When an Estranged Mother Dies

Renee found out on a Friday, standing in the break room at work with a coffee she'd already let go cold.

The text was from her brother. Mom died Tuesday. Service is Saturday. Nothing else.

She read it twice, rinsed the cup, put it in the rack, and went back to her desk, because her two o'clock was already waiting and there was no way to spend the next hour explaining any of this to anyone.

She didn't cry that day. She kept expecting to. What actually bothered her, by evening, was that Tuesday to Friday is three days. Somebody sat down and made a list of who to call, and she wasn't on it, or she was at the bottom of it, or her name came up and somebody said they'd take care of it and then didn't.

By Saturday, everybody in her life had picked one of two stories about her. The first was that she must be devastated, because it's her mother, and whatever happened between them, it's her mother. The second was that she must be relieved, because they hadn't spoken in six years, so presumably she'd already done the hard part. Both came with expectations. Neither one described what was actually happening, which was that she felt several things at once and none of them had a name.

What you're feeling is grief, and almost nothing around you is set up to treat it that way. Regular mourning comes with a structure other people can see, time off work, cards, people at the door, a period that starts and is understood to end, and permission to be visibly wrecked inside of it. You get none of the structure and none of the permission, and the week still has to be gotten through.

The leave is the strange part, because you'd qualify for it. No policy anywhere asks when you last spoke to her, a mother is a mother on every form. But taking it means walking into a supervisor's office and asking for time off to mourn a woman you hadn't seen in six years, and feeling the whole time like you're getting away with something, so a lot of women don't ask, they take a personal day and tell nobody. Nobody comes to the door either, because nobody's sure they'd be welcome, and the cards that do come are written carefully and land slightly off, because whoever wrote them didn't know what tone to use.

Everyone will assume the distance made it easier. Six years without contact, so surely the loss was already absorbed, spread out over time, handled in advance. It doesn't work that way. Unresolved relationships are harder to lose than settled ones, not easier. When there's nothing left to work out with someone, their death is sad and it's clean. When the whole thing is still open, when there are conversations that never happened and questions that never got answered and a mother you never got, you're grieving all of that at the same time. Grief after a difficult relationship tends to run longer and heavier, not shorter.

So if the death hit you sideways, if you're more of a mess than a woman who hadn't spoken to her mother in six years is supposed to be, you're not doing it wrong. It's a harder kind of loss than people assume.

What you're grieving usually isn't the person. The relationship ended years ago. You already know what it's like to not have a mother, because you'd been not having one for a long time by then. What ended on Tuesday was the possibility. Not that you were waiting on it, not that you had a plan, just that as long as she was alive the situation was technically unfinished. Now it's finished, in the worst available way. Nothing got repaired. The option got removed.

And you lose the option even if you never wanted it. Plenty of women who were completely settled, who had thought it through and made the right call and never planned to go back, still get hit by this. Declining something isn't the same as it not being there anymore. You can be sure about your decision and still notice when what you decided about is gone for good.

That's the women who were sure, and a lot of women aren't. A lot of women are still holding onto something right up until the phone rings, even if they'd never say it out loud, and that something is hope. Most estranged adult children keep some of it, the hope that she'd change one day, that she'd turn into the mother you needed, that there'd be a conversation eventually where she finally understood what she'd done. You might feel like you grieved this relationship years ago, and for most women that's true, but the hope you kept, and it stayed alive because she was alive. So hope died on Tuesday too, along with any chance that it could ever have gone differently.

You already did this once. The estrangement was its own bereavement. You grieved her while she was alive, without a funeral, without anybody acknowledging it, and mostly by yourself. Then she died, and none of that first round counts toward the second one. You don't get credit for the years you already spent grieving her. You do it again, in front of people.

Saturday is its own problem. There's a stigma around estrangement, and the stigma makes people secretive about it, and being secretive about something means fewer people know enough to support you through it. A funeral makes it worse. The room is full of people who either don't know the history, know a different account of it than yours, or know it and have opinions. Whoever walks in as the estranged daughter is the one person there with the least support available and the most managing to do.

So if you go, you'll be working, not mourning. Reading the room. Deciding what to say to the aunt who asks how you're holding up in a tone that means something else. Watching a relative use the receiving line to relitigate the last six years. Being told, by someone who has known you since you were four, that she talked about you all the time, and you won't know until later whether she meant it kindly.

Go or don't go. I'm not going to tell you which is right, because neither one is automatically the honest choice. Some women go and find it useful. Some go and spend a year regretting it. Some skip it and feel fine about it, and some skip it and find out in March that they needed something they didn't get. Going or not going says nothing about your character, whatever your family decides it says, and somebody in your family will try to make it say something.

What people say to you will mostly be bad, and mostly not on purpose. At least she's at peace. At least you had those years. Everything happens for a reason. You'll regret it if you don't go. Life is too short, said to someone who is standing at a funeral. The greeting-card answers come out because most people have no idea what to say here, so they say whatever they've heard other people say.

You don't owe them a correction. You don't owe them the timeline, the history, or an explanation of why you stopped speaking. "It's complicated" will do. A funeral is the worst possible place to explain your entire childhood.

You can feel relieved and grieved at the same time, and you don't have to sort them into one feeling before you're allowed to have either. You can be sad she's gone and glad you're not going back. You can miss a woman you'd never have let back in. You can feel almost nothing on Friday and fall apart in the car on Tuesday. None of it means you were wrong to leave, and none of it means you didn't love her.

Did you go, or did you stay home? And looking back on it now, did it turn out to be the right call?