Dear Bel,
I’m the eldest of four. Three of us have done well and have thriving families. The youngest’s life was different: bad luck, poor relationship and lifestyle choices. She has also lived with borderline personality disorder (BPD) throughout.
Recently — tragically — she was diagnosed with a terminal illness. We’ve all rallied to try to support her and her family but it’s difficult. I’ve always needed to tread on eggshells around her, not knowing what might trigger an outburst.
Her life was difficult, becoming a single parent with three young children who were emotionally neglected, as she couldn’t cope.
They witnessed her being horribly abused by her partner, slipping in and out of depression, feeling overwhelmed and finding solace in alcohol. She tried suicide twice. Our parents helped her a great deal financially and practically.
My relationship with her was quite distant, especially as there is a 15-year age gap, I worked abroad a lot and found her chaotic way of life exhausting. Everything would seem fine, but she’d then become indifferent, distant or verbally abusive — all part of BPD.
Each of her (grown-up) children has struggled to make lasting relationships. Her youngest daughter also has BPD and displays irrational and manipulative behaviour with huge emotional highs and angry manic outbursts when triggered.
This has led to a stormy relationship with my sister and her daughter over the years. You’re either best friends or indifferent enemies. Everything is black or white.
Due to false allegations made by her daughter, my sister fell out with our father. She was always very close to him so I believe my niece felt she needed all her attention. It worked: my sister withdrew and is still estranged. My niece has taken on the role of her carer (a good thing in the circumstances) and they’re now inseparable.
My parents are very elderly and frail. They desperately want to see my sister, but she refuses to see Dad. It’s tragic.
I have compassion for my sister and her family, but don’t know how to cope with this added tragedy of her terminal illness and estrangement from our parents.
I feel I need to look after our aged parents and protect myself from the trauma I’m left with in the aftermath of a manic outburst. I have a sense of sadness and guilt because I know my sister is dying and I am powerless to change or help what is happening.
JANETTE
This week Bel Mooney advises a woman whose youngest sister is dying and estranged from the family on how to reunite them
Your subject-line was, ‘Sadness and guilt’ — surely the story of humankind.
We experience sadness from babyhood and learn guilt as soon as we are aware of the feelings of others, as when a small child knows it has made mother sad.
Yet why do people tend to regard these feelings with suspicion and shame?
To me they are profoundly important as proof of all that’s best in the human condition. How we recognise our fates as thinking, feeling people — and learn to accept and cope.
The story of your youngest sister’s broken life is indeed tragic: the one member of the family who, for whatever unknown reasons, went wrong. It’s easy to imagine how annoying this was at first, before you realised the full extent of her damage.
It’s also clear to me that for you, as the oldest sibling always concerned about your parents, it must also have been a cause of resentment, as you witnessed how she broke their hearts and used them as well.
If part of your current guilt dates back to those years, then I beg you to realise that there was nothing you could have done. Guilt with the intention of making things better is fine, but guilt at what is past and cannot be recalled or helped is just pointless — and can become corrosive.
What’s more, it is hardly your fault that you were never close to her — 15 years older, with such reservations about her as well as your own life to live.
I suggest the situation is not so different now. What can you change by feeling guilty? But sadness — yes.
Sorrow for a life seemingly wasted, which brought unhappiness to others. Sorrow for three fatherless children and their unhappy lives. Sorrow for your old father, falsely accused, yet longing for reconciliation. Sorrow for your mother who will inevitably have wondered, over many years, what she did wrong.
Now is the time for you to take good care of your parents, and for your niece to take care of the mother who failed her.
What else can be done?
I chose your letter because you recognise all that and know your sister’s diagnosis has directed a pitiless spotlight on all that has gone before. It is not so much a problem as an important lesson for others — all of us who understand Reinhold Niebuhr’s words:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Dear Bel,
I met my husband in our teens. We had two lovely daughters and a lot of hard-up times.
He worked long hours, while I worked part time. Fast-forward 40 years. We’re close to retiring — with our eldest daughter, her husband and three grandchildren all living in our house split into a lower and upper villa.
I’m not sure for how much longer, as my daughter and son-in-law are now able to buy a house after living abroad. This will really change things; I’m expecting the empty nest to be hard.
Ten years ago, I discovered my husband had had a seven-year affair. He’d ended it before I knew, but I couldn’t believe it, so even met his lover for her side of things. I’ve never felt hurt like that.
Things were never the same, but I carried on, no one knowing apart from my youngest daughter, still at home. After that, we both lost our parents and I find this very hard —as well as coping with the menopause for which (at last) I take HRT.
We don’t socialise much and most of the time do our own things.
A year ago, I read text messages between him and another woman. It may not have got as far as sex, but (from the texts) was building up to an affair. I’m still with him, though I always thought I’d leave with no explanations allowed.
I don’t want my eldest daughter to know, as she’d never speak to her dad again. I’d find it too hard to walk out and start over on my own but also can’t be false and make out we’re a happy couple.
I just don’t know what’s best for me.
JOSEPHINE
This is one of the hardest tests of any marriage, so it’s easy to understand why you feel so confused.
Your email laid out your life in stages: courtship, marriage and children, work, close adult children, husband’s first affair, menopausal middle age, bereavement — and now the double whammy of discovering your husband is at it again as well as the sudden dread of an empty nest. What is the next stage?
Will or will he not still be sitting in that nest, like a great cuckoo who doesn’t have the right (any more) to be there? That’s the question you can’t resolve. I don’t mean you are unable to, but that I believe it’s too early even to try.
You are still tortured by the memory of his seven-year affair, because such a hurt can never go away. It can be processed and lived with, but it does change things for ever.
You always believed such a shock would end the marriage. But it didn’t. Why?
You might answer that you were cowardly; too afraid of throwing everything away. But perhaps you were/are much too strong to let a middle-aged man’s predictable lust/need for adventure destroy what the pair of you have built since first love. A life of hard work and family love — until ten years ago.
You haven’t said whether you have confronted him over the texts. What has happened in the intervening year to make you write now? I wish I knew whether you and he have talked about the latest betrayal and its implications.
To your closing sentence . . . I suggest you won’t be able to know what’s ‘best’ for you until you’ve faced the next stage.
If/when your elder daughter and her family move, it will be very hard. But do you know for sure they intend to?
If they’re comfortable where they are, it could be wise to buy a place, renovate it and rent it out. They have a lot to think about and I imagine they’ll talk it through with you, too.
Meanwhile, keep on with the HRT, but I also suggest some counselling, whether on your own or with your husband. Relate is an obvious choice, but there are many forms of therapy — and I think it will help you to talk to a professional about all these issues.
You don’t want to pretend to be ‘a happy couple’.
Oh, what does that mean? If you talk through his mid-life crises, reminisce about your shared past, ask what future he imagines, perhaps find something new and fun you could enjoy together, discuss selling the property if your elder daughter does move . . . all this may in time lead you to the solution to the dilemma you express today.
In my heart, I’m not convinced you want to end the marriage. In a year it might seem better to stay with a bloody fool (so many of ’em about) than set off alone.
And finally… we should all write our life stories
A while back I had a long email from Susan B, recounting the story of an extraordinary life full of drama, trauma, unhappiness, making do, discoveries, faith, upsets, quarrels, volunteering — to a new love and marriage in her 50s.
It wasn’t a problem but she concluded: ‘Should I write a book? A lot of my friends think I should, but how would I go about it?’
Some weeks later Susan wrote again. She’d just read somebody’s problem on the page. ‘. . . omg — enough said . . . Bel, just don’t bother reading mine or think of featuring it in the newspaper because obviously the likes of poor Richard need your help and advice more than me.’
This column often works for people by putting their own issues into perspective. Yet the only question Susan had asked me was about writing a life story — a question I’ve been asked before.
A warning first. It sometimes distresses me a little that people put a lot of work into writing a memoir and then expect it to be published, only to be bitterly disappointed.
Private printing (or using Amazon for this purpose) is always a possibility, but not if you then expect your hard work to be rewarded in any way other than the satisfaction of seeing your (costly) book on your own shelf.
Yet I agree with the Russian poet Yevtushenko who wrote, ‘No people are uninteresting’, likening our individual fates to ‘the chronicles of planets’.
Each person is a star in their own story, although obviously some lives are more exciting than others.
So yes, write out your own life story, for the love of doing so. Believe me, it’s a fearful slog getting words on to the page — and I do this for a living!
But if you have children, write it for them, just a neat typed document in an ordinary binder, so that your individual history (with plenty of detail and description) remains in the family when you have gone. A wave to the future.