The Last Letter

My mother died in July this year (2025, for future readers). I know I don't have many followers here despite writing this blog for more than 20 years, but if you search the posts, you'll find a lot of background. Some of it is repeated here.

She was ill and declining for six or so months. We never reconnected. 

Before:
I’m sorry you’re unwell and in hospital, but I am so much sorrier for you, for the life you’ve squandered. I’m so sorry for you, that you know nothing about me, nothing of my partner, and nothing about my amazing, successful, wonderful, compassionate, loving daughters, or your incredible niece.

I’m sorry – and this is the hardest part – that in 12 years, you never reached out beyond notes talking about yourself, or asking for things you wanted; never, “I would like to reconcile; can we talk?” I’m sorry your refrain was always “I don’t know what I’ve done.” I’m sorry you never saw your eldest child was desperate for a real, kind, compassionate relationship with you, and I’m sorry every time there was the possibility of having a relationship, you found some way to kill it.

I’m sorry that, because you have never shown much interest in them, your grandchildren wanted little to do with you; anything you might ask them about was only a springboard for you to talk about yourself. You made no effort to know them or be interested in them, their schooling, their friends, their partners, their work.  They are my greatest joy. I’m sorry for you that your self-obsession prevented you from being interested in and engaged with these brilliant women.

After
I’m so sorry you never understood the immense love you could have enjoyed – from your children, your grandchildren, and your husbands – George particularly. I’m sorry that my children could never know you, know about your life, your family, your experiences – the true story of what it was like to grow up when and where you did, the true story of who your mother was, who your father was – good or bad. I’m sorry my children knew how bright you were, but that what could have been a bright beacon for them was only an enticement into your self-obsession, and your constant belittling of other people, your anxiety, depression, your closed world.

I’m sorry that your anger and your lies caused a permanent rupture between you and your Nova Scotia family. I’m sorry for you that the damage you did to your relationships there mean you will be buried far away from your parents, your brother, and your family members. 

I know you spoke against me to your brother and sister-in-law intending they hate me too. I believe you poisoned my grandfather’s understanding of me.  You didn’t succeed. The last words out of Bill’s mouth to me before he died were “I love you.” The last words Alice spoke to me before she died were “I love you.”  Jeanette and her girls and I are very close. As weird as he is, even Brad and I can get on the phone and talk for ages.

 I’m sorry that you don’t understand how criminal it is you caused such deep divisions between your own children and I’m sorry for you that you spent your life abusing, maligning your firstborn. I’m sorry that you seem never understood what all of this cost you and that you never understood the life you could have enjoyed and the love you could have surrounded yourself with. I see all those condolences people have posted, and those make me sad and frustrated, frankly, because most of these people never knew you beyond a few hours at church or at some event. They never knew the you behind the door. They never saw or knew the chaos and they never understood how deeply wounded you were. Hundreds of people in your life would have corralled around you, supported and championed you – the real, damaged, human you. But your narcissism was profound and so stifling.

 I was saddened and frustrated to receive your note in May via G. I am without words to understand why, after nearly 12 years, your request was that you were probably dying and that I should come make you happy. I have never been successful making you happy at any point in my life. I don’t believe it was ever possible. Nothing I did every caused you to feel pride, interest, curiosity. You responded to me as a nuisance, an invasion, as someone who, as you said so often, was trying to ruin your life and doing a good job of it. How could I have ever made you happy when I was a liability you seemed to have to deal with? How would my presence have suddenly made you happy when it hasn’t in my entire life? It felt more like you wanted a win. It did not read that you wanted a reconciliation.

I think you have been anxious, and depressed most of your life, and that your coping mechanism was anger, blame and chaos. That too makes me so deeply sad for you. You had an amazing second husband. Amazing. You had three great daughters -different yes, but all bright, compassionate, funny. You were surrounded by so much potential for love, support, understanding, help, but you let your anger colour everything. The cost is immense – for all of us.
 

I have had the experience of anxiety and chaos ruining my life and relationships several times myself; I have had several periods of debilitating depression. I was very, very ill between 2020 and 2022. I was critically depressed and anxious, leading me to seeking out crisis care when I became obsessively suicidal. During this time, I was prone to hours-long rants, and to feeling persecuted and marginalised. I was sure my children and spouse were conspiring against me and positive I was universally hated and hence should not exist. As I look back over my life and the hundreds of times you engaged in similar rants, anger, inconsolability, I recognize these similarities – depression, anxiety, insecurity. I will always, always regret the distress I caused in my family and to Jason, when I was so ill. I don’t believe you ever considered the damage you have caused, and certainly not that you ever had a moment’s regret.

For most of my life, I wanted a relationship with you. How many times did I try, did I hope “maybe this time,” dare to believe you would somehow have some clarity about how you’ve lived and behaved, and that maybe you would engage with those realities and finally be honest and humble, and willing to accept your failings and deal with whatever mental health issues you surely had.

 But the mother I wanted a relationship with didn’t exist. The mother you were was brutal, false, violent, untrustworthy. It took two years for me to mourn the end of our relationship and nearly 10 years more for me to finally accept you were not that mother and were incapable of being that mother. I had to abandon hope you would ever have any clarity, honesty, or humbleness, and that your inability to do so prevented you from having close, loving, respectful relationships with me, RA and G.

 Your relationships with us have been unpredictable, anger-based, and incendiary, predatory where it concerns RA, controlling with G. I do not have any impression or memory of you being genuinely proud of us. My feeling is we were accoutrements to your life. You said so often I was selfish and that any time we did or said anything you didn’t like or agree with, or if/when we were just being kids of whatever ages, we were out to make you look bad. You said so very often we couldn’t wait until you were dead. I remember you saying such things from when I was very young. You never understood, or never cared to know, how utterly destabilising it is for children to know themselves as liabilities to their parent. It has taken me most of my adult life to finally put the responsibility for your behaviour where it belongs; with you.

If I were to lose contact with any of my daughters, it would be my sole pursuit to know why and put it to rights. You made absolutely no effort at all. Not once did you ever indicate you were aware your actions and your abuse at were, at very least, what caused me to sever contact.

 I have no means of understanding why a mother would not make it her obsession to rectify such a catastrophic event. I don’t know if you were unwilling to acknowledge your part in it or are utterly unaware, or if doing so would have wrenched open the portal to something impossible for you to take on.  I deeply resent it when people say “she’s your mother,” but never stop for a second to contemplate what might make a person sever their relationship with their mother. I am not infallible, and knowing that helps me be a better, more honest person. You always believed, or at least presented to anyone who passed through your life, that you were infallible, and that somehow, I was just an unkind, punishing person. “I don’t know why she won’t come see me,” puts the blame outside yourself. For people who don’t know you (very few people knew you well), and who don’t know me, or who never met me, you managed to place all the blame on me with that one deeply dishonest statement. 

From my earliest memories, I have known it was impossible to make you happy. I have always known it was impossible to trust you. I have always known that I have been your scapegoat.

The week G was here in 2013, when A was a newborn was the terminus. It was the last weight I could bear. To watch you be so unkind and abusive to a near stranger you had invited to stay was bizarre. To watch you sulk, be petulant, to lock yourself in your room for two days, and be so abusive to G, who was a new mother trying to get her bearings, and who had brought you youngest, newest grandchild to meet you, was intolerable. Then, after you had spent that week being vicious and intractable, the morning they were to return home, you suddenly refused to drive them to the airport, leaving G in a panic. You were petty, angry, and narcissistic. That October, I finally accepted a relationship with you was not only impossible, but to continue to try would be dangerous - potentially lethal - for my mental health. The cycle of abuse was present then, and looking back, I could see it having repeated over and over, hundreds of times.

After 53 years of your abuse, I knew in my bones you could not be any different, and that a relationship with you was impossible. I tried so many times to establish a workable relationship, or re-establish after a period of no contact, but you never seemed to understand you had a significant part in that loss of contact, that you had to participate honestly, and that you were culpable. You were impervious to the swaths of damage you caused me, and to Ra and G, and to so many people around you. Nothing ever penetrated to cause you to acknowledge this reality, not even losing one of your children. That is astounding. In twelve years, not once did you reach out with anything approaching “what happened?” or “I want to reconcile.” I know, second hand only, you consistently stated “I don’t know what I did.” I believe you did know but I think acknowledging any of it was impossible for you. This is the core of narcissism; it’s always everyone else’s fault. Whatever goes wrong, when you felt bad, or angry, it wasn’t ever due to anything you did or said; it was always other people treating you badly, being mean to you.

The things you have said and done to me, your dishonesty, your anger, your propensity to belittle, insult, rage against, terrify, has left me with permanent scars. Until I chose to end contact with you, I was unable to know myself. I still struggle every single day with deep self-doubt. Every. Single. Day.

I have lifelong depression and have struggled my entire life to trust people because you, my mother, were immensely untrustworthy and consciously vicious towards me at every possible moment. There was never a time between you and I when things stabilised for more than a month or two, and I could trust you; there was only holding my breath waiting for the next explosion.  From my earliest memories, it was always when, not if it would all burst into unquenchable flames.

My lifelong depression is grounded in that trauma. I am deeply resentful of your abuse of me, and so much more so of RA and G. More than that, I am so resentful of the deep ruptures between me and my sisters, and particularly RA your abuse caused. You sewed the seeds of this rupture years ago, when we were small, and you never stopped. The divisions between us sisters, our inability to trust each other, or to lean on each other, and in my opinion, RA’s propensity to do as you have done, and shift her anger, her disappointments, her resentments onto me – to continue making me the scapegoat for whatever is wrong in her life – this is the greatest wound and the deepest cut.

 It is an unforgiveable theft, and an unforgivable shift in RA’s ability to recognize problems and deal with them, rather than shifting blame onto me, or targeting me when she’s angry, frustrated or disillusioned. You disabled her by instilling this process with her; you predisposed her to engaging in bad, sometimes scary relationships, and when those were going badly, to acting out and making me the scapegoat, or the recipient of her anger or frustration. G too is so deeply affected by your abuse. She is brilliant and talented but deeply insecure – so much so she seems unable to make her immense abilities and her excellent mind the cornerstone. She is angry to the point of scary unpredictability. She simmers only degrees from catastrophic, angry, unpredictable explosions.

It is impossible to describe losing a sister, but much more so seeing that sister fall into the same behaviours, suffer that same anxiety, anger, depression. Of everything you took from us, our relationship and her confidence, assurance, ability to trust – this is my deepest resentment. As for G, I say the same; all the success she most surely would have had were stolen from her along with her self-confidence by you, who never saw her as a person, your child, but as a cog in your desperation to be someone, your desperation to create some fantastical, important, wealthy maquette. I believe your inability to accept and honour yourself also comes from substantial abuse in your childhood. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t have recognized the traumas of your own past, and why you never rejected continuing that abuse and inflicting it on your children. From the time my girls were tiny, I have encouraged them to cherish and nurture their relationships with each other, to champion each other, to love and understand each other, and to acknowledge they are individuals with their own thoughts and perspectives, but to never let their individuality stand in the way of their relationships with each other.

 I hope we sisters can heal. I hope RA can begin to understand how your abuse, particularly in these last 12 years, when she has been your sole caregiver, your ride, your confidante, your coordinator, your support, has impacted her. Regardless that she was with you, or helping you, almost daily for the last 12 years, bought you a house when you were homeless, found you safe care when you needed it, dealt with your possessions, liaised with your friends, you continued to harass her, to diminish the immensity of her contribution to your life and your day-to-day and accuse her of avoiding you or “being too busy to help her old mother.”

 I hope she will come to understand, and deal with how it has affected her, how she lives her life, and to understand how damaging it has been to us as sisters. She literally had neither of us, G being distant physically and me being distant otherwise, and still, you never stopped. Those “you don’t have time for me,” comments, when she gave you as much of her time – more – as she had, were cutting and malicious. I know she slagged you off behind your back all the time, because she was powerless to speak directly to you – it would have done nothing beyond giving you more opportunity to criticize her, be angry, be despicable to her. She was essentially enslaved by you – an old woman who had made stupid choices, and who took and took and took from her. She was powerless to change any of it and absolutely unwilling to do what many would have done and leave you to deal with your situation alone.  

At least I was honest: I couldn’t be around you and I couldn’t fake it; RA felt she had no choice, but she reviled you in private. I know this, because there is video of your birthday one year, and I can hear her being sarcastic and diminishing of you under her voice and off camera. You forced her into dishonesty with herself and with you. I asked her once why she didn’t speak back to you, and she said she didn’t want to make you cry. You, however, never spent a second thinking about the years, and years and years you caused such pain to your children, and how many oceans of tears we cried. 

You treated me like an intruder, a problem, I think as soon as RA was born. You used me, and you reminded my sisters from when they were little until I left the province, that everything that was wrong, and anything they did that displeased you was my fault. If they misbehaved, you told them – and me - it was because I had taught them how as a means of getting back at you. None of us trusts the other and neither of them is concerned about wounding me. It’s normal. You taught them this. I’m the family garbage dump. I am terrified we sisters and Ruth Ann and me will never have a good relationship, or any relationship, as it is so critically damaged at present.

When I had escaped and was living in Montreal, you sent me letters and a cookbook professing your love and saying you missed me, but when I did come home for a week, within hours you were at my throat about my relationship. I hadn’t been in the door three hours, and I was tired – because two hours time change, but you were at me about living with someone – who was and still is an exceptionally decent man. Then, the first morning I was home, as I was coming down the stairs from the bedrooms in your house, you said, “Don’t touch anything, don’t break anything, don’t steal anything.” Why? Because I had slept in, and you were pissed off about it. I was home for a week but I changed my flights so I could leave early and spent the remaining days out of the house with friends. Maybe you did miss me, but your actions, your derision, your anger, your belittling me and you suggesting I would steal from you put lie to everything you’d written in the two years I’d been gone.

I am deeply, profoundly resentful that you poisoned my relationship with my dad. Thanks to you, I didn’t trust him, and he didn’t trust me. I spent my life thinking he despised me, and I didn’t know any differently until two weeks before he died. I didn’t get to know my dad, thanks to you. You painted him in such a false and maligning way, that, at his funeral, I was blindsided by the things people said about him. I didn’t know my dad the way people knew him. I didn’t know how much he loved me, but how incredibly difficult it was to do that, because I was so deeply distrustful of him. I’m resentful you stole our relationships with my dad’s family. I never knew my grandmother. I was terrified of her, and of Carol and John, thanks to you. I had the same experience at her funeral – of hearing people talk about a woman – my grandmother – who was a complete stranger to me, but who was absolutely not, in any way possible, the woman you lead us to believe she was. Maybe she was horrible, but we never had the opportunity to discover that because we’d been poisoned so young. 

In 2020, I obtained your divorce records – 123 pages of documents including your 10-page, hand-written letter. At 60 years old, I finally understood not only were you abusing me and scapegoating me at home, you had used me as a pawn in court. You put words in my seven-year-old mouth – things I never said and would not have known how to say – to deprive my dad of his children. These documents confirmed the extent to which you are untrustworthy and mendacious and willing to hurt and use your children to achieve whatever your goals were. Those years are etched on my skin like deep burns. Had I known any of it before my dad died, I would have been able to connect with him, to talk about what had happened, and to explain my understanding was false and manipulated by you, and that you never stopped speaking against him.

You brought that divorce action, not him. You lied about still being married for almost two years after you were divorced, and by doing so, you fostered the falsehood my dad was a philanderer. If I have my timelines right – and I have these documents by which I can verify this – you only stopped claiming he was your husband because you were pregnant and had to remarry.

You sacrificed EVERYTHING that could have made you happy. Yes, you and my dad were mismatched, but you chose that union, probably for the admiration you expected to obtain from your family. I think you always felt less than for being from the farm and maybe, by marrying my dad, you thought to elevate yourself – and you could have, except you let your anger, your anxiety, your inability to be happy, ruin that marriage, and then you lied about what happened.

Then, you married GG, who was one of the most stellar men, who took on a pregnant wife in the context of the Baptist church, who committed to RA and me, and then G, who stabilised all our lives, and yet you still would not be happy. I miss him, but not because I was unsure he loved us. I miss him because he was a wonderful dad, granddad, friend. I wish so much the people in my life now could have known him. He was everything a man, a dad, a granddad, anyone could wish for. In this entire morass, he was the best thing – and, I was not able to appreciate him, because you caused unending trauma around him, between he and I.

Occasionally, and far less often now because so many people have died, people say I look so much like you. I can’t describe this in any other way than that observation make my skin crawl. I don’t want to be like you, look like you, think like you. I want to be a trusting, confident person who can accept the love and care of my family and my friends, and to trust the people around me; I want to care for my appearance but not be obsessed with it: this has been incredibly, debilitatingly difficult throughout my life.

From when I was little, your obsession with how I looked, how my hair looked, what clothing I liked or wanted to wear was the basis for constant little wars. You wanted me to be a compliant little dolly with no voice, and when I wasn’t, you used that as a weapon. How many times did you erupt in anger, sometimes to the point of hitting me with your hands or some implement, because you didn’t like how my bangs looked, or that I wanted to do my own hair at all, or the colour of my shirt? How many months did you threaten to send me away – every morning pretending you were on the phone with a boarding school -because who knows what had set you off before it was even 7:30 a.m.. Occasionally an old yellow wall phone, or an orange desk phone will turn up in some thrift shop somewhere and I am instantly back in that trauma – it’s as real now as it was when I was seven.

How many months did you belittle me by saying the then-fashionable colour was “prostitute pink,” yet years later that became a colour you wore often; how often did you disparage my hair – even dragging me off to the hairdresser to have 18 inches of my hair cut off because you didn’t like the style. How often did you disparage my body by pulling open the front of my shirt and saying “Oh, you poor thing,” or when you would suggest I was somehow improper, or bluntly suggesting I was sleeping with some random person, most often people I barely knew. How could you have been so vicious over things – clothing, hair - that didn’t matter? Not once did you ever understand the immense damage you did, or the hypocrisy of your actions. You tried this with my children too – even once calling C a “heathen” because she happened to be wearing a black dress one day. Horrifying. So, when you said to my kids and to G and RA you didn’t know what you’d done and why I wouldn’t come see you, you made it ever more impossible to reconnect with you.

When my girls told me you were in hospital and going to respite, I STRUGGLED to know what to do. I knew you were very ill and that I had very, very little time should I want to see you. The trauma and the indecision that caused were brutal. But here’s the rub: my lovely girls – C particularly – and G (after the fact) told me you would not have a moment of clarity; you would not accept any responsibility, and that there would not be any kind of reconciliation. They said if I chose to go see you, I should expect you to chastise me for not having come sooner and perhaps even chastise me for having abandoned you or some similar accusation. I am sure this is true, given your note that I come make you happy. Even when you knew your life was coming to a close, you didn’t write a single word I could have interpreted as you having any awareness. The mother I wanted to know and love never appeared. 

When G messaged me to say you were gone, my first thought was regret for YOU, that you could have, but didn’t in twelve years, and not in the last six months when you KNEW you had little time, you would not overcome whatever drive you had to never acknowledge your actions or behaviour. My mother died without doing anything to reach her eldest child. My mother died welded to never being culpable, to never acknowledging she had any part in my – our – life-long trauma. How could this be possible? When I was very sick in 2021 particularly, I was estranged from my children – because I had caused an immense disruption; I had caused an impassable catastrophe. I didn’t know how sick I was until A wrote me a message in which she called me her abuser. She was correct and I had been incredibly abusive for six months.

That message felt as brutal as being kicked in the head with a jackboot. That message sent me immediately into crisis care. That message caused me to accept everything I’d said and done, and to get help – medication and six months of intense therapy – rather than lose my children or continue traumatizing them. I will regret my actions for the rest of my life, but I am so very grateful my girls are as confident as they are, and that A was willing to risk terminating her relationship with me so that I would hit the wall of reality and facts, and be propelled into seeking help. Had you done this – ever, at any point in our lives, even last year – it would have changed everything. It would have given you your family back; it would have given me a mother I was so desperate for; it would have changed all our lives. But because you refused to acknowledge the things you said and did, you died without contact with your eldest, and with your grandchildren saying “good,” regarding your death.

I can forgive you for being a victimized child – I’m assuming you were – granny was unkind to us as children, and inexplicably derisive of you when we were to Nova Scotia for that reunion; I have to let that be my reality; I can forgive your anger and depression resulting from the effects of being an abused child, but I don’t know how to forgive you for the things you stole from me – my sisters, my self-esteem, my feeling worthy to exist, my father, my aunts and uncles and cousins, and my paternal grandmother, and for leaving me motherless in every way but biology. 

I can forgive you for your own deep and debilitating insecurity that made your life performative, rather than authentic, leading to acquisition of a revolving door of friends, catastrophic disagreements with your family, and termination of your relationship with your Nova Scotia niece and nephew, but I don’t know how to forgive you for doing everything you could to isolate me – belittling my friends, leaving me questioning everything and everyone, leaving me unable to trust anyone, and to my being paranoid – because you told me so often you had people watching me. Although you did hit me, in the context of being scared all the time, having nobody to talk to, and having my sisters disliking me, being distant from me, and the three of us unable to overcome your abuse and the fracture of our relationship, being hit is the thing I remember the least.

Recently, I watched an episode of a popular series, The Bear. The mother character is, in many ways, you. Abused as a child, deeply insecure, anxious, depressed, angry, and vicious to her children to the point one has taken his life, and another left the country for years, and her daughter is left walking over the broken, sharp bones of a destroyed family. Following a catastrophic, violent family altercation at a Christmas dinner (quite like what happened to us in 2007) her living children will not see her. Unlike you, she has her “come to jesus” moment, when her living son comes to her house. She is overcome. The soliloquy is riveting. She bares it all, acknowledges the damage she’s done to each of her children, her part in her son’s suicide, the distance she caused between her children, and she begs her son for forgiveness. The night I watched that episode, I made that speech mine. I made that be the apology I had always hoped to hear. I know it’s a TV show, and I don’t believe TV characters are speaking to me, but I have been desperate for such an apology for most of my life, and there it was. I know you didn’t say, or ever think any of those words, but the fantasy mother gave the fantasy apology. It is what it is.

In another life, I would be mourning my mother’s death as so many people do. So many are blessed to have had good loving relationships with their mothers, blessed with the opportunity to mourn and to miss their mothers, and then to fill that space left by loss with good memories. I mourned for perhaps three years, but now, at the moment of your actual death, I don’t feel loss; I feel a combination of nothing, freedom, release, sadness that I have very few good memories to fill whatever small void, and guilt that I am not mourning. I wish we could have reconciled, but I also wish I have known for all these years it was impossible. I mourn the life you could have had. 

I want you to know that despite a lifetime of abuse, I have survived, and I am happy. Jason and I have been together 29 years this year. My girls and I are unbreakable.  I have graduated five times from university. I own three businesses; my clients appreciate me, and the members of my studio have a safe, warm, welcoming space because I make it that way. I have real, long-term friends who actually know me – my successes, my failings, my insecurities. I deeply hope my sisters and I can reconnect, and I hope with all my heart, body, and soul RA and I can finally, finally find each other, learn to know and trust each other, and that we can be supports and champions for each other.