Hello everyone, I’d like to apologize for the length of this post, but there’s a lot of information to cover and without some of it, the post wouldn’t make much sense.

Today I’ll be sharing my story and asking for some pointers, because the events that have transpired in my life the past couple years have sent me into quite a tailspin.

I’m 20 years old, two time college dropout, with almost 0 life experience. In other words, I don’t know how to adult.

Here’s a little information to help anyone who reads understand the dynamic in my family, specifically between me and my father. For starters, my father and I have never had a good relationship. He has always been a very distant man, and doesn’t do a very good job building or maintaining healthy relationships. He’s an avid self-blamer who sometimes sends himself on crazy alcohol fueled guilt trips but never tries to solve the problem he’s feeling guilt over.

Basically, he’s just a lone wolf who’s never been a great people person, and it shows in his life. He’s almost 60 and has no friends left because he wronged them all, he used to sell and use a number of drugs, you get the picture. Something to note as well, he has never been physically abusive to me or my mother, but verbal abuse was and still is a regular occurrence.

Above all though, my dad is a control freak. He has a certain way to do everything, gets upset when it isn’t done the way he wants it done, and then gets mad when nobody wants to help him because all he does is critique and pick at people until he gets what he wants. To give you an example, I once filled up a Brita filter from the sink incorrectly, and was made to empty it and put it on the counter until the almighty Dad could fill it up the right way.

With my dad being the way that he is, I clung to my mother for the majority of my childhood. She was my “protector” so to speak, and would intervene whenever Dad was being an ass. As a result, my mom became my best friend, and I was very much a proud “momma’s boy.” In fact, there are no words to describe how close we were. Anyone with a great mom will understand!

This dynamic was very unhealthy as my mom often found herself quite literally in the middle of my father and I, trying to defuse our differences. I wanted my dad gone, and whenever my mom wasn’t home, the thought of even walking past a room he was sat in scared the shit out of me. “What was he gonna say? What did I do wrong? What isn’t good enough this time?”

So I grew into adolescence developing an arguably unhealthy attachment to my mother and a bitter hatred toward my father. And at the end of that adolescence, the year I turned 18, my mom was diagnosed with lung cancer.

I still remember in vivid detail everything that happened the day of the diagnosis, it was one of the only moments my dad and I completely said “fuck our differences” and hugged it out crying in the hall of the hospital.

After the diagnosis, my dad and I inexplicably switched personalities, and I still can’t figure out why I acted this way to this day, but while he jumped onto the caregiver role without a second thought and started waiting on my mom hand and foot despite all the years of dysfunction, I curled up down in the basement, smoked copious amounts of weed, and drank a shit ton of liquor. My daily routine was waking up, getting high as a kite until about 1 o clock, and finishing almost a liter of Jagermeister every single night for almost a year. By that time, the cancer had progressed to the terminal stage. It was in my mom’s brain, liver, and lymph nodes.

I was terrified, I really didn’t know how to process my mom’s diagnosis, and I wanted to help her be comfortable and feel better, but I’m still just a kid, and trying to balance preparing for the worst and hoping for the best just became a big gray blobby area of my consciousness.

Toward the end of my mom’s life, her brother drove down from Michigan to visit and say his goodbyes. He stayed with us for almost a month, and much like myself, he and my dad did NOT get along at all.

This is where my dad starts to turn psychotic.

My dad had fucked up so many years with my mom without a second thought, and right as the diagnosis came he was trying to patch things up to repair his own guilt about everything. I think the reason he became so eager to help all of a sudden was to ease his own feelings of guilt and finally see himself as the good guy, sorta tying up loose ends and whatnot. This amazing act of kindness and dedication turned into a selfish battle to keep my mom alive and in pain.

Back to my mom’s brother. When he arrived about a month before my mother died, he knew what was happening and he knew that she was going to die. And so he started working with the medical staff to find the best way to keep her comfortable on her way out, and eventually they just decided to up the dosage of pain meds she was getting in order to keep her from squirming around in the bed and getting agitated.

I thought this was great, because once the cancer progressed past a certain point, my mom became a different person. I really think she died before she actually died, you know? She was very upset, couldn’t articulate any words, and whenever she woke up, she’d try to get out of the bed every single time, and she’d get so mad when we had to put her back in. She had many accidents and needed cleaning, it was a very traumatic thing to watch your own mother go through.

My dad then became hysterical and started to believe that the medicine was what was causing her condition to plummet. He got in several verbal altercations with the nurse, started knocking things over when they said they weren’t going to just cut her meds, and ended up getting the cops called on him and faced the possibility of not being with his wife as she died.

This led to my dad becoming increasingly aggressive toward my mom’s brother, and eventually it got so bad that he went back to Michigan, fearing for his own safety. He did not get to see his sister out of this world because of my selfish fucking father.

My mother died in pain, and I was holding her hand as she left this world. It sits somberly with me, and I’m not convinced I don’t have PTSD because sometimes when I close my eyes I see her helpless face, jaundiced and scared, looking up at the ceiling of the hospice facility.

It’s been a year since I lost her, and I still live with my dad, who sulks around the house to this day. If you looked at him the day after he lost his wife, and then looked at him today, you’d notice no difference. He’s a lonely, sad, shell of a man who still lives with guilt. We don’t talk much and our lives are very separated even though we live under the same roof.

Today I was thinking about everything and I’m starting to realize that I’ve never allowed myself to fully grieve and process everything that’s happened. I can’t make myself cry, I can’t make myself focus on the subject, it’s like my brain took all of this and locked it away somewhere. I almost feel as though none of it happened, even though my mom isn’t here, like it was all a Dream. I have no idea how to go about dissecting this because it’s like a 100 pound weight I carry on my shoulders every day.

I miss my mom, my dad is still a controlling asshole, and I don’t know what to do.