Grief; or, MC has an existential crisis

My Mom-Mom is dying. She is 87. She was a war bride and married my Pop-Pop when she was 17, shortly before he left for WWII. She was Rh- with an Rh+ husband in the era before RhoGAM, and had 7 children and 13 pregnancies. Her last miscarriage was quite late into the 2nd trimester, and resulted in a hysterectomy due to severe hemorrhaging. She was a fierce Irish Catholic who smoked, drank, and swore like a sailor. She kicked the smoking habit when my Pop-Pop was diagnosed with heart disease. She developed Alzheimer's shortly after Pop-Pop died in 1992. The last time I saw her was at my sister's bridal shower 7 years ago. She did not recognize me. She wasn't told when her daughter, my mother, died in 2007, 9 months before my son was born. Neither my mom nor my grandmom ever met my son. 

All that I've written above could have been written by any impartial observer. When my sister called this afternoon begging me to come to the hospice center to see Mom-Mom before she passed, I admit that my main emotion was annoyance. I was never close to that family. When my own mom died the year before my son was born, I found it hard to reconcile years of abuse I'd suffered at her hands with the general sense of remorse and sadness seen at her funeral. My own sisters admitted that they could think of nothing positive to say about her in her eulogy, which ended up focusing on her love of plants and the seashore. Yet, despite the shared past my sisters and I had, they and my Dad still berated me for not crying at Mom's funeral. At the time I was so hurt that they could say one thing about my mom behind closed doors, but then chastise me for not pretending to be a well-loved, mourning daughter. In fact, my own feelings on my mom's death bordered on elation. I felt like a heartless, shameless jade.

Since the time I left for college at age 17, my relationship with my family has been marked by a purposeful emotional distance on my part. After years and years of feeling worthless, helpless, and small, I finally had the opportunity to come into my own. But it seems that since about 2000, each year a different member of my mother's family dies and I am forced to deal with my inadequate emotional response to death. Not just deal with it on a personal level, but actually being confronted by family members for not being "sad enough".

And so begins this latest round. I will go to see my Mom-Mom tonight, and likely will feel a strong sense of distance between myself and the woman in the bed. Mom-Mom never hurt me, but we were never close either. She was part of an entity that had maligned and censored me, even if she never did those things herself. And so she was distanced from me.

And now, I will pay the penalty for that distance by being shamed into grief.