u/Lychee_489

Two owls, sitting on a post, caused quite a stir between my mother and I, who were fighting as she insisted on taking the photo of them and we are in a rush. Her sister died yesterday. I felt that the owls were her parents. My mom and I yelled at eachother, I instinctively looked at the owls and said “what!?”. Then left. Hours later we drove home, owls still there. I took my mom over to photograph the owls, she was happy about that. The owls just watched.

Family member just died who showed me tenderness in a way I didn’t receive from my mother. It’s hard to be in the family environment where their kids are supporting eachother and assume I’m ok because I’m not the direct child of the deceased. I am being supportive of them as much as possible, they lost a wonderful mother after all. But it’s really truly difficult to not have anyone know that I feel like I lost the only person who really saw me. I dont know what to say really, I’m just sad about it. My family was pretty abusive and desperately impoverished. Their family also had problems (whose doesn’t?), but it’s hard to not have anyone to tell and to have to be strong and try to support them all during this difficult time, but not be able to be there for the most personal moments because I’m not a direct child. I assume it’s really just that I’m greedy for attention due to having been neglected in my youth. Anyway, how do you deal with death?

Traveling cross country with loved one who has dementia. She sundowned in gas station, meltdown imminent. “Come on mom, we need to get you in bed, we can’t sleep here.” “No im going to go look around”. We had already been there almost an hour. Thank you kind employee who came up and said “sorry we are closed now,” and winked at me, made full serious eye contact with my mom, and then helped us to the door, held open the doors and wished us a good night. We got home without meltdown. 💝