How it feels to not grieve your parents
Monday, February 24, 2025
When Logan Roy died fishing his iPhone out of the toilet on his private jet in Succession, his daughter Shiv hesitated over whether to go and see his body. Her brother Roman clocked what was going on in her head, as co-traumatised siblings tend to, and said ‘he’s not going to shout at you if you don’t.’
That’s the main thing when the narc/abuser/toxic/whatever-we’re-calling-the-nasty-fuckers this week dies. The venomous terrifying shouty person is never going to get to do their venomous terrifying shouting at you again.
There is no ambivalence. There’s no loss, no missed opportunities, no gap in your life. There is no regret of what might’ve been, or things that could’ve been better, because nothing was ever going to be better. There was only ever going to be the psychological equivalent of living in London during the blitz.
Until now, if you got through the night without the sirens going off, it was because the weather stopped the bombers, or they were busy destroying Coventry instead.
You could get your breath back and your heart rate down but the radar stations and firewatchers of hypervigilance stayed at their posts and your background cortisol levels stayed up.
This is the bit that the non-complexically-traumatised people really really don’t understand. The traumatised know that people aren’t to be trusted and thinking you know what’s going on is for fools.
For the complexically-traumatised, If someone’s being nice to you, it’s just to try to get your guard down. Or maybe they’re being poisonously sarcastic on a level you haven’t quite worked out. Or something else that you haven’t thought of, but it won’t be good. Anyway — nothing’s simple, nothing’s straightforwardly a good thing, and sooner or later everything turns to shit. And then there’s the original source of the trauma, sending dive bombers to screech overhead at frequent but unpredictable intervals, just to keep it fresh.
Then one day you find the Luftwaffe is a cadaver in a nursing home with a morphine drip stuck in in her arm. The bombers are permanently grounded. And — this is the Shiv bit — the person who would’ve shouted at you for not going to see the cadaver is the cadaver. Cadavers don’t do venomous terrifying shouting, which was always your main issue, so the problem has gone away of its own volition.
What’s not to love?
This doesn’t stop other people expect you to fall apart.
The ‘oh but she was your mother’ narrative is strong.
At the wake, they look at you over the catered vol au vents as though cracks are going to appear in your outer surface and everything will crumble, like an astronaut freezing in space. They don’t realise you’re in the Shire after the defeat of Sauron. Sunlight is breaking out over green meadows everywhere and buds are sprouting.
I did wonder if I was going to crack up, myself, too. I didn’t ever feel like I would, but apparently these things apparently can ambush you. And there was nothing. It was all just an administrative inconvenience, and I outsourced it to executors, funeral directors, house clearance people. Whoever’s job it was, because it wasn’t mine. This was moving house. This was figuring out the best route to a new work place. This was the admin to move forward.
You may think this sounds like avoidance, and I can’t prove you wrong. All I can say is that I’ve done avoidance, based on Trauma Things, and I know what it feels like, and this didn’t feel like it. This felt like time management.
Some child development researchers consider the mother and child’s brains to be the same organism in the first few weeks of life, functionally. They’re so intertwined, so obsessed with each other, that they respond like a single system. In the baby’s brain, many neural pathways grow, seeking out stimulation. Light, smells, sounds, touch, things outside itself, as far as a baby registers that a world exists outside itself.
(Sidenote: babies eventually realise there’s a world outside itself. My mother never did.)
The more the neural pathways get used, the more they prosper a survive. And not just sensory things. They pick up emotions, like love, and feelings like safety.
If the pathways don’t get used, they don’t survive. They are sluts for stimuli, and quick to wander off when the stimuli cease, and never more than in those first few weeks, when brains throw all manner of shit at the wall to see what sticks, neurally speaking.
So to loop back to my mother dying being no more than an admin problem: my neonatal brain didn’t get offered a lot of safety or other nice things at that formative stage, and all the hopeful neural pathways, eager for love and safety and other nice things, realised they were out of luck and wandered off to save themselves for other important tasks, like, it turns out remembering what Mark Knopfler says between songs on the live Alchemy album.
But that first few weeks of wariness never leave you or your neuronal setup, which now doesn’t include the ones geared up to expect love and safety.
I’m not a robot or psychopath. It’s more that the emotional pathways grew later. The brain learns to work around these things, just like relearning to talk after a stroke, or the internet when someone cuts through an undersea cable. But it’s never quite the same. It doesn’t have the intuitive nuance and speed of the early pathways, honed and perfected over the years.
But still, the really primal feelings that people are waiting to burst out over the catered vol au vents just don’t seem to be there. Maybe I don’t have physical capacity for them and the vol au vents are safe.
The main thing is that the bombing has stopped, and it’s possible to start rebuild, working around the craters and rubble.