Why I Didn't Go To My Mother's Funeral

Why I Didn't Go To My Mother's Funeral
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I have not told many people why I didn’t go to my mother’s funeral two years ago because it’s been too raw. But now with the passing of the second anniversary I am ready to tell my story. I want to share my story in the hope that it will help other women who struggle with being rejected by their family.

My mother died in July 2015, in Christchurch, New Zealand, where I grew up and my family lives. My mother and I had barely spoken since I left home over thirty years ago. For those of you who haven’t read my previous blog posts or my books The Silent Female Scream and The Mother-Daughter Puzzle, my mother and I had a very difficult relationship. Our difficulties started when I was a teenager, and the more independent I became, the more my mother withdrew into angry silence. She recruited my sister and brothers to join her in her effort to exclude me from the family by threatening to exclude anyone who had contact with me. And more recently, my brother-in-law, his wife, and their daughter were also recruited.

My crime that justified being ejected out of the family was that I didn’t follow in my mother’s footsteps and live a repeat of her life. I wasn’t supposed to go to college or leave New Zealand and graduate from Indiana University with a Master’s degree. I wasn’t supposed to work while my children were young. I was supposed to live close to my mother, listen to her endless complaints and hard-luck stories. I was supposed to not make my mother feel envious about my education and achievements. And I was expected to never challenge her beliefs or behaviors. As my mother’s elder daughter, I was born to be her emotional helpmate, just like she was for her mother, and my grandmother was for my great-grandmother.

Even though I had already experienced years of being excluded from the family, including, my mother keeping my father’s cancer and impending death a secret 17 years ago, it was a shock to read on Facebook that my mother had died a few hours ago, and that no one had told me. By coincidence I had arrived in New Zealand two days prior to attend my mother-in-law’s funeral. Not only had no one emailed or phoned me to let me know about my mother’s deteriorating health, I had just spent 48 hours in Christchurch with my brother-in-law, his wife, and their daughter without them saying anything, even though, as I discovered later on, they were fully informed. And all my siblings also kept quiet. When I applied for a copy of my mother’s death certificate so that I could get some answers, I discovered that she had been diagnosed with cancer two years ago. For two years everyone conspired to keep me and my adult children in the dark about my mother’s health.

Why? Was it my mother’s wish to not see me or her grandchildren before she died? Or did my siblings and brother and sister-in-law deliberately keep my children and me away? And why did my siblings not want me to take part in the funeral? Why didn’t they invite me to help in the planning of her funeral and allow me to speak about my relationship with her?

I know that I will never get an honest answer to these questions. Nor will I ever hear my siblings or brother-in-law and his wife apologize for their behavior. Challenging their behavior won’t get me anywhere because in my family, excluding me has become a fully accepted normal. In my family, what I feel and need has no voice, no language, and no understanding. From birth I was expected to fit in and shape my life and needs around what my mother needed. And this dynamic is still omnipresent within my family, expecting a mother, wife, and daughter to be at everybody’s beck-and-call, as it is in many families.

I am still coming to terms with the nasty, inhumane way my family and in-law siblings treated me, and my adult children. And getting closure is harder when the perpetrators feel no remorse and don’t even recognize that they have hurt me and violated my rights, along with my children’s rights. I didn’t go to my mother’s funeral because I wasn’t welcome. I knew that my truth, my existence, and my experiences would not be welcomed. And I know that it wasn’t just my siblings who didn’t want me to take part in our mother’s funeral. My mother didn’t want me to be there either. By not going I was honoring her wishes. And I was also honoring my right to not expose myself to people who do not respect me.

As I write in The Silent Female Scream,

“My connection with myself should never be sabotaged in my relationship with others. This is because the emotional damage I will inflict on myself will far outweigh any benefits I may get from being in the relationship.”

Family relationships are no exception to this rule. Being silenced and dismissed is never okay. I have a responsibility to protect myself from anyone who silences and dismisses me. And I have a responsibility to not let their rejecting behavior infect me, or to make me doubt myself. My siblings and in-law siblings are responsible for their behavior. How they treated me and my children is about them, not me. All I can do is to rise above it and walk away with my self-worth intact. I know that this is easier said than done. But it’s the only way to heal and thrive.

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