Dying Angry But Not Because You Were Angry About Dying
Dying Angry But Not Because You Were Angry About Dying
When anger becomes the guiding force in life to the very bitter end (pun intended)
EDITOR’S NOTE: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the death of Grayson Murray. I would guess that 85% of you just said, “Who?” Murray, who was 30, withdrew from a PGA golf event last Friday due to an illness. The next day, he was found dead from suicide. Murray had battled with alcoholism and mental health issues previously.
Though it is at the bottom of every edition of Dirt Nap, it bears repeating: If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.
Eventually they all become bitter, angry women.
Not a truer word has ever been spoken about our family, or at least the women on my mother’s side. My cousin Mike shared this wisdom a few years ago on one of his calls from Japan, where he lives with his wife and kids. Mike is nine years older than me, the senior member of the cousins on my mother’s side of the family, and has gotten more philosophical in his old age.
Italian families are traditionally matriarchal, so we spent more time with my mother’s side than my father’s. My grandmother had two sisters. My great Aunt Anna was an angry woman who would slap you while playing cards if you held them in a way that other people at the table could see them. The other aunt we didn’t speak to because there was drama1.
My grandparents had three daughters. Marietta, whom we have spoken about at length. Her battle with mental health transformed her into an increasingly short and cruel person who became very transactional in her relationships.
My mother, Andrea, lived a life of bitter jealousy. Marietta was the “successful” one, who never married, lived at home, went to college, and traveled the world. Her other sister, Carolyn, married young and never really had to work. My mother envied those things. She married, left the workforce, raised children while her husband traveled for work. We didn’t go on family vacations and we never seemed to have enough money to do all of the things we wanted to do.
Carolyn, though, is why we’re here today. I remember my aunt as being a sweet woman whose house always smelled like soup (or bay leaves, at the very least). My sister remembers her similarly; very maternal and loving.
There were overlays in the Venn diagram of the three sisters; life approaches or concerns they shared in common, but they were very individual people. My mother, it turns out, was the one who would tell dirty jokes to my cousins. Marietta was the second mother to her niece and nephews, ensuring we had access to the opportunities that we wanted and she could afford2. Carolyn was the nurturer. The babysitter in a pinch. When my sister or I were young and home sick from school, we spent it on her couch. It was a place you wanted to go because of her (and the seemingly endless supply of candy and her swimming pool3).
Carolyn lived about a mile away in the next housing development. My sister remembers going over there frequently when she was old enough to ride her bike across Bear Road, the busy thoroughfare separating our neighborhoods. She also remembers a childhood of sitting with my aunt, head on her shoulder or always having her hair stroked. Again, very much the mother.
Which is why the anger was so stunning.
My sister4 thinks the anger coincided with my oldest cousin’s wedding in 2003. Both my father and I had been laid off from our jobs5, my sister was in college and, financially, none of us could justify the travel expense. She thinks that the anger began there and she distinctly remembers the animosity shown towards my father6.
I think it started a few years earlier.
Her husband — my uncle — died during summer 1998, about nine months after my mother. I stayed on campus for Easter break that year for my internship, but the story goes that everyone gathered for dinner on Sunday afternoon. That night, my aunt called my father because my uncle was in extreme abdominal pain7. Dad took him and my aunt to the ER. After multiple rounds of tests, he was determined to have inoperable liver and colon cancers. Happy fucking Easter!
His death was a turning point for my aunt. “God took her husband,” she would say, with the bitter anger found in a search for someone to blame. She and my uncle had built a retirement home in Las Vegas, which is where my cousins had landed in different professional roles8, so she moved west.
“People can get trapped in patterns of anger and never really get at what's underneath. It can be a really tough way to go. Though some use their anger to try to feel strong or protect from underlying shame or guilt or fear or whatever. Some idealize the anger and pretend to be warriors who are going down swinging.”
In time, both of my cousins got married and “God took my husband” became “They stole my sons.” If you listened to my aunt tell it, these women violently ripped my cousins from her gentle, loving grasp. There are some details I’m leaving out to protect the innocent9, but this began driving a wedge between her and each of her sons.
Around the same time, my aunt began losing her sight due to macular degeneration. She eventually gave up her car and required 24-hour care. You can see where we’re going, right? God took her husband, her sight and the house she planned to live in, and those women took her sons. When I went to visit in 2010, I remember that she presented as the same ol’ Aunt Carolyn, but I remember her being passively bitter in the comments she made about this or that. Every sentence ended with some level of acridity. And it wasn’t just, “It’s beautiful day. Too bad that it’s so fucking hot that we can’t go outside10.”
It was more like she would ask how some element back home was, I would tell her and she’d finish that segment of the conversation with an insult of that person or place.
Anyhow, she died in June 2022. Angry. Very angry.
It’s one thing to die angry because you were angry about dying. That’s not what I’m getting at. I want to focus on the amalgam of unresolved anger in your life at the moment of death because you never addressed the anger’s underlying cause.
(I don’t remember my mother being so dour on her march to the end. Resigned? Yes. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in February 1997 and died seven months later. In between, she had surgeries and attempted chemo knowing that it would only prolong the pain, so she decided to ride out the wave in hospice care.)
At the root of my aunt Carolyn’s anger was unresolved, unconfronted grief. I have a distinct memory of family weekend from my senior year of college. My aunts tagged along with my father and sister that year. St. Bonaventure University is a Catholic institution run by the Franciscan friars. The college has an affiliated with a mountain retreat about 45 minutes from campus and we went up there for some reason I can’t remember. The chapel is its central hub and we arrived just in time to hear Fr. Dan Riley lead a prayer11.
Fr. Dan exudes charisma, possessing an intoxicating voice that commands your attention and a laugh that shakes the brick buildings on campus. He could read a Chinese restaurant menu and draw a crowd. Anyhow, I don’t know how long it took before I noticed that my aunts were no longer in the chapel. Carolyn, it turns out, was outside having a panic attack and Marietta was with her. It was the first time she had been in a church of any sort since my uncle’s funeral.
God, you see, had taken him from her so she took herself from God.
My aunt and uncle got married when she was 26 and my oldest cousin was born two years later. His brother would be born two years after that. They had a very stereotypical American marriage; he worked at a local manufacturer while she stayed home with the kids. Some time after my cousins left, he switched to a night shift. By then, she worked days at a local payroll company so they really only saw one another on weekends until they both retired. And then the cancer hit. And God took him from her.
Her anger is reasonable to understand on its face. She had been robbed of her golden years with her husband living in their single-level retirement home on the outskirts of Las Vegas. How it overtook her life is something neither my sister or I can explain, though I watched a very similar path with Marietta. I suspect Carolyn’s unresolved grief also brought about some untreated mental health issues.
The anger was directed at no one and everyone at the same time. It struck the people closest to her. Marietta caught quite a bit of it. While Carolyn was playing the role of dutiful housewife, Marietta was a single professional woman who traveled the globe. While jealousy ran beneath the service, Carolyn’s grief lit her envy of Marietta’s freedom ablaze, converting it into personal attacks and walls being built. There were accusations that Marietta had turned her sons against her, slowly reprogramming them to see her as the enemy.
Years of silence filled the space between their last conversation and Carolyn’s death.
Her sons and their wives caught more of the fire. The wives stole her sons and were the obvious culprits in this delusion. Eventually, my oldest cousin stopped bringing his kids to visit their grandmother to spare them the bile that would be spewed in his direction in front of them12.
There are no atheists in foxholes, and you often hear of deathbed conversions and confessionals to clear their record before heading to the great unknown. As I said, my mother may not have been happy with her fate, but she died peacefully resigned to the fact that no amount of modern medicine would save her. Carrying around unresolved anger is one that puzzles me, and that’s coming from someone known to hold a grudge.
Carolyn had long self-medicated with food, which is one of the things that led to her physical downfall. Her overeating resulted in the onset of Type II diabetes, which hastened the macular degeneration and blindness. It also led to serious mobility issues that resulted in an early transition to assisted living. Once again it was God, not her own choices, who was at fault.
I reached out to Scott Janssen to ask him about his experience with this topic. Scott, whom you may remember from our entries on men and grief, is a licensed social worker for a hospice program in North Carolina. He said that he has worked with people who die angry and were in that state long before the diagnosis. He though that there was always something underneath the anger that went unresolved.
“People can get trapped in patterns of anger and never really get at what's underneath. It can be a really tough way to go. Though some use their anger to try to feel strong or protect from underlying shame or guilt or fear or whatever. Some idealize the anger and pretend to be warriors who are going down swinging.”
It makes me think about what would have happened had my aunt talked to someone — a therapist, a priest or pastoral counselor, or anyone with some level of training in grief13. Would she have felt the urge to follow the retirement plan and go to Vegas? Would she have maintained a healthy relationship with her sisters and sons? Would she have died peacefully and contented?
There’s no way to know, but the damage left in her wake is pretty clear guide of the ways you shouldn’t handle it.
Final thoughts on finality…
“It didn’t matter if you died in a car crash or peacefully in your sleep at 102 or if you drowned in a plane at the bottom of the ocean. The end result would be the same. And that was all life was. Shifting the balance, every day, to make room for joy and grace in whatever circumstances you’ve got before you time runs out.”
― T.J. Newman, Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421
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Family drama isn’t exclusive to Italians, but it was very Italian drama in that only a few people knew why and we never spoke of it. I’m still not 100% certain what happened.
She took us to Disney World every other year when we were young. She paid for me to attend a summer journalism program at Syracuse University when I was in high school.
My aunt and uncle had a large above ground swimming pool, where we spent many a hot day until we got our own above ground swimming pool.
I’ve mentioned her before. She’s four years younger than me. We’ll probably hear more from her over the coming months.
At different times. I was out of work from January 2002 until March 2003, post-9/11. The economic slowdown eventually claimed my father’s job and he was out for a short stretch.
My cousin and I talked about this during a long trip through the Mojave Desert, as we were heading from Vegas to LA for a day. There had always been something in the air between us when (in 1997) he didn’t come to Syracuse for my mother’s funeral, and (later) I didn’t go to his wedding.
My uncle was not one to express emotions beyond anger and laughter. It must have been crippling if he went to the hospital.
One cousin worked for a software company programming casino games. The other was a VIP host in a casino.
Virulent racism, mostly.
Las Vegas in late June is a special type of heat.
It may have been mass or some sort of blessing. My memory of these details is foggy.
I remember a story where my aunt asked my cousin, upon arriving, “Where’s the bitch?” My cousin and his sons turned around and left. My cousin’s wife is the very opposite of a bitch. Digressing…
She stuck pretty closely to her circle of validators who nodded their heads and told her that she was right about everything and had done nothing wrong.
Thanks for sharing. The anger in my family runs deep as well. So deep, in fact, that my dying sister asked to only see "some'' of her siblings when she passed away nine months ago at 64. When my 68-year-old brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in February, he spent the last 19 days of his life with his children, my sister, myself, my brother and my one niece. My 93-year-old father, when told his son was dying, shrugged his shoulders and said "Oh well.'' My youngest brother, who my dying brother asked to see, refused to visit him. I learned a lot during those 19 days - about selflessness and selfishness. I also learned that some people truly believe that hiding behind a grudge is the way to avoid handling the tough stuff in life, like the death of a sibling/child. How truly pathetic.
Grief can truly make people bitter. Another great read, Jared.