Trigger Warning Lots of stuff that's not meant for fragile eyes to read today, if in a good headspace please proceed because having it just swimming around inside of my head is ruining my life right now.
They are so weird about grief and it's made me become this person who's just like there, observing like a scientist (I seriously think I have Asperger's) and trying to keep everyone's needs tended to. Then when it hits me, it devastates me for days. IDK if what I'm describing is dissociation, but to others it makes me look like a psychopath because I take my emotions home to be alone with, while trying to be "strong" for everyone else which comes off as aloof I guess.
My grandpa died after a very long battle with cancer. Idk what to do with these feelings that arise (lots of anger and confusion) based off the observations I made during that very stressful time period. Family members were triangulating me, expecting me to go help my Covert mother and my overt grandmother with this situation. Meanwhile, I'm raising a child who really did not need to see what was happening and was devastated by the death of his gramps even though he didn't have to see too much, what he did see was horrifying even for the adults witnessing it. The skin-and-bones-shell-of-a-man whose pain was so intense that it didn't appear as though he was even in there anymore, that image will haunt us and I no longer give myself guilt trips for not helping out more. I had my own responsibilities to tend to, and I realized they raised me to be their "Cinderella" of sorts. Every time my mother's helped me out and I've said I can't repay her, she retorts with this, "Don't worry about it. You'll take care of me when I'm old." The last memory I have of my grandfather (kiddo was not in the room thank Christ) was of seeing his penis as he pissed down my legs because I had offered to help my grandmother with our family's issues. Two weeks prior to this, my mother had worked out the paperwork to where there would be nurses sent to help with not only this, but to help my grandma with her household tasks as well. Grandma allowed this woman to come help her one time, then was on the phone with everyone loudly shouting that she doesn't need anyone's fucking help. I only visited maybe a dozen times over the 3 year cancer journey, but every time I did visit, I witnessed yet another disturbing incident. For context, my grandfather used to abuse my grandma and all of the male children in the family when they were kids. He never once laid a hand on us as kids, but we did know him to be a "Grumpy Old Men" type and to be on our best behavior around grandpa. Once becoming adult grandchildren, he always did what he could for us grandkids (especially me because my grandparents deemed the golden child whereas my parents scapegoated me) but grandma would also tell us stories of things he did to her. Put her in the hospital a few times. Dumped piping hot soup on one of my uncle's heads. All of their children moved out at ages ranging between 14-17. My mother essentially married a psychopath. But none of this knowledge disturbed me quite like my grandmother's behavior in the midst of all of this.
Every time I would come visit, she'd dredge up the stuff from the 60's and 70's, how Grandpa did XYZ to her. While he's sitting in the room, suffering. Like he's not even there to hear this shit. I don't think I ever once saw her tell him she loved him in that cancer time. I don't know what to do with this info, so my brain's just been picking at it for years. WTF was that? Then once, she yelled at him for pissing himself and said, "I should just take you out back and put a bullet in you like you did our dog!" Dudes. I think it's wrath? Is that what my either too traumatized to understand social interactions or autistic brain is sticking on? But again, disturbing but not the most disturbing part for me yet...
Once he died, she flipped a switch, started acting like a whole other person. She was talking lovingly to his ashes. She was grieving him the way a loving wife of sixty something years would. But when he was alive, she was behaving like Kathy Bates in Misery. Every time I would try to help, it would take me at least a week to shake off the mental turmoil it took on me, and my grades slipped and then just completely dropped off. Then my scapegoated uncle tried to triangulate me on my mother's behalf. Mom needs help with Grandma. Grandma sounds like a "Mom and Uncle Problem" to me. I had begun reading this subreddit and picking up red flags at the time, seeing them actually play out in my life in front of me made me scared and unable to trust. One of the main red flags related to this post was the martyrdom I was watching unfold, my grandpa's physical discomfort becoming a pawn in a chess match between adult children who were each doing their best to help but all were so broken, their help ended up hurting more in the long run. So my Uncle's phone conversation with me backfired on them, and only cemented into my brain that what I'm living and experiencing my whole life is real and it's a dysfunctional family dynamic. He called me and told me to help them more. I asked him why he doesn't move here to help. This got the ball rolling, and he unloaded years of trauma my grandparents placed onto his shoulders as a child and as an adult. He told me about how my grandma used grandpa's death against him, tried to say grandpa said he hated him because he's gay on his death bed. My grandpa had a conversation with my uncle during their last visit, and he came to peace with my uncle's sexuality and life choices. I love my grandma, but that's some evil shit right there. I don't want my child to have to experience life broken the way every single one his ancestor's are. I want him to be free of the mental cages they've so masterfully crafted around me and my other family members. I'm protective as shit now. My child hasn't left my sight or been around any of them alone in almost two full years. The damage has been done, but we're getting him in to therapy so that these problems are handled now, not when he's thirty and having to untangle from a web woven around him like I'm doing now. I have a hard time seeing my mother's "taking care of them" as anything more than martyrdom sprinkled with a dose of "Mommy and Daddy Please love me before you leave me" type mentality. It was not out of the "goodness of her heart" like I'd had myself believing. It was about control and validation that she's "a good person." Anyone walking into that room would have seen that was a task outside of our family's education level and care, and that our grandpa should have been put into the hands of professionals while the family's "care" should have come in the form of regular visits to ensure he was being treated properly. But that's my family. All of them stubborn and unwilling to admit when they're either incapable or wrong. My mother told me she "had to move her father's body" because "they sent a tiny woman from the coroner's office and she wouldn't have been able to lift him." She cried when revealing that to me, and it made me feel icky. I told her I was sorry, but in my mind I was thinking, "yeah right. You did not have to do that. You told yourself you did, but they would have figured it out had you not taken it upon yourself to do so." Which feels like I'm invalidating her trauma, which makes me think I'm the narc again. Every other week I gotta talk myself out of that... It's just that based off of everything I saw when I did go around, nothing really spoke to me like either mom nor grandma really cared about what he was feeling. I brought up CBD and tried to explain how it could potentially help him eat and was separate from THC, they gave me yet another Reefer Madness speech and brushed me off. Aight then, fuck it, solve your own problems if you don't trust me because I'm a millennial then...
Thank you for reading.