Dear Nichole:

I hope you had some sleep last night and that you feel better today. It is okay with me that you didn’t read my last post to you, read it when you will.

“tonight I have to say I am a mess!”- you felt like a mess, it doesn’t mean you were a mess.

“I feel what she must have went through. I feel it like it is me”- it is called empathy, or  love. You always loved your mother and always will and because you always have, you never wanted her to hurt and when she hurt, you hurt too.

“She was needy… We should all feel loved and have compassion”- your mother, like mine, suffered a lot. And so did you and still, you suffer. And I suffered too, for decades. And millions of people suffer. This is human reality. When you hurt for your mother’s suffering, keep in mind your own suffering and everyone else you come across. Love and compassion are not common and we all suffer.

“I will never understand why I was so mean to her in her last days. How cold I was and all the boundaries I was setting”- you tried for about two decades to make your mother happy, you tried very hard, sacrificing yourself. At the end of her life, a part of you was trying to move on from her, to live your own life. You forget now how hard and how long you tried, unsuccessfully, to make her happy.

“I should have asked the doctors and what I should have told her”- wouldn’t have made a difference. Just like what you said and did before, your whole life with her, didn’t make a difference to her quality of life.

“I should have saved her”- impossible.

“Sometimes I feel like I was so wrong”- you were never wrong regarding your mother. You always loved her, always will and you tried your best. A child/ adult child cannot 100% sacrifice herself for her mother, part of the child wants to live her own life. And then all the sacrifice you did do made no difference in her life and more sacrifice, wouldn’t either.

“I should have been there!”- but you were with her for how many years, before you left to Florida? Again, what difference to her quality of life did you make by living with her for so long before leaving to Florida?

You didn’t betray your mother, Nichole. She betrayed you. And you love her and always will, no love is stronger than your love for her.

I love my mother too and I choose to not have contact with her. I dreamed about her the other night, that she needed me. But I will not contact her. Not because I feel anger at her, but because I know that I failed at making her happy when I was a child, when I was a teenager, I failed when I was in my twenties, my thirties and my forties. I don’t expect to be successful now, in my fifties, so I am not trying.

I hope to read from you soon, I want to know how you feel, what you think..?

anita