Did Guilt Kill My Father?

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I wonder sometimes if it was guilt that killed my father.

He developed dementia rapidly and passed not long after my psychotic episode. I was in hospital for a long stretch, and I think he only visited once. Maybe he couldn’t bear to see what had happened to me. Maybe he didn’t know how to face what I was finally beginning to uncover — the truth of our family system, the weight I’d carried, the absence of real love from the one person he left me with.

I believe now he saw more than he ever let on. And maybe that’s what broke him. Maybe it was the shame of allowing my life to unfold the way it did. The guilt of not protecting me from her. Of staying too long. Of saying too little. Of loving me in the only ways he knew how — which sometimes weren’t enough.

But I don’t hold that against him anymore.

I think guilt is what made him human. And love is what made him endure.

Maybe he died with unfinished words lodged in his chest. Maybe he never forgave himself for what I had to survive. But I’ve come to a place where I forgive him. I see now that he did what he could with what he had. And maybe, just maybe, he left this world hoping I’d find the words he couldn’t say.

And I have.

Dad, I love you. I understand now. And I carry forward the parts of you that were good, the parts that were mine all along.