Grieving What Could Have Been
At the end of May, I got a Facebook message I’d been expecting for years. It was my cousin reaching out to let me know my father was in the hospital and — as it turns out — on his deathbed.
My father (we’ll call him Dan) wasn’t a likable man. He was mean, arrogant, and manipulative. Dan walked out on my family when I was a young teen and never looked back. In fact, I can’t even recall the last time I saw him in person.
When my mom died in 2020, my father reached out to my younger sister and my older brother with sympathy cards, hoping, I suspect, that we’d want to reignite a relationship of sorts. Dan was elderly, not in great health, and the more cynical part of me believes he was looking for a caretaker in his old age. I was living in the Nashville area, so he didn’t know how to get in touch with me.
None of us responded, nor did we want a relationship with this man who’d abandoned us all nearly 30 years earlier without so much as a backward glance. I had long since forgotten him. My mom was my lighthouse in a storm, and he was a faded memory.
Living abroad means sometimes being the last to know anything. However, in this case, Dan had only two immediate relatives left: my sister and me. I’m the only one who uses social media, so my cousin knew precisely how to reach me.
How do you respond when someone tells you your father is dying? What do you say when they want to know if you have any preferences about burial, life support, or any other end-of-life issues?
I wanted to be respectful. After all, my cousin was the one who was going to have to deal with the aftermath of Dan’s death — a man who wasn’t liked by many in his family or community. Taking on that task was no easy feat, and I wanted to honor that.
“I’ll honor whatever you decide,” I responded. “We haven’t had a relationship in decades, and I don’t feel it would be right for me to make those decisions.”
It landed with a thud. As soon as I typed it out, I knew how it sounded, and I hated it. But Dan was a virtual stranger to me, so making decisions about his end-of-life care didn’t feel right either.
When a parent dies and you had no relationship, what are you supposed to feel? What should the response be when you live thousands of miles away and don’t want to participate in grieving someone who didn’t love you?
For me, I grieved what I lost long, long ago. Dan’s death was an acceptance of what could have been but not what was. I couldn’t grieve someone I didn’t really know and never would. But I could mourn the loss of a relationship I had once very much wanted.
In the end, my cousin took care of ensuring Dan was cremated. His ashes will eventually be buried in a local church’s cemetery, and they’ll hold a memorial service that I — nor my family — will attend.
Forgiveness is a funny thing. You can offer it, feel it, believe it. But the sore spot it leaves on your soul remains. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting. While I forgave Dan long ago for my own sake, the scars he left on my childhood are with me forever. Living abroad released me from any remaining vestiges of responsibility, and now that he’s gone, the reality that I am truly an orphan in this world hits a little bit harder.
If you’ve ever lost a parent you never really had, I’m with you in solidarity. I see you. And if it feels especially complicated because you’re living far away from home, I understand.
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