[elisewin]

Have you covered in your therapy the issues about bad parents getting old/sick/dying? What are your therapist's views on taking care of or washing your hands from an ageing parent who never offered any safe parenthood and to whom you may feel resentment? How do you feel about the issue. Have you or have you not been in the life of your bad parent? How did you feel about it? I'm dealing with this and no solution feels good.

[Therapy reviewed]

I was astranged from my adoptive mother for most of my therapy....i would sometimes swing between blaming myself and blaming her... She died and I found out 4 yrs later no, one had told me.. T was a great support and kept me grounded in the real mother/child dynamic I had with adoptive mother... T said, she too got angry that my brother had chosen not to tell me, saying he could have said "you're not wanted at the funeral but letting you know mum had died".. T said in the 15yrs you've been here I have never heard anything from you that puts your mother in an other light than abusive, and in that time if you were in the wrong something would have come out to show me she wasn't what you've told me she was and it was self protection to be astranged from her that I had tried many times tried to mage the relationship work but my adoptive mother had issues that weren't off my making and I was the vessel she used to project her negative traits into..

[stopdog]

Not me but my partner - her parents were absolute monsters. She hadn't seen her parents for over 40 years because they disowned her, but (when we first started dating) she still talked to them on the phone once a week (the phone calls made her physically ill each week) - finally she stopped the calls but heard her father was sick - her mother told her brother to tell her she couldn't come to see her father (which she wasn't planning on really but to be told she wasn't welcome was not fun)-he died and her mother smashed all his stuff or gave away anything the offspring might want. Then her mother got sick and her therapist spent a lot of time talking about what a terrible idea it would be to go to the mother before she died.

[unaluna]

Elisewin - first thing i would check is if the state you or they live in require that the child be responsible for the aging parent.

After that, i would say to be aware of your feelings. My mother was in the hospital a couple of times while i was no contact, and i kept having this idea that if i approached her, she would knock my eyeglasses off and break them, and i would be unable to drive myself home. A catastrophe. So i protected myself and stayed away. I am not one to indulge in such fantasies as a matter of course, but i figure my brain was trying to tell me something!

There are a lot of books and articles about going no-contact that you may find helpful.

[elisewin]

Thank you all so much for your thoughts and experiences. I think it is one of the hardest thing to do to firstly limit contact with a harmful parent and then facing the feelings and acts (or lack of acts) when they are vulnerable and old.