Mental Wellbeing – My Grief Letter to my dead father
Putting it out there
I’m just going to put this out there, because I believe for those of you that have either lost a parent or been traumatised by one, it may help. I am not asking for, or expecting tea and sympathy. I genuinely just want to help others make some sense of the complicated love relationship we can have with a parent and some of the damage it can cause.
The trigger
This letter came into being during my therapy session Today, and I always said I’d share the bits I thought were most salient. So, this is going to be raw and uncut, as it poured out of me. And no, it’s not the best piece of writing but it’s 100% true. The trigger was my birthday tomorrow, and the first I’ll experience without him.
It really works
I truly recommend doing this, if you’ve lost someone close to you and there is still pain surrounding their memory. It’s cheap but amazingly effective personal therapy…. Save where you can people! And, I hope you have realised by now, I like to empower people to D.I.Y, less B&Q and more Gandhi!
The grief letter
Dear Daddy, (I called him Dad or Bad in life, ironically he never got the nickname but kinda liked it…. proof we’re blind to what we don’t want to see),
As you know Tomorrow is my birthday and it’s going to be the first one without your phone call. Yes, phone call, because I was never important enough for you to make the journey to celebrate my birthday. It was never that important to you, and that’s in fact how you made me feel in all aspects of our relationship. Important, but not a priority, never ‘the priority’, that was always someone or something else. I have to make sure I don’t do that to my kids, because I think I inadvertently have, how awful. This lack of true love has scarred me deeply and played a major role in me not making, from not being able, the most of my life. It’s made me insecure in every aspect, undermined by you and then myself – the role modelled behaviour! I feel like I’ve spent my lifetime backfilling the potholes in my road, potholes you helped to create. I know you loved me but why was I never enough? Am I so unlovable, difficult? What made me so? I am your daughter, what happened to unconditional love? I’ve married someone whose repeating these patterns. My life has and continues to be so lonely. I have to learn to parent myself, because it wasn’t and isn’t good enough Dad. I feel so much anger towards you. But even I know, I would never have bothered saying this to your face because it would have been futile. It would have made you angry and fractured our fragile connection. A connection I kept giving you time over, though at times you did chase me to keep it, so I knew you cared. I wish it had been different, I wish you’d accepted me more so I could do a better job of accepting myself. I wish you’d noticed and met my needs so I learnt to do that for myself. You asked a lot of me, and so I’ve asked too much of myself. You set the tone Dad, because you were my father and you didn’t do a very good job of it.
Goodbye Dad, I feel a lot of anger and so I’ve ripped you from your pedestal now. I always cared about your vulnerability beyond my own. Not anymore. I deserve to be a priority. I deserve love. So, I will do that for Myself.
The end
There you go reader, it’s not perfect, it’s clearly private and about us! But it sure made me feel a hell of a lot more grounded, and clearer about some of those complex emotions uncovered by my deep grief.
What a good parent looks like
PPS. What I didn’t say, but feel I need to add, is that from doing that process I came to understand more clearly the role of a good parent. It’s to make your child feel like a priority, so when they grow up they know how to prioritise themselves and not put other people first. It’s to identify and show them their needs and how to look after them, so again, when they mature into adults they can do that for themselves. Growing up is truly a rights of passage, it’s when they take over the reigns of their own lives and stand grounded and powerfully in themselves. Not seeking or looking to others to fill their gaps or meet their unmet needs, they can stay in their adult selves.
•NB. Living relatives, I do not need you to tell me how much my Father did love me, I know he did in his own way. It’s just his way has done an awful lot of damage, that’s costing me thousands to correct, primarily, so I don’t repeat this on my own kids.
