Thread by @HZiauddeen

🧵On complicated grief: losing someone who should have been close but wasn’t

For those of us who've lost people who should have been loved ones but didn’t really love one,
Who’ve lost parents, siblings, (sometimes children), and spouses, who were uncaring, and abusive.
(1/25)

Grief is the pain of the void left in life where someone used to be.
The void is the great discontinuity, the point where they will no longer be part of the unfolding story of your life, the point where your shared story ends, from when there will be no new memories.
(2/25)

All they were part of, all that they helped in making the world feel better and safer, in making you know you mattered, all of it ends at the void. The enormity of the void is overwhelming, and in the early stages of grief, it can be hard to see a future beyond the void.
(3/25)

Even when we slowly manage to grow around it, a fleeting reminder of the edges of the void, can bring the pain crashing again. Knowing just who you need to speak to, just who to take this feeling to and remembering you can’t.
This is all about grief as a personal loss.
(4/25)

As we grow around grief the void changes shape, like a circle becoming a teardrop, with hopefully the tail stretching thinner and thinner into the future, the loss stays with us but more of it is in the past and the tip of the teardrop staying with us into the future.
(5/25)

This is the case for uncomplicated grief, when you lose someone you (overall) loved and someone who (overall) loved you.

Things are very different when you lose a parent, sibling, child* or spouse who was uncaring or abusive.

*To parents, they are always children.
(6/25)

Someone who in the usual scheme of things (in other ‘normal’ people’s worlds), you’re supposed love and they’re supposed to love you. But that was not your experience, or not most of your experience. Here the grief is complicated.
(7/25)

It is not about losing what you once had, it is about what you lost or you never had and now what you will never have. That you were never loved, never cared for, never cherished, never believed in, by them and never good enough for them, always failed them.
(8/25)

Sometimes people have managed to come to terms with the fact that they will never get what they should have got and wanted to get from the person before they died.
Sometimes all people hope for is some recognition of what happened to them, an apology, maybe some amends.
(9/25)

Sometimes, there is nothing to hope for or expect, you have already learnt that painful lesson, just the finality of knowing you will never have what you never had.
(10/25)

That the staple characters that populate most people’s lives, did exist in your life but only in a twisted charade. All they were part of, all that they did, didn’t make the world feel better and safer, didn’t make you feel you mattered.
(11/25)

Pretty much everyone who has been on the receiving end of such relationships will start (and may still be) questioning themselves ‘Is it something wrong with me? Is it me that’s the problem? Have I not done enough? Am I getting this because I deserve it?’
(12/25)

And yet, especially as a child and later as the child in the adult you, you feel you must be kind, you must be caring ‘You’re supposed to love your parents, look after your parents, grieve for your parents’, because it’s your duty but duty without love is just work.
(13/25)

For parents dealing with abusive children (usually older, adult children), there is the sense of failure & responsibility, that one didn’t do enough, didn't act at the right time, missed something vital & usually one can always find something to blame oneself for.
(14/25)

For those who have lost abusers, especially those who continued to abuse or petrify them till the end, even the long overdue freedom from suffering is marred by guilt, that it is someone’s death that has given one freedom, that they are being horrible in feeling relief.
(15/25)

There is another kind of loss for the victim i.e. they will never have a chance to speak to their abuser again. Whether it is to confront them, to say their piece or make their own peace, to ask the questions that have plagued them for years, to ask 'why?'.
(16/25)

For some the loss can activate a severe guilt, that they should have tried harder, that should have done more to repair the relationship, that they were part of the problem, 'after all we're both adults (now)'. This kind of guilt is usually v. unfair to themselves.
(17/25)

Nevertheless, guilt being the irrational beast that it is, can savage them by repeatedly pointing out, 'it's too late now, you can't do anything now that they're dead, you should have done something when you had the chance but you wouldn't'.
(18/25)

One reason this occurs is that with death, the abuser can no longer change ('how am I the victim? he's dead!'), only the victim still has the potential to change and very unfairly this can drive them into despair, thinking about what they could have done differently.
(19/25)

And there are still the social rituals of funerals, mourning and grief that one must go through, pretending to those who don’t know your reality that it was nothing like what they imagined it was.
(20/25)

And there is still the process of grieving, which is a different kind of a pain in these situations, no lesser, just different.
For those who have built a life around surviving their abuser, there may be no other way of living that they know.
(21/25)

There is the painful process of building another life and often with it the repeated grief of truly realising what they had lost and never had for so many years, the multiple griefs of the lives that they could have had.
(22/25)

The is still the process of growing around grief and building a future that might hopefully become increasingly free of the toxic influences of the person who is gone, and of those still left behind.
(23/25)

But what’s really different about this kind of complicated grief is this: it doesn’t need someone to die for the grief to start.
(24/25)

Afterword:
If any/all of this seems like complete bollocks, please say so. This is not based on any personal experience so may be badly, badly off the mark.
(25/25)