The Mother Who Might Go First

A lot of estranged mothers first notice it on paperwork, at the emergency contact line on a doctor’s form where the daughter’s name used to go without a second thought. They write down a sister or a friend instead. What most of them haven’t let themselves finish asking is what happens between them and their daughter if one of them dies first.

Estrangement doesn’t pause the rest of a woman’s life. The early years usually go to waiting for a phone call and checking a returned birthday card for a note that wasn’t there. Somewhere in there she starts doing the math on how long she can go without seeing her daughter before a rough patch turns into how they live. They’re both getting older the whole time, and one of them is going to die before either of them has decided anything.

If the daughter goes first, her mother might not find out for weeks. It could come from a cousin who assumed she already knew, or from an obituary a friend forwards without comment. Then she has to decide before she’s finished reading it whether to show up at a funeral she wasn’t invited to, or stay home and let everyone there decide what her absence meant. When the mother is the one who dies first, the daughter might not come. Everyone who does show up will take her not being there to mean her mother did something to her, whether or not that’s true.

When a marriage ends or a person dies, other people know what they’re supposed to say. There’s nothing anybody’s been taught to say to a mother whose adult child doesn’t speak to her, so mostly they say nothing. If they say anything, it’s what everyone says next: you must have done something, or, have you tried reaching out. Nobody brings food or sends a card, because nobody thinks anything happened.

You’ll be tempted to reach out now, while there’s still time, and whether it helps depends on what she’s been living with since the last time you spoke. A daughter who cut contact for a real reason reads her dying mother’s letter as pressure, one more time her mother needed something from her and called it generosity. If the estrangement started because you couldn’t hear her without turning the conversation back to your own feelings, a letter that opens with how much time you’ve got left is that same conversation again. It’s fine to write to her, but the letter has to be about her, and your own dying can’t be the reason she’s supposed to answer.

The parts of this other people end up seeing are the ones involving money, and your family will remember those long after they’ve stopped talking about the rest of it. Whoever advises you on the will is going to ask whether her name stays on it, which is a decision your own mother never had to make. Your own mother’s children all still called her on Sundays. Somebody’s going to have to sort the house, and you don’t know whether that person will be doing it because they loved you or because nobody else would. The plot next to your husband was bought forty years ago on the assumption that your children would be standing over it, and now you don’t know who’s standing over it, or whether anyone is. Most of it comes down to a phone call to a lawyer and a decision you have to put in writing while you still can.

People will tell you family is family and you should fix it while you can. Most of them have never had to sit across from an adult child who looked at them and meant it when she said she was done. Time is short, they’ve got that part right, they’re just wrong about what to do with what’s left of it. You have to be honest about whether what you’re offering her now is any different from what you offered before, or the same offer with a deadline on it, so she feels like she has to take it.

Nobody’s going to tell you how to grieve a loss that hasn’t happened yet and might not for years, or might happen this fall, because as far as anyone else can tell you haven’t lost anything. What you do with the time you have left is up to you, and doing nothing about it this year is one of the choices. You were never going to get her approval on any of it anyway, since she’s the one who isn’t speaking to you.

From the book

Family, Interrupted

A Guide to Understanding Estrangement, From Both Sides of the Silence

Family, Interrupted looks at estrangement from the mother's side and the daughter's side, and it doesn't ask either one to agree with the other before the first chapter. If you're trying to decide what to do with the time you have left, it's a reasonable place to start working out what actually happened between you.

Read about the book