I mentioned previously that our mom had printed and framed 100 photos of my sister for her celebration of life. On the day our parents were departing my sister’s town, mom dropped the news on both me and my sister’s partner that she had done this, in part, with the intention of handing off dozens of them to both him and I. This wasn’t a conversation or discussion—this was an implied imperative. Mom had dad bring in the boxes of photos and asked my sister’s partner if he wanted to look through the photos and choose some. He politely but firmly replied he didn’t need any and had all the photos he wanted already.
Mom got pissed. She thinks I didn’t see her angry crying as she stormed out into the garage to busy herself with helping dad load up the truck, but she was upset. She wouldn’t speak to anyone for a while. The muttered phrase about “erasing my daughter” came up again.
And the point of this anecdote isn’t to litigate the series of communication failures or the interpersonal issues—though I could write much on that. Instead, I am here to say for you as much as for me that when there is an outburst, whether it is your own or someone else, it’s probably not about the thing happening in that moment. And if you have it in you to take that moment to pause and be inquisitive rather than acting, it will go a long way toward diffusing the situation.
I know mom wants to grieve by surrounding herself with my sister. She wants to hoard everything my sister touched or had. She may slowly turn our family home into a museum or shrine of my sister. I also know mom expects others to think and act in a way approximating her own thoughts and actions. So when my sister’s partner did not want those photos, she took it as a rejection of my sister herself. She saw it as a total erasure of my sister, especially on the heels of the clothing donation we had made the day before. Mom doesn’t see just how much of my sister remains in that house, despite the major exodus of things. Because the part of my sister that lives in that house is the adult woman who made a home and a life with her partner, separate from our parents. And that part is less obvious to mom than the part she raised. My mom isn’t wrong for wanting him to want the photos, but it wasn’t fair for her to project meaning onto the refusal, either.
I also know my sister’s partner wants to grieve by speaking into existence the idea that he is “farther along in his grief than everyone else.” He finds comfort in distraction and distance from the pain, though he also keeps many prominent reminders of my sister throughout every room of the house. He takes care of my sister’s cat, an animal that is not the kindest or the best behaved. He parks every day next to my sister’s car, still on the driveway. He indulges in their shared hobbies with her things around him, now unused. He failed to see that my mom needed the validation of him wanting those photos to know that he still very much loved and missed my sister. Though he wants to believe he’s way ahead of the rest of us in processing the loss, he’s still very focused on protecting his own mental wellbeing, and he knew having more photos of her physically around would not be healing. He isn’t wrong for this in any way.
I avoided inserting myself in the situation. I was torn, because I obviously care about my mother, but she didn’t want to speak, and she doesn’t have any interest in having emotional conversations. I also feel an allegiance to supporting my sister’s partner, because I know it would break my sister’s heart if the winds shifted in a way that left it as him vs. the three of us. My sister loved him enough to nearly get to make him my brother-in-law, and so he is definitively family, too. I’m also just tired of constantly feeling like I need to resolve conflict and preempt it when possible. This doesn’t leave time for me to focus on my own grief.
And maybe that’s a lesson I need to learn. I can’t mitigate every moment of interpersonal friction, and it’s okay to step back and focus on myself. Or maybe there isn’t a lesson at all, and the entire moral of the story is death sucks, grief hurts, and there’s no amount of fixing that will fill the hole.
Unmoored Sister 