My mom died long before her body did.

The title is clickbait. When I say my mother died, I mean to say that the person I once knew as my mother died. I apologize in advance as this post is mostly going to be a stream of consciousness because I want to be as authentic as possible. You should not expect this post to be particularly well-written or formatted.

I am writing this because I hope that it may help others who may be going through a similar experience as myself and as a tool for me to express my thoughts. I am largely a private person, I prefer to keep my issues mostly to myself so this is a huge break from my typical behaviour.

Roughly 1 year ago, my mother succumbed to issues relating to her stroke. The mother I knew died long before she suffered a stroke, however. My mother had long been suffering from an undiagnosed schizophrenia, the reason I believe this is because she constantly felt and espoused that she was being watched by some government or some omnipotent entity. My mother seemingly saw things no one else did.

To say the least, living with my mother was difficult and my relationship with her was highly complex. I cared about her, but it deeply frustrated me because we could not connect at all as we did not even live within the same plane of reality. It made discussing anything I would want to with her difficult as a common symptom of schizophrenia is word salad–the words and sentences she says are syntactically correct but are largely devoid of semantics and meaning.

My mother did on occasion experience some periods of lucidity, but those were interspersed amongst much more frequent periods of insanity. My mother was a diabetic, but due to her distrust of anything government she would often go for extensive periods where her diabetes was largely untreated. Unfortunately, this caused her significant nerve damage resulting in decrease in motor function. It really is difficult to care about someone like this. My energy is finite and as a child I was an extremely impatient person, I find it frustrating when someone doesn’t get me and my mother never got me. I tried reason, lied, and verbal abuse, anything to get her to listen to me. All of it failed.

There were many times I told her to leave me alone and I wish she had left my life entirely, but I do remember a time when my mom had her mental faculties intact where I saw her as a caring and loving person. I desperately yearned for that feeling again, but that never did come.

Overall, I’d say my mother had a negative impact on my own mental health. Even now, I’m somewhat grateful she died, but I am nonetheless sad she did die. I cried for her at the hospital when my mother suffered her final stroke which rendered her incapable of producing and understanding speech. It is safe to say I am very conflicted about my mother’s death.

I made the mistake of making my previous roommate responsible for my mental health and to be honest he was not of much help and he was right for doing so. I believe my mental health is largely my own responsibility and not anyone else’s, the only thing I regret is probably not getting professional help earlier. To deal with me and my emotions is a lot and my experiences are largely unique–I’d estimate maybe on the order of 1/10,000 (N=1). In conjunction with other issues such as the divorce of my parents and the fact I spent 4 years of my life in 2 separate foster homes, probably on the order of 1 in a million.

I feel incredibly alienated when I visit another person’s home and family, it is so otherworldly and differs from my own experiences so much. This is what I’d imagine (Paris syndrome)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome] must feel like, but the feelings between Paris syndrome and my own feelings are completely orthogonal in nature and extremely distal. I find it incredibly hard to relate to other people, even if we may share common interests as in the back of my mind I’m constantly wondering if they might be experiencing it through an incredibly different lens. I don’t think I’ll ever meet anyone aside from my sister who could sympathize with my problems and even she and I never discuss it.

What’s the moral of the story? To deal with a family member or really anyone with mental health issues requires an inhuman amount of patience and kindness. Something I wasn’t capable of as my mental health was already quite poor, if I had to do it over again, I’d probably be much more apathetic about my mother and attempt to preserve whatever semblance of happiness I may have had. It’s why I am hesitant about dating as I believe hiding my own mental health issues and trapping someone is deeply immoral. I make it a goal to tell them about my own issues within the first couple of dates. I believe you should only date someone if you are willing to share your partner’s burdens and be willing to open up about your own issues.