Countdown to Another Sorrowful Christmas: Day 12 Grieving the Living

         Tears fall from my green eyes as I slowly tap on the keys of my laptop, the keyboard a blur.  The sadness washes over my soul like a tsunami smashing my heart to bits and pieces.  There is not a moment in each day, sometimes more, that I don’t grieve and mourn the loss of my two sons and four grandsons.  I have two more but I don’t know them thanks to their psychotic mother’s alienation.  Its hard, so hard to have to grieve the living dead, to bury the living and let go.  The emotional pain has taken a toll on me and I wonder where in life the wrong turn happened.  I sure did not ever, EVER imagine that at this stage in my life that I would be estranged from both my sons and grandsons.  It wasn’t supposed to happen, it wasn’t in the script.  Who was the cruel person that wrote in that plot twist in my life?  I’ve tried rewinding the reel in the movie of my life trying to find that one moment.  I beat myself up wondering where I went wrong or how it went all wrong.  I can find neither answers nor relief from this pain.  I know that I am not alone because I am a member of a few groups on Facebook that deal with estrangement.  It seems to me that this is becoming a widespread epidemic of abandoning one’s aging parents and tossing them aside like yesterday’s trash.  I must pause and say that some children have had to alienate from their parents due to abuse, however, this new epidemic of children were not abused.  Maybe its entitlement, they deserved and wanted it all and when their parents could no longer give they tossed them.  They have no use for their parents unless there is some gain for them, mainly financial. 

               We have been estranged from our older son since 1994 when he met his then psycho girlfriend.  Thats when we lost him.  He graduated from high school that year and was set to begin the local community college the spring semester of 1995.  My brother married his long time girlfriend that Labor Day weekend.  He was in the wedding.  We drove back home to  NYS for the wedding and thats when it fell apart.  He said he wanted to stay with his grandparents, my ex's parents for a bit.  I knew what he was up to, reconnecting and stalking his old girlfriend.  His grandparents were religiously obsessed and went to church all the time.  That was where he met his demise and psycho girlfriend who later became his wife.  She was controlling from the get go, no manners, crass, rude, and crude.  Her mother had recently passed away from a heart attack and there were allegations she did not call 911 in time and let her mother die.  I have to say its plausible.  My son was obsessed with her and then got her pregnant.  They had to marry.  Shortly after the birth of their son her violent abuse of my son began.  She beat him so bad on three occasions that  we know of that were homicidal.  She beat him with the wooden butt end of a gun and actually broke it over his head, this caused some TBI with him.  Next she sliced his left arm open with the blade of a butcher knife in a rage leaving his arm numb and a scar.  And finally she tried to kill him by driving into a telephone pole at a high rate of speed with their car with their baby in the back seat, the baby was two at the time.  My son went through the windshield.  Never did he report her or have her arrested which I can understand why, men are not believed when they are abused.  In addition she publically degraded and humiliated him.  So his grandparents brought him down to our farm in North Carolina, hundreds of miles away.  He stayed with us for two years and then he met this girl online, flew out to Colorado to meet her, it apparently didn't work out and his grandparents paid for a bus ticket for him to go back to  NYS.  Then he hooked up with his psycho wife shortly after, she claimed she was beaten by a boyfriend and has no memory of what she did to my son.  Yeah right!!!  Then there was a time of a brief relationship from 2009 til 2012 when she got pregnant again after seventeen years and then suddenly our son stopped calling us.  

                Our younger son chose to be alienate from us just after my heart attack.......funny isn't that?  Its been six and a half years now.  There was a period of a year where he was fine last year and we enjoyed a warm connection but then a few months ago he suddenly cut us off again.  He is no longer married to his wife who had schizophrenia, they split after he ran off with her bestie.  Its his ex wife that has caused us a lot of pain but then what would one expect from someone who brought a gun to school at the age of fourteen with intentions to harm another girl.  She was in trouble so she knew if she got pregnant she would not have to go to a juvenile detention center.  This was in 1997 before the Columbine incident.  The bestie I like, but even she is acting strange now.  

                In our case the alienation and estrangement from both my sons involved their involvements and marriages to women that have mental illness.  One is a violent psychotic and the other a schizophrenic who brought a gun to school when she was fourteen years old with intentions to harm another girl.  Typically this does not happen twice in a family, however, when young boys use the wrong head they get into trouble and they both did at that too!  Yet can I fully blame those two women?  Our sons needed to grow a pair of balls and stand up to them!    They made their decisions and now they must accept the responsibility and consequences for those decisions.  Like my mother used to say, “You make your bed now you lie in it!”  Yet I don’t believe that they, nor the millions of other children who estranged from their parents sees their role in the disaster they created and the shit storm about to hit them from their own children.  Nothing is ever their fault.  They are narcissistic as are their spouses and children. 

                I have to live my life without my two sons and grandsons, its really hard to accept that sentence and know that I have to bury the living.  Its not my choice, its not what I bargained for in this life.  There is nothing I can do about it, they all control the situation, cutting us off, silencing our voices.  But not for long………this mother has a say and my voice will be heard through my tears!  I’m telling my story to the world!  I’m going to be a voice for all estranged parents.  I am going to connect with others who are estranged from their children and grandchildren.  Together we will be a force to be reckoned with and let our estranged children know we will NOT TOLERATE This.

Tomorrow is Day 11 in Grieving the Living.