My Father was Dead for 41 Days Before I Knew

The realities of being estranged or going ‘No Contact’ with an abusive family.

When my half brother called me on Easter Sunday 2017 to tell me our father had died when he hadn’t, I was done with the entire lot of Hollabaughs. My family status changed at that moment in my mind from ‘estranged’ to ‘no contact.’ Instead of using Google Voice to call my family like many of my friends, I‘d use Google to see if my abusive dad was dead. Two and a half years after my half brother’s phone call, my search result finally yielded an obituary.

Few People Understand When You Grieve

More than one person told me ‘it must be nice to get all that grief out of the way,’ and have even told me how lucky I was to control the timing of when my family of origin exited from my life. For me, the concept that emotional attachment to the situation ended when I stopped the contact with my family was strange.

The fact I stopped talking to my father years before he died lessened the impact on my daily life, but it didn’t lessen the overall impact of his death.

It Doesn’t Fix The Hurt

I thought that by eliminating such a looming negative force in my life it would have an immediate healing effect on me, but that’s not what happened. It gave me space and protected me from continual re-injury, but it wasn’t a magic pill that fixed everything wrong. The hurt produced by years of abuse was still present, and will always be present.

While Going no contact with them was vital to my healing, it wasn’t the only thing that needed to be done.

There’s Guilt

I decided to break contact with my family, and I did so with the understanding that I’d live with a lifetime of guilt from myself and others. Sometimes knowing you did the right thing is all you’re going to get — and knowing you did the right thing doesn’t lessen the guilt you can feel. Of course, choosing myself and my needs over what my family wanted contributed to my guilt.

That guilt is part of the price I’m willing to pay for my sanity and safety.

I Still Have Questions

What I went through had an impact on my memory both physically and psychologically. Often my questions are simple, like “Why.” Other times, they are more medical in nature. Regardless, those questions will never have answers, which is another price I paid.

Life is full of mystery, and sometimes we won’t always get the answers we seek. Since my family was full of narcissists and pathological liars, even the answers they gave me weren’t guaranteed to be true.

I am grateful for being emotionally healthy enough to decide to cut my toxic family from my life. The emotional challenges it presented were worth it for me.

Even when it meant Google told me my dad died.