I don’t know how share this in a concise way, so here goes and thanks for reading.

My siblings and I were very close to our mom growing up. She loved us very much and was always happy to tell us so. However, something in that love soured over the years, and she started treating us differently. Around middle/high school, she became very emotionally manipulative, angry, and aggressive. She was also very transparent about having favorites, and I received a lot less of this new behavior than my brothers. This really damaged my relationship with them for a long time, and I felt isolated and pressured to be perfect while she openly called my brothers fuck ups.

Fast-forward a few years to 2015, I had been out of the house a while, but my twin was still there. Despite the rift, we started hanging out again and he opened up about how much worse Mom’s abuse had gotten. She destroyed his self-esteem and stunted his personality through constant guilt and lies. We were both confused and outraged how she could treat us so differently, and after a lot of sobering discussions, we decided to cut her out of our lives. I found somewhere for him to stay and we tried to not look back.

Our mom was devastated. She lost contact with her youngest child and her “golden child” in one fell swoop, and she tried reaching out to us daily for a long time. You know that tension you feel in your chest when someone’s knocking on your front door and you pretend you’re not home, but they just keep knocking? We carried that tension with us every day for years. We even took our turns answering the door a few times, and we made sure to keep it open when our older brother passed away, but her behavior never changed and only reaffirmed our decision.

In October of 2019, I got the call that Mom had passed. Part of me broke to realize that I was still her emergency contact, but the guilt didn’t stop there. I felt a responsibility to take care of her remains, which involved signing up for a state-funded cremation. This requires certain information (drivers license, address, etc.), but seeing as I hadn’t spent much time with her in 4+ years, I didn’t have access to any of that. I started to hunt down information through friends of hers, but the more I revisited her world... I don’t know, a part of me shut down. I couldn’t think of her as a human being that needed to be put to rest, I could only see all the pain she caused my twin and I. I didn’t want to be a part of this, but I didn’t feel like I could hand it off to anyone else, either. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I stopped answering calls and stopped collecting info. I kept pushing it off and letting my mom’s body sit in the coroner’s office for two whole months before a friend of her’s assumed responsibility. It was unfair to her friends, to the coroner’s office, and most of all to her. I can’t properly express the shame and guilt I’m carrying around from this negligence, and I can’t help but think that no matter how my mom treated us, she didn’t deserve that. I think some part of me wanted to prove to my mom that I wasn’t perfect, that I was a fuck up, too. But you can’t prove anything to the dead.

Since then, a lot of my anger has melted away. I don’t regret cutting her out of my life, but I am hit with waves of sadness every few days. I didn’t realize until she was gone that some part of me still hoped for our family to reunite, and mourning for her has helped me realize that I never properly mourned my older brother. So I’m working on that.

I don’t really have a way to wrap this up, but it’s been cathartic to get my worst sin out there. Thanks again for reading.