Dealing with dying Cluster B parents

Editor’s note: The following article was written by the Lovefraud reader, “Matt,” a long-time member of the Lovefraud community.

By Matt

It has been many years since I last posted on Lovefraud. When I first joined Lovefraud in November 2008, I was among the walking wounded having just pried my sociopath boyfriend out of my life. This site was my godsend. Among the many topics covered, although it wasn’t on my radar at the time, was dealing with Cluster B parents as they came to the end of their lives. Having buried both of my parents within the last 5 years, I’d like to share my experiences dealing with such parents.

My parents

My parents were two martinets who treated their children as marionettes. We didn’t exist as individuals — we were treated as mere extensions of them. Verbal and physical abuse rained down upon us. My father tried killing me when I was 8 years old by drowning me in our pool. The only “positive” attention we got was when they manipulated us into doing something they wanted that would make them look good or gain them entrée into the social circles they wanted to move in. One of the many therapists I saw over the years said if he had to make an armchair diagnosis, my father was a sociopath and my mother had borderline personality disorder (BPD). Yet, their behavior was a 180-degree difference from their treatment of their own kids when it came to other people’s kids. My father lavished attention on attention on any widow’s wayward son. My mother would move heaven and earth to help her counselees. I often found myself wishing I was one of those widow’s sons or counselees to get even a fraction of attention that my parents poured into those kids.

My parents had a marriage that was made in hell and blessed by Satan. I never could understand why they got or how they stayed married — they both did everything they could to avoid each other when they weren’t busy torturing each other. They waited years to have kids. Life in that house involved walking on eggshells. To say I became an expert of reading the signals is an understatement. My all-time early warning defense signal was listening to where she shifted her sports car on the street as she drove towards the house. One spot, run for the nearest fallout shelter. Further up the hill, you were probably in the clear. If the cork was yanked out of the bottle the moment they came through the door, that was your signal to drop everything and vanish. My siblings and I all had bolt holes both in and outside the house.

As time went by, a few of my friends’ mothers developed a pretty clear picture on what was going on in our house by both the stories their kids came home with and what they heard through my parents’ open windows — a reason they should have put in central air. A few years before my parents died, one friend’s mother told me, “I have never forgiven myself for not calling the cops or protective services on your parents.” I told her I appreciated the sentiment, but since we were talking about the 1960s and 70s, it was a good thing she didn’t, since all those authorities (a) viewed this as a family problem and would have promptly let my parents know and I would probably have been killed, and (b) there really was no such thing as abused children back then, so nobody would have done anything.

Leaving the Macadamia Ranch

I somehow managed to survive life at our ancestral manse, The Macadamia Ranch — my name for the nut house we lived in — and went off to college. While I for once had done something that pleased my parents by heading off to one of the Ivies, no one seemed to acknowledge that I had been spiraling downwards for quite some time. The family doctor gave me Seconal and Miltown (the great granddaddy of valium) to address my chronic insomnia and anxiety. I now know that I had undiagnosed complex PTSD. I was engulfed in depression, yet somehow managed to pass my first semester. My mother took one glance at my transcript, tossed it aside, and said, “Your father always said your brothers’ good looks and athletic prowess came from his side of the family and your brains came from mine. Clearly he was wrong.” I point out at this time I was working as a model and featured in national print campaigns.

Read more: Senior sociopaths as parents: manipulating their kids while young and as adults

Those words destroyed me. Within 3 weeks I tried to kill myself with Seconal and went from the ivy-covered halls of learning to the ivy-covered halls of a very posh psychiatric hospital. After six months of seeing my parents in action, my psychiatrist told me, “Your mother and father say you’re uncontrollable. I say you’re trying to protect your siblings by deflecting their wrath onto you. Your parents between them have every psychosis and neurosis known to mankind and they dovetail perfectly. Your parents are like this psychotic ball rolling down the street flattening everything in its path. Your siblings are old enough to protect themselves. Get out now and save yourself.”

So, I did. I finished school, built a successful career, and damaged though I am, tried to construct some kind of life with others in it. As for my parents, I kept them at arms-length. I made the obligatory weekly calls that said nothing. I’d make several short visits a year.

Dealing with dying Cluster B parents

Inevitably, as my parents aged, their reign of terror waned. In 2015 my father entered the hospital, rehab, home cycle. My visits to The Macadamia Ranch steadily increased. By early 2017, when my father was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, I felt I was literally in my own version of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, since I was making 1000-mile round trips every weekend to deal with assorted crises, including dealing with the non-stop battles between my mother and the in-home attendant my youngest brother had placed there, who, it turns it out, he had hired as his personal spy. A case of the sociopath doesn’t drop far from the tree.

At my father’s funeral, I found myself nodding politely as dignitaries praised him for all he had accomplished, and those various widows’ wayward sons told me how he saved them. Occasionally, I had to fight down the urge to say, “I wish I could have met this man, since I certainly never saw evidence of him.” But, to be honest, my attention was riveted on my mother’s behavior. After 60 plus years in a pure hell of a marriage, she was crying and carrying on like Lana Turner in one of her 3-hanky weepers. For someone who drove into my head from my earliest age that she had no intention of wasting her time visiting her parents or anybody else’s graves, she began to haunt the cemetery. For the longest time I kept waiting to announce that she was acting out her part of a joke. But the punchline never came.

In 2018 my mother entered the hospital, rehab, home cycle, and I again entered the Planes, Trains, and Automobiles cycle. My mother realized my youngest sibling was ripping her off and gave me my first clue that she wasn’t going to shuffle off this mortal coil quietly when she said, “I used to yell at you when you said the one thing on earth that would make you happiest is to find out you were his only kidney match and getting to say no. I now realize why you feel that way.” This time I hired an attendant she liked and hired a contractor to do some long overdue repairs on the house. But, again, there were never any great moments of reconciliation or revelation before she died in mid-2020.

Of course, my mother and father did not go quietly into that good night. Their will was an atomic bomb with the various children and grandchildren who were disinherited or treated differently. The ruptured remains of my family can ever be repaired. My goal with the one sibling I still spoke to was to clear out the house and push the will through probate so I never had to deal with any of the family drama again.

Why did I care for my dying parents?

A friend who grew up in a family similar to mine asked me why I did what I did during my parents’ last years. And I really have thought about this a lot the last two years. And I realized that it all boiled down to three issues.

1. Was it the money?

I used to flippantly say, “The reason I have anything to do with my parents is they have a lot of money. And I want every penny that I have coming to me as reparations payments for my hellish childhood.” On the surface, saying I stuck it out for the money has a certain truth to it. When you grow up in a house where every relationship is transactional and everybody in your life is assigned a value on their usefulness to you, money is everything. It is the substitute for love, respect, and affection. And love, respect, and affection in a family like mine are fully quantifiable in monetary terms.

The reading of my parents’ will at the lawyer’s office should be played on a 24-hour-a-day loop. I fully expected to be cut out of their will — especially after a lifetime of lectures on how I was supposed to forgive every hellish thing my parents had done to me because, “I didn’t understand the stress we’re under,” and how, “you’re imagining that” (gaslighting). And then the reading began and I saw my parents were going to settle scores hell or high water through that will. In some odd way I realized that their will was probably the only way they actually could apologize to me for some of their cruelty, since I got far more than I expected. I remember a trust and estates attorney I once worked with who said, “every one of those dollar signs has a little heart attached to it.” At the end of the day, I realize he is 100 percent right. Especially when you grow up in a house where everything is quantified.

But, at the end of the day I realized that although I came into a substantial inheritance, that wasn’t what drove me. I have done well enough on my own. While the money gives me some options I didn’t have before, whether I got it or not was not going to make any difference to my big picture. So, it wasn’t the money.

2. Was it to prove I was a better person than they were?

When you grow up in a family like mine, inevitably you start to develop an “I’ll show you” mentality. Unfortunately, you become so focused on proving you’re kinder, more generous, more loving than your parents, you basically become ripe pickings for a sociopath who sees that you will tolerate any behavior out of them while you’re busy proving what a good person you are. However, once I got some space from my parents, and years later after my final relationship with a sociopath boyfriend, I finally learned how to set boundaries. As for my parents, as their declines accelerated and they got more hateful, I just side-stepped the landmines they threw in my path and took care of business.

As both were on their deathbeds, I realized there were going to be no proclamations of regret for the way they treated me — whatever version of me they had rattling around in their skulls, they were going to stick to right to the end. As for me, I realized that I had given my parents exactly what they had given me. No love, but someone who made sure the roof wasn’t leaking, the housekeeper had vacuumed, and that the attendant had changed the sheets. Granted, with their resources my parents had a lot more than that. But, when all was said and done, I could only give them what I had learned from them, and nothing was going to change that. I was no better or worse than they were.

3. Was it to have no regrets?

I remember years ago saying “I want to have no regrets when I put them into the ground.” As my parents failed, I did everything that I could do for them without jeopardizing my own well-being. After they died, I began to think back on all the years I so desperately tried to get their attention, their approval, their love. And then I came across a quote that put my life into perfect context, “when animals don’t want to care for their young they kill them; they don’t torture them for years on end.” And that quote was so eye-opening for me. In some strange way I realized that when I found the strength to walk out and not look back, I finally had taken control of my life, and in some strange way was able to stop them from hurting me. Any interactions with my parents for the rest of my life were on my terms. Were those interactions bled out of emotional content? Absolutely. Superficial? Absolutely. Did they work for me? Absolutely. I can truthfully say there wasn’t any more I could do for my parents. And when I watched them being lowed into the ground I could truthfully say that I had no regrets. Mission accomplished.

Advice for readers facing the same situation

What is my advice to readers who are either dealing with dying Cluster B parents, or are going to be dealing with parents like mine? First, you have to be really clear on why you’re getting involved. If you think there’s going to be some kind of great reconciliation, forget it. Tigers don’t change their stripes. Second, you have to be really clear with your parents as to exactly what your boundaries are and how much of yourself you are willing to give. With both of mine I said I would come up on weekends to cover for the attendants. I also made it very clear that I had to work for a living and my career was my priority. Third, I made it clear that if they were looking for a personal punching bag, they could join a gym. Because, let me tell you — the oldest lion in the jungle still has claws and sharp teeth and knows exactly where to sink them.

If you are not good with setting boundaries, you’ve really got to think twice about getting involved, because these situations are the absolute epitome of one gets sick and two go into the grave. A Cluster B personality will eat you alive if you don’t come at them from a position of strength. And if you’re sticking it out for the money, there are no guarantees that you are going to see anything in the end. The only option here is that you want to have no regrets.

So, here I sit today. I realize that I will in all likelihood never deal with half my family every again. And I’m okay with that. In some strange way I think my parents had this fantasy that they could create the perfect family. The problem was they both didn’t have a clue what that was or the tools to make it happen. And in my family, where everything and everyone were quantified, sometimes you need to analyze your relationships like the assets in your portfolio and realize that some people in your life are like crappy investments — you put in 100 percent investment and get 0 percent return. And that’s when you cut your losses and cash out.

Learn more: Overcoming shame — how to feel worthy of love and respect

As I cleaned out my parents’ house I got one small insight into what made them tick. I found these strange packets of letters from the girlfriend my father probably should have married and the boyfriend my mother, right up until she was at the altar with my father, kept hoping would marry him. The letters weren’t hidden like you would expect in a trunk or somewhere private. Strangely, they were scattered around the house — a few here on the top of the china cabinet, a few there on my father’s desk, another couple on top of the refrigerator. All I kept thinking was, “why would anybody do this?” And I realized they were both such poor communicators that this was the only way they could even begin to let the other know how unhappy they were.

My partner is now dealing with two declining (and divorced) parents. There are times I see him grieving and I actually envy someone who can feel that kind of grief. After all the decades of torture at my parents’ hands, the only thing I can grieve is that I had so much love to give my parents. And then that love just died and went away.

Are you dealing with disordered parents? Learn more in Donna Andersen’s new book, “Senior Sociopaths — How to recognize and escape lifelong abusers.”