Bereavement - "I'm so sorry for your loss"
Bereavement. “I’m so sorry for your loss”
Is it easier going through a bereavement if you are unattached to a parent that dies? Well, maybe the word “unattached” is based on a false premise, because we are all attached to our source.
What is “bereavement?” The meaning of BEREAVEMENT is the state of being deprived of something or someone.
One thing I’ve observed is that the phrase “I’m so sorry for your loss” is one of the most presumptive, and ill-informed statements ever. My mom passed on Monday of this week.
What did I lose, that the issuer of “I’m so sorry for your loss” can relate with? A parent? Hell, I lost them a long time ago, before they died. No one was coming by, shaking my hand, or calling me then, telling me “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
The term “I’m sorry for your loss” seems to be a simple ego soother for the person issuing it, and often it is accompanied by “Let me know if there is anything you need.” Fuck. I needed a parent, or two. That’s what I needed. Instead, I got authoritarian figureheads that, in all fairness, didn’t know how to deal with their own traumatic childhoods, and so they beat me until my legs bled while professing their love for me, and they gave me the “This hurts me more than it does you” lie.
My dad’s dad (My grandfather) died when he was 8 years old. They were a tobacco farming family, and my dad dropped out of school in the 8th grade. The irony of not really knowing someone, and loving them - this leaves a feeling of loss.
My mom’s dad (My other grandfather) had epilepsy and self-medicated as an alcoholic. I don’t even know what the extent of her childhood was, but I know it was harsh.
I was raised in fear. Fear of my parents, surely, but with the Stockholm Syndrome of them being my source of food…
My first marriage was a little over a year. She ran, and I don’t blame her. I had no clue who I was, and I surely had a shit-ton of baggage that I didn’t know how to deal with.
So, I immediately found my current wife, and we decided to go through hell together. She’s been solid as a rock, and yet, there is this nagging knowledge that the people that made me, and my kids, who I made, are all bereaved to me.
Oh, my kids are still alive, but because of the PTSD and communication issues I’ve brought forward with me from childhood, I was unable to truly connect with them in a bonded way. I love them desperately. And they appear to hate me.
The really fucked up thing is that my kids hate me over ideology. You know the “inclusive” and “accepting” ideology of wokeism? Yeah, that one. The acceptance and inclusivity that rejects and violently discharges anyone who may have a difference of opinion. Who’s the real bigot here?
Anyway, I’m a bereaved motherfucker, and “I’m sorry for your loss” is just salt in the wound of a societal programming of produce, consume, and ignore the absence of true connection.
On the bright side, it gives me fuel to fight the beast. Another thing - It is a certainty that we all carry generational trauma. I’m doing my best to correct this, at least for my family. Perhaps I’ll die a failure, but not from lack of trying. Maybe one day my kids will see how much I’ve accomplished.
P.D., JAY V SHORE
Wow, your father could've been my grandfather. He came from a share cropper family in Vermont, farming tobacco. Same shit lack of life skills passed on to my mother. I once confronted him on the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse he put my mother through. He denied doing anything wrong, yet broke down in tears. Seeing this impotent old monster sitting at the dinner table weeping somehow managed to make *me* feel like a piece of shit for making it happen.
My mother exhibited all the traits of a borderline personality disorder. Whenever she wept over a conflict, I knew she was weeping for herself. She'd tell me she loved me, but only ever looked through me. Role played out all her trauma on me, projected her father onto me constantly. We eventually, only fairly recently worked things out, but it took us /her right to the edge. How many ways can you say something to someone, how plainly can you convey a concept only to have them not listen?
That was always the issue. She wasn't listening to me, she was hearing something else, replaying a different conflict with someone else in her head. You get worked up because *they're* not listening, and you're replaying your own trauma over the situation, but the only way to succeed is to insist that they stop doing this and *hear* what you're saying.
Perhaps with your children they're replaying interactions they've previously had with you, and are blocking out what you're trying to say now. If you're objecting to the new-age liberal BS, you'd best also be explaining why you feel the way you do, and show that you're a human being who's come to a rational conclusion, and perhaps walk them through how you came to these conclusions. Just rejecting the BS and locking horns over your respective positions is no good.
This faux-demic reveled to me a surprising aspect of American culture. Adult children severing relationships with their parents over official covid dogma. I can't believe how many times I read people disclosing this shocking revelation. It speaks to the dysfunction of a whole nation. Young children parenting their parents as soon as they develop a sense of logic and autonomy. I know that's how our relationship was. I was the only voice of reason, my mother was the impulsive and irresponsible delinquent. It speaks to parental abdication. An inversion of roles. That shit never would've flown a generation ago, but that's a meaningless observation, as that generation led directly to this generation.
The mind controllers in charge have been hard at work for a very long time, and they've now brought humanity to it's knees.
:(