Dear Katie:

I am getting to understand him better, and you. The two of you needed that feeling of home, of being together, connected, loving and being loved.

Earlier, he wanted to be together with the one who raised him: his grandmother/home, together with her in death (“always told me that when he dies he wanted to be cremated and buried at his grandmother’s burial plot”). Later, he wanted to be together with you/home in death (“we got the burial plots”).

“He always referred to me as ‘his home’.. I felt like he was home to me as well”. You were ready and prepared to make him your  home forever (“I thought he was my forever till the end”), and you were “looking forward to retirement and life together”, original post, Nov 2). But he was not ready or prepared to make you his home forever because he had “dots to connect”.

To connect what to what? – to connect his real-life, past devastating alone/ lonely experience in his original home—> to a calm, together hoped- for experience of home with you in the future. In between those two experiences is the fear, despair and anger of a child left alone for too long.

Nov 2, and Nov 24: “At a time when we should be looking forward to retirement and life together, he’s dwelling on high school, to the point where he’s become verbally abusive. This has all peaked this last year… I do believe that something did happen to him when my daughter was drunk and he was afraid she would drown. That was the beginning of the side of him I never saw. Yes, I saw a jealous side before, but it wasn’t destructive as the behaviors that followed that vacation”-

– maybe the turning point in that vacation was not that your daughter almost drowned, but that he witnessed your reaction to her almost drowning, your great concern for your daughter, your love for her, and .. the thought occurred to him that you love her more, that you don’t love him as much as you love your daughter.. sort of a much delayed sibling rivalry.

Possibly so?

anita

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