Dorothy Marley's Journal

Longtime readers may remember that my father died 13 years ago (in fact I lit his yahrzeit candle last night ❤️) and that my mother took up with a widowed family friend not long afterward and told us, my brother and me, about it in a manner so astoundingly insensitive that our relationship never really recovered. (The description at that link says he, the um-friend, invited her on the European river cruise, but in fact I learned some time later that inviting her hadn't been his intention; he'd mentioned it in a way of saying it would have been nice to have been able to plan something like that with company and she went ahead and invited herself to join him, because it turns out this woman may never have seen a boundary worth respecting in her entire life.) I'm not going to go hunting for the exact email at this time, but I have a pretty clear memory that it included the assurance "I would never do anything to hurt you" and that in the conversation the three of us had in which the two of us said we were unhappy about the suddenness of the seriousness of their relationship, the message we got from her was you're going to need to deal with those feelings. It wasn't exactly "I would never hurt you" / "This hurts us" / "I'm going to do it anyway" but it wasn't a million miles off.

So naturally a person withdraws from that kind of thing. I'm confident the um-friend thought we, or at least I, hated him, which was never true. I liked him fine, but I found it very difficult to be around him—or around them together, I guess—for a very long time because his presence was a stark reminder of how my mother had mishandled things. I was actually never angry at him about it; she's always been the one I've judged. I remember telling my sister-in-law that the only solution I could see was to give my mother as few opportunities as possible to hurt me. I know my mother asked about inviting the um-friend to our wedding and I went into some sort of fugue state. Himself had an email exchange with her that to this day I don't know what he said or how he talked her out of pressing the point. (In any event the um-friend had grandchildren graduating from either high school or college that weekend so he wouldn't have come anyway, but my man convinced my mother to drop it because he is a hero.)

One time she finally asked me, "So did you want me to be miserable and alone for the rest of my life?" and I said "No, Mom, I wanted you to have meant it when you said it mattered what we thought." But it hadn't then and it apparently still didn't, because she still didn't understand until I explained it that saying you don't want to hurt someone and then doing the thing they've said will hurt them is, in fact, hurtful. I can't actually remember if she has ever apologized for having done that, but if she has I can't believe she's meant it, can you? because she still doesn't get it.

Or didn't. And then she had a stroke. And now she's got progressive dementia as well. Which means the odds she even remembers any of these events or conversations are dwindling by the day and if there was ever any point in my talking about any of it with her ever again in the hope of her appreciating anyone's feelings on the subject other than her own, there isn't anymore. For example! Look, widowed parents go on to have subsequent partners. As a concept I am and have always been fine with that. Witness my consideration of other people's feelings. Telling your children you're going to Europe with your new boyfriend six weeks after you've all buried your husband/their father is less considerate of other people's feelings. As it happens, my mother had never been meaningfully alone in her life before my father died; she'd gone from home (where she was the middle child) to college (where girls always lived in dorms in those days) and got married the summer after graduating. Other people married to their high school or college sweethearts include EVERYONE ON THAT SIDE OF THE FAMILY EXCEPT ME, which I mention because speaking as the only person in three generations of this family to have spent any time single or alone, I find it extremely offensive to imply that fear of Such A Fate is an acceptable reason for doing something you know—because they have told you themselves—will be hurtful to your children.

So a couple of weeks ago, my mother, who is more and more confused, called me to tell me she'd just spoken to her um-friend, who was not doing well and was saying good-bye to everybody. And I said "Oh, I'm sorry, Mom." Because I was. She's losing her mind, and he's been important to her, and she's my mother, and I love her. And she said she couldn't talk to him anymore, but I could call him to say good-bye. And I said "Oh . . . you know, the shape he's in, probably he's got all the phone calls he can handle." Quite good, I thought, thinking on my feet. And she said but I could call and talk to him for her. And finally I said "That isn't the relationship that he and I have." And she still wouldn't let it go. She said well, but that's the relationship you have with me, isn't it. So she made me say it. I said "Mom, I'm here for you, and I'm glad you got to talk to him, but I'm not going to call him myself."

My brother, whom I texted about all of this afterward, agreed with me from top to bottom on the whole thing, including not having said mother, it is the anniversary of the time Dad spent in hospice, what in the world makes you think I want to speak to anyone at all right now, least of all . . . anyway, the next day we got a message from the um-friend's son saying they'd begun hospice care and she had called crying so many times that they'd had to ask her to stop calling, which cast "can't talk to him anymore" in a different light and made me feel even better about not calling when she asked me to; I wasn't going to do it when I thought she was saying I could have one more Moment that I didn't need, but if it was actually "they asked me to stop, so will you do it instead" that's obviously an even harder no, because see ALL OF THE ABOVE re: boundaries and my mother's inability to observe them even when her brain was whole.

Anyway. The old man passed away peacefully yesterday afternoon. He was a nice guy. He saved my mother's life at least twice. He was a product of a time and a place that may have been responsible for his having some attitudes that I didn't always care for, but you know, what can you do. Mainly, he was important to my mother, which was fine, but I was never able to forget that he'd been more important to her than our feelings were, which was not. I'm very sorry for his children and grandchildren. I myself will not miss him. I'm not going to pretend there was never any such person or anything, but a small selfish still-hurt place inside me hopes that now that he's gone, my mother will think about him less and less.