Of all the things that still eat at me, it’s the wondering about what he thought of me at the end that eats at me the most. I used to be the person who brought him the most joy, the one person who could do no wrong in his eyes, his favorite person, the one person he put up on a pedestal. But when he became sick, I went from being the center of his universe, to him telling me, “you’re ok.” I wondered at the end if he ever even liked me at all. The rational me knows this is nonsense, but the very vulnerable me at my core still wonders.
It’s not just the physical loss of him that is so painful, it is the loss of him loving me in the way that he used to that tears me to shreds. Even now, I have this voice inside of me that questions what he thought of me at his core. There’s this little doubting voice that tries to convince me that, maybe, down deep, he didn’t ever hold me in as high of regard as I thought he did.
I think inside all of us, we have this really deep need to be understood, seen, and loved. Sometimes, that need is fed by the people who raised us, and sometimes, because it wasn’t, we seek it out in our romantic partners. In my case, I found it in my husband.
When the person we trusted the most in this world gets dementia, our relationship changes, and it crushes us. When it’s the person we should have been able to trust, but couldn’t, like when we have a parent whom we didn’t have a good relationship with, but wish that we could have, we suffer a special kind of torture. We realize we will never have the chance to resolve those hurts we suffered as children, forever riddled with the doubt of just what they thought of us. It feeds into the fear that maybe we really never were enough, never really were loved.
It is so important for us to separate the way our person was from the way our person is now that they are ill, so we can forgive the painful things they say on this journey, lest it haunt us forever. But when the person we are grieving is someone we had an ambivalent or otherwise less than ideal relationship before their disease, it becomes critical that we seek help in reframing that pain from something WE lack, to something THAT PERSON lacked all along.
This disease steals away the people who love us, and it steals the possibility for reconciliation with those we love, but had a less than ideal relationship with. I know no greater pain than this.
I hope you can find a way to heal from your situation. I know from personal experience, one can never DO enough in this life to feel like they ARE enough, especially when it was a parent who told us we weren’t. And when you throw dementia on top of it….
I just want you to know, you are worthy. You are not beautiful because of the things you do, you are beautiful because you were born. You ARE enough, simply because you ARE. 💞
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