AITAH for not visiting my mother before she passed from Cancer because she welched on paying for half of it?
33M. This was a few years ago now and I still kind of sit with it. I can also be a lot more honest here than with a lot of my actual family.
My mom got cancer after smoking for 40 years in 2023. She was a really, really bad mom. She beat me, she screamed and abused me pretty much non-stop. She did drugs (hard) while I lived with her, she put me at risk by bringing in drug addicts constantly, she constantly associated with people I can really only describe as 'low class' in the worst way. Abusers, drunks, druggies, losers. I was also really, really sick. I have a genetic disease that caused me to need open heart surgery at 18, spinal fusion at 14 and was constantly painful, so I retreated primarily to a world online where nobody could hurt me.
I moved out at 19, I left the state entirely. Mom ended up going to prison for 4 years for Identity Theft. I still tried to support her becoming better while she was in jail, and by the end of her sentence, because I thought she was starting to change, I wrote a brief letter to the parole board that they said was the deciding factor of allowing her to get out on parole before her 7 years.
For a few years things were better and our relationship started to actually kind of heal. With the benefit of distance I started to care for her again and she was clean, she learned a lot of hard life lessons and she started to really improve her life. She wanted to open a business, even.
In 2018, my heart sprung a leak and I had to have open heart surgery again, this time to get a mechanical valve. I didn't really have anyone I trusted, and to her credit, my mother offered to come visit for a month and take care of me post surgery. I paid for this, as I felt like it was my responsibility if she was going to come here and care for me. I paid for her flight, put her in my apartment, paid for food and even, though I hated it, her cigarettes because, again, she was doing me a real favor.
It was rough sometimes, but she tried mostly to behave herself. She helped me a lot and then she went home. We left on good terms, shockingly. She even came back to visit about six months later for a week in a much more friendly visit where we actually did things.
Then she started to slip again. She called me constantly to complain about her life, about the people in it. She moved out of her apartment because she didn't like paying rent (She got SSI, same as I do) because a family friend who owned an RV offered to let her stay in it permanently. I knew it would be bad for her to take that offer and it was. She became miserable, despite having money. And then, having money turned into idle hands and anger. she started doing drugs again, started hanging out with bad people. But I was remote now, so I only had to care so much. I knew she was going down a bad road, but it was her road to travel.
Then, around 2023, she got sick. She thought it was pnemonia at first, then other stuff, but she wouldn't see a doctor because she didn't trust them. Eventually she was hospitalized with pain in her lungs and the news came back: Stage 4 lung cancer. She had very little time left. She got the diagnosis in November, and we started talking about the end. She didn't want chemo and her diagnosis wasn't good anyways. She could have extended her life by a fair bit with it, maybe a year or two. But she was doing drugs at the same time, and her druggie friends said she should just enjoy the rest of her life.
I admit, I gave up on scolding her about it. I couldn't really bring myself to do it. I hated it, but it was over anyways, there was no longer really any more damage she could do, I guess.
I was really nervous about going to see her in this state, but I told myself that if I was in a Hotel it would be fine. I was going to go out there for 2 weeks so we could say goodbye. I had a professional obligation in April for one weekend, and I offered to come out literally the next day after it was over. At first, she was happy about this idea. She respected that I had one weekend I couldn't come, and I was honest with her that I couldn't afford to pay for a hotel for 2 weeks plus food and other stuff. She said she'd pay for half, and I agreed. About 750$ each, all told. I would need to take out a loan but I was prepared to do that at the time.
But there were enormous red flags. She started to insist I stay at this one specific motel near a really, really bad part of Arvada colorado. An extremely, infamously known drug motel. It was dirt cheap, but this is maybe one of the most famous motels in the state for drug users and prostitutes. I finally said no, and that if this was really that important to her, I would actually pay the difference. (Basically we'd treat it as if she paid half my hotel at that motel's rate, and then I'd make up the difference to stay in a holiday inn)
She blew up and refused, and said I was ungrateful for even asking for money to come see her on her death bed. I suspect she was also not telling me the truth about how long she had left. This spiralled really badly, and she dissapeared for a week on a huge drug bender. Bad enough that her druggie friends started calling me and telling me I had to pay for her habit 'or else' (Implication there was that they'd find where I lived) (To which I immediately got one of them arrested by calling the cops)
She never really recovered from this spiral. She started sending me texts that I was defective, that I was a bad son, that she hated me. I tried to reconcile with her up until the very end, the very, very end. But she didn't want it, and her last text to me before she went to sleep and died was that she would never forgive me and that she would hate me forever.
The hospice facility she spent the last 3-4 days in called me that morning and told me she died. I was devastated, cried for hours. But I thankfully have a roommate who I'm as close with as a brother who got me through it.
distilled, here it is: Am I the asshole? I could have visited. I could have made it happen. She died after the weekend I was locked out of travelling for, about 2 weeks later. I could have gone into debt and borrowed from friends and family to go to her and be at her side and say goodbye. I think she knew that, she knew I could have forced the issue and gone to her if I had really, truly wanted to.
But I didn't want to. That's what I struggle with. In the end, despite the fact that she had helped me when I had surgery, I didn't want to see her at the end of her life, drugged out of her mind, screaming, and treating me like shit one last time. I've struggled and kept this part a secret for years: I could have made it work if I had wanted to, but I didn't. Am I the asshole for letting her die without being the better person and going there to say goodbye?
I should also disclose: There was a lot of rumbling in the last weeks from a mutual family friend that there was a really specific reason that she wanted me to take her to that hotel for 2 weeks and it was told to me, though I don't know if I believe this, that she had floated the idea of having me mugged in the motel and having the 750 in cash I was going to bring (long story, covid stimulus money) and ditch me to do more drugs.
But I could have still gone and just isolated myself into a safe hotel where she'd have had to act normal. I don't know.