thoughts about exAH who has passed away
 

Hi everyone. Thank you all for the sympathy you've expressed to me and my daughter. It is indeed a challenging time.

I am thinking of using this thread as a way to keep track of some of the thoughts and reactions I am feeling after his death, in the hope that this might be useful to others. Here we go:

1. The most likely outcome is the most likely outcome. I knew, sort of, that the most likely end for ex was that he would die before Kid grew up from the consequences of his drinking and that is exactly what happened. The medical examiner's report indicates cardiomyopathy and cardiomegaly, with at least one prior massive heart attack (MI). This is all consistent with decades of alcohol abuse and possibly other substances (we are waiting for a full toxicology report, which could take a long time). However, I never quite believed it. On an unconscious level, I somehow thought that he would be the exception.

2. Alcoholic deaths are not good. Ex was literally found dead on the street where he had dropped, which is better than years of diminishing. That is good. But he was brought in to the hospital unidentified (his wallet and car keys were missing. So is his girlfriend, also an addict. Go figure). The emergency contacts in his phone were his second ex-wife, who said "I'm not going near that, call Sasha" and a friend who had fallen out with him, who also said "I'm not going near that, call Sasha". So he was formally identified by the ex-wife whom he had spent years stalking, berating and trash-talking to everyone who would listen, because there was no one else who would do it. It took me three days to find his sisters, his only living relatives other than Kid, because he had not spoken to either of them in years.

3. Keep your wills up to date! Ex's is predictably a mess - it's several ex-wives old and contains obsolete references. Without going into all the boring details, it looks like the public guardian is now going to be responsible for his estate, which will tie it up forever (if there's anything left after all his debts).

4. The feeling of freedom is odd. I no longer have to worry that if I give too many details on this forum, he'll find them (see above re "stalking"). I no longer have to experience that rush of adrenaline every time I see a vehicle that looks like his in the vicinity of my home. I no longer have to update my "safety plan" with the police. I no longer have to go to court!

5. Freedom coexists with grief - all the grieving I didn't do when I left him because he was turning into a monster of addiction and mental illness. This is very hard for people to understand - that I am saddened by his death but also liberated by it.

6. Kid dodged a bullet. She was being recruited into the same caretaking/enabling/Daddy's special kid and let's just not tell Mommy about this, okay? role that he had played in his own dysfunctional alcoholic family of origin. It is terrible to lose a parent but she is now free of what the future could have held with an addicted parent with untreated mental illness and no boundaries.

More to come.

My father died on my 16th birthday. He was an alcoholic as far as I can figure. Dropped dead at age 41 while mowing the lawn and was found by Wife #2 some hours later. Heart problems similar to your ex.

As the kid...it ain't easy, regardless. It is abandonment, and I was furious as his only child - whom he abandoned first in the divorce then with his lies and deceit and finally by dying (how dare he die!)


It's an emotional minefield. I really needed therapy and I didn't get it. No one ever talked about it in my world and my own mind was not the place to be processing this kind of betrayal. I didn't have the tools and it took decades for me to sort it out on my own.

I have followed your story for a long time, Sasha, and this probably says something about me, but I was HAPPY to hear that your years of being tortured by this man have finally ended.

Your recent posts about him sneaking your daughter out of school and driving her around (not to mention “teaching her to drive”) and her lying to you about it were terrifying to read...I can only imagine how you must have felt.

My father messed up my emotional and mental health until his death last year. I am sixty. Your daughter doesn’t have to spend her next four plus decades that way. She can now get on with her life with the sanity and support you have never failed to provide her, and thank goodness.

You feeling relief from finally having it over—the mind games, the fear, the legal battles, the expense, the struggle to stay on the high road with your daughter while keeping her safe—is absolutely justified. Bask in it, hon, because you earned every bit of it.

The man he might have been died long, long before his body did. Now he is at peace.

And what is crucially important is that you and your daughter can be, too.

Wishing you all good things...

^^^ Ariesagain, you nailed it. I am just starting to realize now how terrifying it was. Two people with law enforcement experience have told me that I am very fortunate that he died when he did - every risk factor for assault or homicide was there.

Sasha :hug:

I'll never know exactly how awful this has been for you and your daughter. I hope you'll keep coming here as one way to help you work through all this. I hate addiction and all that it does, and I hope and pray for much brighter days ahead as you continue to process all that has happened.

^^^^ THIS !!!! Truer words were never spoken. I am thinking about making a sign with this sentence and hanging it on the wall.

Sasha, I am so very proud of you and everyone else who has posted so far. You folks and your collective wisdom and experience are an inspiration to me.

Here's another reaction: anger at exAH. He had been told by physicians three years ago that he was likely to die within five years if he didn't stop drinking, and he kept drinking. And died. I know that addiction isn't rational and that addicts can't think clearly and reasonably about their substance of choice, but what I feel is great anger at ex for literally drinking himself to death and leaving his daughter to grow up without him (and leaving me to pick up all the pieces).

I realize his daughter might actually be better off growing up without him and that makes me angry too - if you want to screw up your own life with alcohol, fine, go for it, but you have no right to screw up your kid by being a really bad parent and then dying (and screwing up/screwing over your ex-wives, and your ex-friends ...).

I respect the struggles of alcoholics who are seeking sobriety and working to maintain it, but I can't respect the utter self-centredness of the non-recovering alcoholic.

Sasha you have a right to be angry, and so do his ex-wives. There was something very off centre in his brain and I'm sure he suffered because of it, but without the self-awareness that would have modified his behaviour. It may be why he ignored the doctors advice.

I hope DD is coping. It's great that she's already seeing counsellors because she'll take some time to process conflicting emotions, just as you are.

You mentioned once that you were seeing someone, but in a limited way because of the circumstances around EXAH. Now you have much more freedom I hope you can do some great things for yourself.

Anger is perfectly natural under the circumstances :)

Sasha1972

I went through all sorts of emotions when my wife died from alcoholism complications. Many normal people don't grasp how to react to death of a spouse so young and add to the mix addiction. Anger, sadness, relief and many more will come your way. Just know it's normal and okay to feel that way. A question I always had but will never be answered is WHY?

Kids WILL travel through many emotions in their time. It will not be the same as yours. So know it's coming. Just pray and hold them when the time comes. At our house it's a topic I brought up often as let them know asking questions is okay.

Another thing is how others view and treat you. It's an Ex after all, you shouldn't have feelings right.. Well, just be you and grieve just like you were still married if you want. People don't or will not understand anyway even with best intentions.
A friend suggested a grief support group for me a few weeks after her death. I'm like I don't really need it but went anyway. I can't express what happened but I was not only there for me but for others. Wonderful experience.

Praying for you guys!
AG

... and another thing: it took much effort to locate ex's sisters, because none of the siblings have spoken to each other in years (decades in some cases), and I couldn't find phone numbers (had to track one of them down by finding a photo on a corporate website that looked sort of like an age-progressed version of her husband from the last time I saw him about fifteen years ago, and sending a cold-call email: "Do you happen to be the Mr Z who is married to Y__________ Z______? If so, could you please ask her to call Sasha about an urgent family matter?"). One sibling is fine - she is very helpful, seems genuinely shocked and saddened by her brother's death (and life - she had no idea how bad it was).

The other sibling has rediscovered how much she LOVED her brother, despite having nothing to do with him for decades. Her daughter is posting messages of grief on Facebook: "Tragedy has struck our family! Our beloved Uncle XAH has passed away. Prayers for our dear cousin Kid. Always loved and missed!". I am thinking:

1. You have never met Kid and you have had nothing to do with her in at least six years - no Christmas, no birthday, no "how are you", etc. You have displayed zero interest in your dear cousin. You are using this to harvest sad faces and emoji hugs on social media. You suck.
2. "Our family" consists of two surviving siblings (out of five) who are about as estranged as it's humanly possible to be. XAH's death was the catalyst for the first interaction between the surviving siblings since literally 2002, when their father died.
3. How can you "love and miss" Uncle XAH when you knew nothing about him? See #1.

I know social media is mainly lies and I usually disregard it (one friend refers to it as "pain shopping"). But the hypocrisy/ignorance is irking me a lot right now.

What an immense tangle of feelings to unpack.

It sounds like Ex comes by some of his dysfunction honestly . . . .at least judging by the reaction of some of his family . . .ugh.

Out of all of this I hope you can shake out some peace and healing for yourself and kid.

Unfortunately, some people use tragedy to get attention from friends and acquaintances--so they can be center stage and have the spotlight in their "grief".

I have witnessed this over and over again in my life and even in this community. My way of handling it is to ignore the drama. I hope they don't bring it to your doorstep!

Hang in there!

^^^ Yes - and now others are chiming in with how special he was, what a great dad, how much they're going to miss him... it's competitive and highly fictionalized performances of grief.

Which means it's time for me to use that nifty Facebook feature and IGNORE.

My mother, who was one of my qualifiers for this forum, passed away earlier this year. We were not and had never been close, and negotiating the avenues of her death was a very alienating experience.

People were coming out of the woodwork on social media to talk about what a positive role model she was when she was coaching the girls' Little League softball All-Star team, what a difference she'd made in their lives, what a wonderful woman she was. It was only then--a couple of decades into my recovery?--that I was able to articulate how much it hurt growing up with a mother who was one thing to most people and an entirely different thing at home. She just couldn't be for us what she was to everyone else. She saved all her vitriol for home. I escaped it and never looked back. My siblings chose the more responsible road and held on and my departure drove a wall between us I don't know if we can ever tear down.

When I started to feel frustrated with people's assumptions about how I felt over my mother's death I just reminded myself that there literally wasn't anything they could say that would be appropriate, and that it was okay, and that for some of them, her passing meant something I couldn't understand either. Only *I* could allow them to disrupt my healing.

Side note (as long as I'm talking about this), my mother got my name wrong in her will. Like, TOTALLY wrong. I've been married twice, and only changed my name legally the first time, so it's not like it's not confusing, but the hard part is she just picked two names that I don't go by and never once thought to concur with me if it was right. I didn't really want anything from her, and to be forced to go through this rigamarole over my name with the estate lawyer was just insult to injury.

Anyway, I have meandered far from the point, which is that we can't control other people (that's always my point).

Once again, Sasha, I want to commend you for living your truth with Kid when it comes to your ex. I wish anyone had been able to do that for me and my siblings growing up.

prayers

I’ve often thought that Shakespeare had it backwards, that it should be, “any good that men do lives after them; the evil is interred with their bones.” I told myself for a long time that my father just didn’t know how to be a parent, because his mother died when he was ten and his father when he was eighteen. Then my father died and the tributes started coming in about how kind and patient he was with children and what a great teacher and mentor to young people. My responses ran from rage to hurt to hysterical laughter.

So I understand and I’m sorry. It’s mind bending.

And heck yes, block them. I have no patience with drama vultures.

Sending you a hug.

You can deal with the irk. Just ignore it.

I had a similar experience with my XAH's family. His sister was a mess. As a sole parent by choice, Sister's children had no other parent. Sister ran off with a man and dumped her children.

Sister got unwell and died unexpectedly. People came out of the woodwork. Sister and I had a difficult relationship...I loved her but her choices were selfish and cost her children dearly. I grieved her from afar and watched social media light up in honor of her. It irked me too...but there was a lot of good in her.

Some grief is complicated. Let it sit with you for a while and try to understand it later.

Oh Sasha, what a circus. I hope you are starting to get closer to a light at the end of the tunnel for the immediate crisis & can get some space from all of this soon. Overwhelming is an understatement.

When my father died it was incredibly complicated & brought out the very worst in people I loved very much & it hurt like hell in ways that took me years & many circular paths to heal. I'm not even confident that I'm "there" yet. In an odd way, your Ex may have given your DD a badly wrapped gift in his death - she doesn't have to witness any further morally confusing behavior & without that negative pull, eventually will be putting more & more into herself instead, in a positive way. His death will ultimately give her a road to closure that him living in a dangerously degenerating situation may not have - like I said, it's a horrible way of seeing the positive side but sometimes we have to. This might just be him giving her to freedom to grow in a really, really messed up way - she doesn't have to watch him suffer inside of himself any longer.

I've spent the last 2 weeks deep-diving into the topic of Grief & specifically it's connection to Forgiveness & it has really dragged me into a new level of recovery/healing. I can only IMAGINE the volcano of hot lava this must be activating inside of you.

Sending you both SO MANY Hugs & Prayers, every day!! :grouphug:

Oh Sasha, I am so sorry. I have been out for a few days dealing with work things so I missed that he had passed away. I know this was very complicated relationship, but that your DD loved her dad. I am so very, very sorry. Please know you are in my heart and prayers, and your DD is as well.

Sending you the most huge hug ever.