How Did Your Parents Deal With Illness?

How far do we travel from our parents' patterns?  A question psychotherapists and their clients have been wrestling with for decades.

We can't escape the parental imprint.  Some of us may not want to.  But those of us who did hope to be different often find ourselves in our 40s or 50s unexpectedly leaking parental behaviors or attitudes we thought we had purged ourselves of in our 20s.

I sometimes hear myself saying to Richard, my partner, as he heads out the door for his Tae Kwon Do class, "Be careful."  He has a second degree black belt and has been studying for years.  He is always careful.  My admonition is a spillover of my father's anxious voice warning me to be on the lookout for endless, unnamed dangers hiding in plain sight at every turn.  Other times I see myself tighten up like a fist when something I thought I had control over twists in an unpredictable direction.  It is not my jaw that clenches in agitation; it is my mother's jaw, on my face.

How our parents do or did illness is a powerful pattern.  Did they suffer in silence, while allowing no one to offer tenderness or help?  Did they submerge into illness and allow it to define who they were?  Did they use illness to control and manipulate?  To get attention?  Did they remain engaged in living and loving?  Did they learn from illness to become more fully who they were?  Did they become nastier to each other?  Or sweeter?  And finally, did they take care of each other -- physically and emotionally?

My parents, who kept each other at a distance when well, became even more separated when ill.  They went so far as to resent each other for their increasing incapacities.  It was not pretty.

There were times when I was in the thick of my pain condition, that I isolated and withdrew from Richard.  But more often, I allowed my pain to teach me to reach out for comfort and connection.  I had to.  For me, the voice of pain was more powerful than my parents' example.

Dealing with illness can be a consuming job.  When you find yourself behaving in ways that don't create the kind of bridge to your partner that will help lighten the load for both of you, pause and ask yourself:  "Am I playing out a pattern that doesn't really belong to me?  Whose voice am I speaking with?  Can I do it differently?"

How did your parents deal with illness?  What did you learn to do and not to do from them?

When Parents are Enemies

My mother passed away a few weeks ago. She died of the same condition my father died from two years ago -- hospitalitis. That is -- you go into the hospital for one serious condition, and while there, the treatment results in unintended consequences, like aspirating fluid into the lungs, central line infection, and finally sepsis, which causes death.

They were both elderly with ailments and while neither one was terminally ill, they were not averse to dying. Their deaths were terribly sad, but not tragic. They had lived lives of consequence, filled with strong and loving stories. Their most generous stories, regrettably for me, were not about each other.

They were snipers. They sprayed each other with bullets of harshness and of indifference. Any dried up piece of turf could become their battleground. My father salted the food she prepared without tasting it -- blast! My mother smoked her secret cigarettes in the bathroom and saturated the house with the sickly evergreen air freshener she used to mask the shameful smoke odor -- blast!

No hand holding. No mushy names for each other. Just the binding routines of taking care of a business and a family, which substituted for marriage.

As they got older and physically impaired, the animosity grew worse. He, once the boss of a manufacturing plant, only had her to control. She, once the supervisor of the office pool in that plant, only had her own tiny tasks left to organize. He griped at her for not getting the mail on time. She expanded her silence.

I think he really did love her and was clueless about how to ever show it in a way that could touch her. He felt his inadequacy, was defeated by its weight, and retreated into TV and food. I don't think she ever did really like him. She resented him for not being enough and punished him with her indifference.

Age and illness did not undo them as a couple. All the fractures had been there for decades, growing wider and deeper. Age and illness just represented a new terrain. It constricted the bounds of their world and gave them fewer distractions and places to hide from each other.

I loved them both. Admired them both. Not for who they were to each other, but for who they were to me and to the world. They were good and kind. They gave ceaselessly to anyone who needed their comfort or benevolence. They were smart and funny.

I often wonder what it would have been like to have had parents who knew how to love each other.

Do you have (or had) parents who are good to each other? What is that like? Are your parents more like mine? What's that like for you?

How Have Your Parents & In-Laws Reacted to Your Illness?

Both Richard's parents died before I met him so I have no in-laws. My own parents were in their 70's when I first developed a chronic pain condition. Their reaction was surprising, although it shouldn't have been. They both backed away and assumed that Richard and I would handle it just fine.

We were not a family that discussed personal matters, and I guess illness is a personal matter. Or perhaps more accurately, the illness of an adult child, which in my family's taxonomy falls into the category that contains topics like sex, birth control, divorce, and emotion.

I think that my parents' reluctance to dive into my illness any more deeply than asking "How are you?" does not stem from indifference or callousness. Quite the opposite. I think it is their way of defending themselves against the consummate horror of knowing their child is in pain and getting sicker, and they are helpless to make it all go away.

Eventually they began phoning more frequently. My mother started sending me quarts of her home-made pea soup by mail (she shipped them frozen overnight and they would arrive partially thawed). I always felt their love, if not their caretaking.

What has been your experience (both as the ill and well partner) with parents and in-laws?