet rather than face them and try to fix them. His narcissistic and authoritarian character ultimately destroyed any fatherly image he’d tried to own.

I took many lessons of his life into my heart. Whenever I need to bring out a strong, authoritative voice, it’s his voice that emerges. He could be sweet, caring, and gentle, but his good moments are forever in risk of being eclisped by his bad ones. That scale is inherently biased: violence, whether psychological/or physical has a denser molecular structure than peace and love. One nasty, violent act, if unredeemed, can overshadow fifty acts of kindness.

I really had to hate the man to truly let him go. When he died, I grieved, but I also felt calmer in the realization that my obligation to him was finished.

My Mum

When my mum died, I was 29.  I felt such a mix of regret and relief. She’d been remote, like a stranger to me, for as long as I could remember. She’d been an enigma, hard to know, and even harder to reach. Her depression and alcoholism were terrible barriers for her to hide behind, but that was her passive, withdrawn way. As a family, we did nothing to intervene. The elephant in the room was illustrated blatantly in a TV commercial I saw as a kid, and that simple phrase and image has stayed with me all my life. We never acknowledged our elephants. Nothing was to be spoken about it.

Over eighteen years of awkward visits in whatever hospital my Mum was living in, I could never really know if she recognized or saw me, even when I was standing right in front of her. She’d left her family to be mired in her own dead end existence, without physically going anywhere. It was no life for her.

I decided to try to preserve her best qualities within my own values and actions and to never punish her for her lack of mothering. Being a mother was never in her nature. She needed mothering and support herself. She was a victim of forces that I couldn’t understand.

Some break-ups just take a long time. Forty years on, I’m still learning from my parents’ examples.