I very much relate to your family story. My parents were the "poster-children" for "love-hate" and they were married & divorced twice, having produced
3 of us confused & stressed kids that grew up with mom. That's all water under the bridge at this point- our dad was more interested in his son & treated
him differently than his daughters...so we weren't close. When I visited him (across the country) in later years, he sort of gave me the creeps & perhaps
it was mutual: I obviously reminded him of my mom. Years later when he passed of a massive heart attack (after suffering years of COPD from smoking)
it had little impact on my feelings, sorry to say. I still remember him as verbally abusive when I was a child & he did little to improve his image with me.
(A child should never hear their father say to their mother that he's going to leave her lying in a pool of blood...he truly needed kids like he needed a hang-
nail and apparently cared just about as much.) At least over the years I was close with my siblings, and all of us seemed to learn not to "become" our
parents, so I guess they served as bad examples. None of us even smoked. Some years back I lost my mother to dementia as you did: that is a horrible
ordeal...the person you knew is in front of you, but yet they aren't fully there anymore. It's a frightening nightmare for them too...my mother started
having awful hallucinations, things she claimed she saw in her house & yard at times, & she was convinced they were real. And unfortunately for her, my
dad never died, he was right there in the basement (that her house did NOT have!) & causing trouble for her all the time. No, she couldn't even take com-
fort in his passing.What an awful disease.
May I send you a hug too?
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