07.OCT.00
Sorting Through ...
I've been thinking about my family. Thinking
about my brother-in-law's illness
has activated all sorts of old issues around the deaths of friends and
family in the last five years, and all of the fall out from those events.
There has been so much loss, and it's not just the loss of the dead.
My best friend's husband, who was also
our close friend, died of cancer about 6 years ago. I lost my best friend
at some level then, too, because when her husband died of cancer, she
fell into her own despair, and still is not fully whole again. I was
a major source of her support through almost all of that.
My mother died suddenly, after surgery,
just three months after my friend's husband died. I had only just begun
to re-establish a relationship with her after two years of her having
rejected me for crazy, paranoid reasons. One of which was as she stated
that I ..."told her how to keep her iced tea from being cloudy, therefore
I interfered"...crazy, eh? Another was what she referred to as being
annoyed by my husband's constant "smirk." There was lots unresolved
about that relationship don't you think? And things could never be resolved
once she died.
A friend who is a therapist told me that
that sort of relationship makes for what is called a complicated bereavement.
And she's right. No matter how I like to tell myself I've coped with
it, there are still levels which elude me and return to haunt me. There
may be no "ghosts" per se, but believe me, there are ghosts of relationship
issues which, if they remain unresolved, will come back to haunt you,
and bite you in the butt when you are least aware, just like the craziness
that bit you in the butt when the people were living.
In April of '97 I lost my favorite brother,
the one I was close to and with whom I had many things in common. At
that time, I also I lost the relationsip, lousy as it was, with my other
living brother due to his own personal unresolved issues, his sibling
rivalry issues and his stubbornness. I feel that relationship will never
be repaired. I am likely better off not to have to deal with him, but
he is my brother, and the loss is not something one can dismiss with
ease. It does make me sad, and again leaves unresolved issues for me
as well.
So each death has also brought the loss
of, or a major change to a living relationship. I cannot anticipate
what losses other deaths might bring, but I am a little concerned.
I also realized recently that because
of all of these family losses, I have almost no close family left. The
only person who shares my history from birth is my father really, and
he is 80 years old. He is extremely healthy and his mother lived to
be 98 or 99, so he could be around for a long time yet. But, when he
is gone, there will be no one else who shares my early history. We were
not a family who did the "relative" thing with any degree of commitment
or regularity, so I don't have any extended family to rely on either.
There is something very, very lonely about the feeling that I will really
truly be the only one left here who knows my entire history.
There's something about family connections
that are so important. So many important connections of mine have been
broken and I need very badly to make new connections somewhere, and
I am not finding a way or a place to do that with friends or relatives.
Instead, I just see more brokenness coming.