Caring for the Abusers at The End of Their Life

Photo Credit: By Fahrmboy on DeviantArt

My Family Background

I am one of nine siblings, eight that are living. My oldest sibling died when he was just three days old of a lung disease that probably today could be surgically and medically healed, but over fifty years ago that was not possible. This is one of the many horribly sad occurrences in the life of my parents that made them unhappy and turned them into disassociate, unfeeling, hurt-filled, and eventually very abusive individuals. The anger was always there for my father. He was abused by his alcoholic father and also watched his mother be threatened to death by this man. He was poor and traveled from place to place as his parents sought work. At a very young age, the first born--only child (two earlier pregnancies were terminated by illegal abortions) he was put in a military style boarding school so his parents could work for the construction of the Panama Canal; years later he confessed to my own mother that he had been sexual abused as a boy at this school.

During World War II, he was in Oak Ridge when the Atom Bomb was being built; his father was a day laborer that did not live in the secret city, but on the outskirts. It was there that his father put a knife to the neck of his mother and she begged before her own children, her two sons (four years apart) to not be murdered. My uncle who has passed away shared this story with me. When my father was thirteen, his mother was put into a mental institution for a nervous breakdown because her husband wanted a divorce. At this time it was horrendous for a women to be single and have by that time three children to raise. She was viewed as a tramp and treated as one. She and her children would have been shunned by society and considered a shame to her church pastor father. While she was in the mental hospital, her children were put into a Methodist orphanage. My father being thirteen was expected to work and not to be considered one of the children that needed care like his two younger siblings. He slopped pigs and did farm work everyday like a slave-hand.

Photo Credit: RustySpoon on DeviantArt

Mother and Son

Eventually his mother recovered mentally, but she desperately wanted to make her marriage work; she did not want to live the shame of a divorcee or raise her children this way. But this was her lot in her life. She and her children were treated as undesirables and she would have to work many menial jobs as seamstress (which she was an impeccable one), doing laundry, ironing, cleaning or other odd jobs. She loved to read and was very well self-taught; she had been well trained in schools during her upbringing and was very intellectual. It is part of her spunk that gave her the stamina to raise her children on her own in later years, even taking up for her children to other adults such as school teachers and landlords. She was not one to hold her tongue if she felt injustice was taking place. Since she had been through the hardest of years with her oldest, my father, they were very close and she had a special tie to his soul that no other living person held. She had warned my mother, even begged my mother not to marry him because she knew his level of anger that could stir in him.

Nevertheless, my mother did marry him and she did experience a lifetime of his anger and abuse. Yet she also "stood by" nearly silent allowing him a period of three to four decades to horrifically abuse her and their children in every means imaginable. She was the enabler, the co-abuser while also being the co-abused.

His mother did not tolerate abuse, although she had been abused and so had her children. My aunt shares with me that she was afraid to tell her mother that her older brother had been abusing his two younger siblings, but one night their mother saw bruises on her little legs. When she confessed that my father had beat her with the handle of a mop or broom, his mother made it clear to him she wanted it stopped and would not allow him to do it again. My father for the most part honored his mother's warning until he left for the military at a young age barely out of high school. He served in the Korean War and there he met more horrors. In one incident the plane he was on crashed into an Alaskan mountain; everyone that fell on the windy side of the mountain died quickly due to exposure to low temperatures. The side my father landed on experienced an unthinkable slow death which resulted in humans resorting to eating the dead before they were rescued in order to stay alive. I cannot imagine what an event like this does to the human soul.

When I was only two years old my father's mother died. My aunt, my father's youngest sister to this day believes his mother alone, my grandmother that died, could have possibly stopped the torturous events of my childhood if she had lived. But this was not the case. I, as a two year old, have a picture seared into my brain of my father standing in his white underwear bracing himself on the strong, wooden, high dresser in his bedroom weeping for his dead mother. I must have peered in, frozen, seeing my father show vulnerable emotions for the first time in my little life and I have never forgotten that image.

photo credit: from DeviantArt Artist Photographer

Caring for Abusers

While I was still living in my childhood family household, in the teen years, I remember my father received a phone call from someone asking if he was the son of Mr. Smothers, his father. It is hard for me to remember if he was still alive or if he had already died but either way my father made it clear that he did not care and was not going to do anything for him. My grandfather that I never met, from everything I know was cared for and buried by the government at the end of his life. My father made his choice, he was not going to care for his abuser.

Now forty years later, my own parents lay in need of elderly care. My mother is frail. Siblings learned several year ago that she has heart disease and the doctors are amazed that she is still alive five years later. My father has suffered from Parkinson's disease the last decade, but has recently had a stroke that put him in the hospital. He made matters worse by ignoring my sister's and the nurse's imploring pleas for him to stop yanking on his catheter. The first time my sister was away from his bedside, he pulled it out and traumatized his bladder and urethra. He was eventually released to an assisted living home that unfortunately re-catherized him before receiving doctor's orders to get a urine sample thereby re-injuring his fragile urinary track. After continually blood in his urine he was sent back to the hospital and underwent surgery to cauterize the points of bleeding. He has been in ICU the past two day.

My mother's fragile heart is continually exacerbated by her emotional tirades. She is consciously or unconsciously using this time in her life as a way to gain control over her life where she has had little to none, but she is demanding and cursing at the very people who come to her assistance which has most been my two sisters who live near by. She craves attention and wants her every whim met. She will go into a tantrum and verbally abusive tongue-lashings. I am whole enough due to God’s healing to not allow my mother to treat me in this way. I know no one needs to submit to such abuse. I am encouraging my sisters to kindly explain that they will walk away or hang up if she does. This is how I would have to handle this behavior.

After a decade or more of most of the responsibility falling one to two siblings we are coming to a point where some of the other siblings including myself are at a healing place that we are able to bring assistance to those who are the caretakers. I love my siblings and do not want them to carrying the whole burden alone. I could not live with myself if one of them became physically injured because they were not taking care while giving too much attention to my parent’s needs. While I understand it is a personal choice, I also love my siblings too much. I would want to help them even if they were taking care of their in-laws.

Photo Credit: Imperfect Child on DeviantArt

What Will I Do?

A few years ago I could not even have been part of this type of a conversation. Just speaking of my parents would have tipped me into months a PTSD episodes, but I am in a more stable place after ten years of trauma therapy. My sisters have not asked for help. And several times, probably hurtfully, I have told my caretaker sister that it was her choice to feel responsible for their care because I did not feel responsible to take care of them. However, what has changed is that I feel responsible to care for my sisters and their own personal families.

I have not seen either of my parents in fifteen years but feel a release from God to be able to even go to my hometown and physically be present to be a relief for my siblings. It is not out of any duty or obligation I feel to my parents nor is it to find closure. I have found closure on my own and have no need to be with my parents or truly no desire, but I am willing to go where God wants me to go. And if it is out of love for my sisters that I venture to one of their bedsides; I will have to let Jesus be my hands, feet and mouth.

Whether I end up going or not will be determined in the near future in long needed joint discussions with my sisters who are caring for my parents, but I am prepared. God has provided for my needs to enable me to be ready. I think of Isaiah answering God’s calling in Isaiah 6:8:

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?" Then I said, "Here am I. Send me!"

It is not that I want to go. I have no desire to be with my parents. God might want me to go. He might have something to teach me, new depths of dependence on Him to take me or He maybe just wanted me to answer his calling and be willing and available to go. That in itself is obedience and can be honored by Him as though I had already gone.

Prayers Welcomed

If your are inclined to pray, say a prayer for my family, including me. Of course, none of us are near perfect; we each have are problems and failings. We, the siblings, are a fragile mess, a beautiful broken group of adult children of severe child abuse. We are walking into new pathways, even in trying to learn how to communicate among each other. I know God is working to heal and restore that which has been broken and stolen away for nearly half a century.