Best For:
Parent loss & grief journal readers, estranged adult children, readers with absent parents, readers who cope with loss through dark humor, and creative writing journal enthusiasts.
The Vault:
- A letter to an estranged father; the questions & abandonment he leaves behind.
- How children learn self-blame, survival patterns, & hyper-independence.
- Losing my mother & realizing she was the foundation holding everything together.
- The difference between losing a parent & losing your person.
- Dark humor, grief, & the strange ways people survive loss.
- The ordinary moments & memories grief steals long after someone is gone.
- What remains after parent loss, estrangement, & learning to carry both.
Self-Care Pitstop:
Take a quick pause before we get into it; this post may feel heavy for some readers. We are talking about grief, parent loss, estrangement, and some painful family experiences. Please read this at your own pace, take breaks if you need them, and give yourself room to breathe. The post will still be here if and when you come back.
Who would you like to talk to soon?
Grief, Estrangement, & What Remains After Loss:
I can’t promise you this will be a clean story about grief, estrangement, or family. It does not stay in one place long enough just like me.
It moves between different kinds of absence: the father I do not speak to and the mother I relied on until she was not there anymore. Between the kind of parent that builds a foundation without you realizing it, and the one that teaches you your first life lesson about trust, distance, and heartbreak.
Grief does not stay in one shape. She shifts depending on the day, the place, or the smallest trigger. Some days I can feel her coming before she arrives. Other days she hits without warning and takes everything with her for a moment.
Estrangement & the Weight of Waiting:
It’s your oldest son, you know, the one you love so much. The one you know nothing about but we will get to that in a minute.
I finally figured out why your nick-name is “Jake the Snake” I always assumed it was but a silly rhyme, since you’re afraid of them.
Oh, to be young and innocent again….
Fuck that. I’m glad I grew to see that it was you who was never good enough for me. I never asked to live with the questions you left me holding onto at such a young age. Left to blame myself for decades and never you until more recently.
The Only Man I’ve Waited On:
I just wanted to let you know, again that the parent is the one responsible for maintaining the relationship with their child underage, or not. Though especially when they are underage.
This was never my responsibility. I didn’t leave you on the porch, I never should have had to beg you to come get me, Jake. You made your six year-old old call you back-to-back, weekend after weekend. You do know that you could have just not called right, or just not offered to come get me.
You ditched your kid before I could spell my name, but you couldn’t answer your phone?
Did it make you feel good to know your kid was waiting on you ?
Did it make you feel good to wait until I lost my mom to try and shift your blame onto her? Spinning excuses like a spider in his web, yet you do know I remember most of it.
I remember the phone calls, broken promises, and you never showing up.
You cannot gaslight me, Jake. I mean “Dad.” That is why it has been a few years since I have spoken to you at all and even longer since I have seen you in person.
I can still taste the bile in my throat every time one of the excuses I made for you comes back to mind. You were not innocent in any of this, and honestly, you were never much of an actor either.
I cannot believe you had the nerve to try to tell me “you have a father that loves you though.” On a post about me missing my dead mother. You and I know she was the only parent I had. Well actually. Did you get your father of the year award?
Pop Quiz:
So “Dad” let’s play a game! You love me? Do you? I have some questions I’d like you to answer for me:
- what are either of my middle names?
- When is my birthday including the day, month, & year?
- On what street & city do I live in?
- What are my favorites: Color? Food?
I’ll even make it easy for you Jake. If you know the answer to just one question I’ll speak to you again.
I’d put a million dollars on it too and never break a sweat. I know you don’t know me at all , Mr. Father of the year.
Farewell.
Forced Weight & Blame Games:
You want to hear the fucked up part?
Your kids will carry the weight of blaming themselves for damn near anything and everything. On top of the blame you gift wrapped up for them they will make excuse after excuse just to protect you.
Isn’t that a shame? Kids would rather blame themselves and carry every ounce of that weight before they ever think to place any of it on you.
Not that I’m saying I’m grateful I never had to depend on you for survival, but honestly? I would not have made it.
Kids are not sitting there thinking, “Wow, this adult is failing me.”
They think:
“What did I do?”
“What did I say?”
“What is wrong with me?”
Somehow blaming ourselves feels safer than accepting the reality that our own parent simply did not show up the way they should have.
Kids start believing they can fix it too.
Maybe I can ask for less.
Cry less.
Need less.
Maybe I need to be quieter, easier, better, smarter somehow.
At least then there is a reason. At least then there is something to hold onto.
Looking back now? You and your actions piss me off. I spent years carrying guilt with your damn name written across it while you spent years pretending none of it belonged to you.
Estrangement teaches children lessons they never signed up for. Children never see this coming, they don’t even know what to look for.
If we are being honest, I doubt any of us do even now. Trust me, there is no orientation packet waiting at the door either. One minute you need to hear your father’s heartbeat to fall asleep, the next your mom wants a divorce and he takes it out on you, at least in my experience.
Learned patterns of Abuse:
You learn how to wait, patiently even. In the days he actually picks up when you call, or, gasp, calls first, you wait on the porch, bags packed, ready to go, but the man doesn’t show.
The next day, for me typically Saturday, he calls early, says he was stuck at work, promising to see you tonight. You grabbed your bag, the one that is packed and ready to go at any time just in case he wants to stop and pick you up. Again the man doesn’t show; I wonder if he knows how many dinners you had while refusing to move from the porch in case today he finally came.
You never knew when the day would come; you just know he does actually come some. Your hope starts to dissipate, dwindling away to damn near empty, and it’s almost like he can sense it. A sixth sense for knowing you’re about to give up, so that’s when he decides to typically show up.
Time after time, excuse after excuse, you make it okay for him because kids become experts at protecting the people they love.
Maybe work ran late.
Maybe traffic was bad.
Maybe something important happened.
Because if there is a reason, then maybe it hurts less.
You do not want to sit with the possibility that your dad simply is not coming through. So excuses become defense, and defense slowly becomes survival.
What Estrangement Teaches Children:
A lot of these kids learn hyper-independence as second nature. Acting as if you do not need anyone, depending on people starts feeling like a set-up with a hidden agenda. Asking for any simple thing feels dangerous, choosing silence over disappointment every time. These Survival skills have a rude habit of unpacking their bags and refusing to leave even years later.
People really act like abandonment stays in childhood, as if one day you turn eighteen and it packs its tiny suitcase and says, “well, my work here is done.”
Yeah, no. I fucking wish. You know what, tell that to my borderline personality disorder please. Maybe the little bitch will pack up all the baggage he brought and finally leave.
These types of things can mess with people mentally, your brain starts learning patterns whether you asked it to or not. You don’t even have to try and keep track of them; it’s all optimized. It will be noticeable in the way you start second-guessing yourself, expecting disappointment, preparing for people to leave before they even grab their coat.
Emotionally?
Oh that gets messy; now anger and grief are roommates and apparently neither one pays rent. Well you won’t like this I just heard they don’t clean up either. You can be pissed and still hurt. Just like you can know somebody failed you and still wish they had shown up anyway. Human beings are inconvenient like that.
Relationships?
Thanks dad all this shit you handed me tends to show up in these areas too. Have you noticed the way you always over explain yourself? What about that extra reassurance you need? Do you live in a state of expecting people to leave?
I bet you are a black belt at keeping walls up! Asking anyone for help leaves you with shame and guilt. Look what having needs in the first place got you. Left on the porch, week after week. Obviously every child with a deadbeat for a parent does not turn out the exact same way. Though our brains so learn patterns and kids who spend years waiting on their parent to love them can grow into adults still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
One of them left traces everywhere; the other exists in scattered pieces.
Axton N.O. Mitchell
Love, Memory, & What I Didn’t Understand:
Dear Mom,
I did not quite understand while you were here just how much of my world was held up by you. I knew I was always safe with you. I knew I never had to worry about you leaving me. I have a hard time understanding the situations of people who have no bond at all with their mothers, and I think that’s because I could never see you choosing to walk away from me.
I also don’t think I fully understood the size of what you were to me until you were forced to leave me as well. When a person has always been there, you start believing somewhere deep down that they always will be. Almost as if we forget death exists until we are given no choice but to look deep inside its existence.
I wonder if you know the one constant I have ever experienced was you. You know the thing I remember the most about softball, basketball, and martial arts? You, in the crowd, cheering the loudest of all. Every single memory, you are there. You always made sure you showed up because I mattered to you, and it mattered to me.
Looking back now, in retrospect, I see things differently than I did when I was younger. I see somebody trying their hardest with the little they were given. I see a woman who, despite everything thrown at her, showed up for the people she held close, and she raised a little sad girl into the man you see today. You carried responsibilities, stress, fears, and still made more than enough room for me and all my pieces inside of it all.
Strength:
When I was younger, if you asked me what strength looked like, my answer would have been a reflection on something physical. Nobody teaches you that it doesn’t always come dressed up as something big, forceful, or loud. A lot of the time, strength wears different outfits and looks like stretching what you have, yet always, without fail, making it enough.
Strength looks like making sure your kid has what they need while quietly going without things yourself, or being exhausted and still showing up. You were the best example of strength I have seen throughout my life. You took all my problems, sorrows, worries, and painful places on as your own.
You loved me through it all.
I wish I had understood sooner how much love was hiding inside the things I thought were ordinary. I always knew you were extraordinary, but I wish I learned just how rare the bond we shared was before you took your leave. I just want to actually tell you that your presence just made everything better.
Your Ordinary:
At this moment, and every moment since you left this life, I have known I would give anything for your ordinary again.
I would do pretty much anything for one more ride in the car with you. I’d have the Yung Joc album ready. Remember you used to overplay it so much, and now I play it when I miss you. I would gladly sing along with you too. I might as well. I already try to pretend that while I’m listening and singing along, you are too, wherever you may be.
To be blessed by one more random conversation, or if I could steal one chance to hear your laugh from the other room one more time, I think I would be able to tread lighter for at least a few days. I would even take another instance of you yelling for me from across the house, “turn the volume up please, hoopie.” One more chance to see your smile and not in a picture, dream, or immediately realize that it is a memory.
I miss things I never thought I would have to miss.
- Being able to call you.
- Your last phone number still saved under your name.
- Getting voicemails from you. I still have the last one you left and I do not think I will ever delete it.
- You making fun of me.
- The feeling of knowing that no matter how ugly life got, somewhere out there was still my mom.
- I even miss existing at the same time as you.
That sounds ridiculous until you lose somebody it is here that you will truly understand .
Mom, I am so sorry.
I wish I could tell you I didn’t mean to take all the bullshit out on you that I have. I spent years not fully seeing who was standing right in front of me. I am sorry I didn’t understand that the love I kept searching for from another parent was already there inside you too. The truth is, you loved me in a way that made it okay to be me, and you loved me enough for way more than that.
You never made me feel like I had to become somebody else. You fought me to try and love me during years where I struggled to love myself. Through anger, confusion, pain, and everything else life brought my way, you loved me. You loved me when I felt not worthy of anything.
I don’t think I say this enough, even now: you were my best friend. Not in the casual way people say, “my mom is my best friend.”
I mean really.
You were my person.
- the only one I trusted always.
- the one I relied on.
- the place I went when things hurt.
- You were home.
That is why this feels so unfair, even still.
Pickup the Phone:
People pretend like grief is just missing someone, like the grieving are experiencing sadness akin to crying on anniversaries and hard days.
Grief is realizing my first instinct is still to call or text you and you cannot answer. When something happens and I think, “I need Mom,” before reality catches up, grief lives there. Learning that there are some losses you do not move on from, but continue living by just learning how to carry them. I still have not figured out how to carry the entire weight of losing you. I doubt I ever will.
I didn’t just lose my mom.
- my safest place.
- my best friend.
- the person who loved me before I even knew who I was.
- I lost home.
And I will forever be changed because of it.
Love always,
Axton.
What Does Not Leave With Them:
I think one of the hardest parts about losing a parent is realizing you can know something logically and still feel something completely different emotionally. My mom used to tell me she would never leave me. Not in some huge dramatic speech either. It was one of those things said in regular moments that quietly become part of our relationship. The kind of thing you believe without question because certain people feel permanent.
Before anybody starts with technicalities, yes, I know she did not choose this. I know death chose it. I know she did not wake up one day and decide she was done being my mom. I know all of that already.
It still hurts because knowing somebody did not choose to leave you and feeling left anyway are apparently two completely different things.
I know my mom loved me and fought to stay. I understand she would have stayed if she could have.
That being said I still feel abandoned.
I still catch myself wanting to argue with reality over it too. Somewhere inside me there is still a version of me saying, Nope. Absolutely not. Give her back. Like if I get angry enough maybe somebody will realize a mistake was made and fix it.
Eight days before my thirtieth birthday I lost my mom, and I do not think I understood until then just how much of my life had her fingerprints on it.
My family dissolved. Not because my sisters disappeared and not because people suddenly stopped existing. My mom was one of those people holding pieces together in ways you do not notice until they are gone. Then suddenly things shift. Things change shape. Things stop feeling familiar. Everything felt different afterward.
We all know life and death are part of things. We all know people die eventually. I have lost people before.
Nothing felt like this because losing people and losing your person are not the same thing.
My First Phone Call:
My mom was my first phone call. Not only when life fell apart either.
I’d call her for:
- Good things
- Bad things
- Random things
- Stupid things
- Things that didn’t even matter
- advice
- If I was excited.
- When I’d get annoyed.
- A lot of the time though I just wanted to hear her voice.
Sometimes I still want to call. Not metaphorically either, literally. Something happens and for a split second my brain still goes, call Mom, and then reality catches up.
Voicemails, Text Messages, & Memory:
I still have her last voicemail saved, our texts, and Facebook messages as well. I read them when missing her gets a little too loud. I wish I had more of our random conversations though.
Somehow out of everything I miss, one of the things I would give anything for is another one of those damn animal videos she used to send all day long.
My sisters and I used to joke about them and roll our eyes because if she was awake there was a good chance another one was coming.
Now I would give anything for my phone to light up with even just one more.
That is the stuff grief sneaks up and steals. It is not always giant moments either, it takes ordinary things especially.
I still miss hearing her yell, “cabs are here,” like Pauly D, or Gordon Ramsay playing in the background. I would love to go back to sitting around watching Snapped, Wives with Knives, and Killer Kids, just to name a few. I would give anything to taste cabbage rolls, mashed potatoes, and corn, made like you would fix. I miss being called Hoopie, and I used to think I hated it.
Grief Isn’t What I Thought it Was:
I think grief changes with time, but not in the way people imagine. In the beginning it felt like drowning constantly. Always existing inside the hurt. I would wake up feeling the weight inside my chest. I could only forget for about half of a second and then I would remember again.
Now it comes in waves; now I can laugh, work, have good days. I sometimes go stretches where I genuinely feel okay.
Then out of nowhere I am crying in my car on the way to work and I feel stupid as hell; I have to walk inside with eyes that are puffy. I have to walk inside wondering if everybody can tell.
Half the time I cannot even tell you what caused it. Sometimes it is a song, a memory, or absolutely nothing.
All I know is grief can go from sitting quietly in the corner to putting me on my ass out of nowhere.
Sometimes I get residents at work who resemble my mom in certain ways and everything inside me gets weird.
A smile.
The way they talk.
A facial expression. Then suddenly I am standing there questioning why I am even doing what I do.
I moved because grief started attaching itself to places too.
Roads hurt.
Streets hurt.
The Urn Moment:
I could not keep looking at these places while my brain kept expecting to find somebody who was not there anymore.
I think grief also did something to my sense of humor. I make a lot of dead mom jokes now; I know that I make people uncomfortable with them sometimes too.
Somebody says, “your mom,” and I hit them with, “Dude, she’s dead.” Or another person says, “fuck your mom,” and suddenly I am explaining, “Ew, she’s dust,” because she got cremated.
I hand people my mom’s urn and tell them, “say hi to Mom,” before they fully realize what I just handed them. Then I wait for the delayed look on their face when it finally clicks.
Before somebody acts like dark humor means it hurts less, trust me, I can joke about my dead mom and still end up crying in my car three days later because a resident smiled in a way that reminded me of her.
I can laugh and still miss her.
Apparently grief can make you devastatingly sad and a smartass at the same time. This kind of humor is part of how I survive it.
After my mom died, part of me attached itself to the living things still connected to her too.
She had two dogs and a chinchilla. Then in 2025 two of them passed away. In 2026 the last one left us too.
In between, we lost her husband too.
Then one day it hit me that outside of my sisters, every living connection I had left to my mom was gone too.
That hurt in a way I was not expecting.
They were not just animals.
They were family.
Little reminders that pieces of my mom still existed outside of photos, objects, and memories.
Then one by one those disappeared too.
Apparently grief likes collecting things in pieces.
I still talk to her out loud on hikes, I still miss her, and honestly I still have not figured out what the hell I am supposed to do with any of this.
Carrying The Pieces
I do not think grief resolves. It does not really end or settle into something clean. It just shifts over time, depending on the day and what gets triggered.
Some days it is quiet in the background. Other days it is not. It can show up in ordinary moments without warning. Usually before I have time to prepare for it.
There are still habits that remain, the things I reach for without thinking, or say out loud even though there is no one there to answer me. There are reminders of her that still exist in small, everyday details that never fully stop meaning something.
I do not think the missing part goes away. You just learn how to function while carrying it.
That is what this becomes: not something finished, but something you continue living with.
“Where one planted permanence and poured in light; the other planted pain, watered by precarity.”
– Axton N.O. Mitchell”
TLDR:
Parent estrangement does not always end in adulthood. Sometimes the waiting, self-blame, and survival habits follow you long after childhood ends.
Kids with absent parents often blame themselves before they ever blame the adult who hurt them. You start believing you can somehow earn the love you should have received freely.
I spent years waiting on a father who rarely showed up and years not fully understanding that the parent who always did was my mom.
Eight days before my thirtieth birthday, I lost her. Losing my mother was not just losing a parent; it felt like losing my safest place, my best friend, and home itself.
Grief did not leave me with only sadness. It left me with dark humor, old voicemails, random memories, and a thousand ordinary things I never thought I would miss.
Some losses do not end or resolve neatly. You just learn how to keep carrying the pieces.
Continue Reading:
Healthline – Navigating the Grief of Losing a Parent
Parents – Why Adult Children are Divorcing their Parents
A Poetic Reflection on Parents who Left Us Waiting – Milk
Celebrating my mother’s life after loss & maintaining our bond
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