BEL MOONEY: Can I forgive myself for falling out with my late father?

Dear Bel,

My story goes back to around nine years ago.

At 25, I was living at home with Mum and Dad. He lost his job as a carpenter, which led to a catastrophic breakdown.

He and my mother had been married for almost 35 years and although we supported him as best we could, his entire personality and outlook on life changed. He was no longer the wonderful, caring, rock of a father I’d depended on.

The situation worsened as I sided with Mum. Dad seemed the guilty party. Things were said that shouldn’t have been, and things became so bad we had to move away.

They divorced; our lovely family home was sold. There was so much hurt and anger, I barely recognised the person I’d become. I couldn’t see a way of forgiving Dad.

Time passed. With encouragement from Mum and my sister (who’d stayed close to him), I made peace with him. It was uneasy to begin with and I was very cautious of him, but he’d always find a way to say he was sorry.

Looking back, I know I was just as much the guilty party, I said some despicable things, and never actually asked Dad how he was feeling.

I was due to marry last May (cancelled due to Covid) and I knew he was excited at the thought of walking me down the aisle. Then he was diagnosed with cancer — related to the work he’d done for nearly 60 years. We’d only just begun to process the diagnosis before he passed away last October, Mum, Sis and I at his bedside for four days. I know he knew we were there.

My problem is this huge feeling of guilt. Was everything said that needed to be said? Did he know how I feel? Will our lives be able to carry on without him? I lost him once and got him back, but now I’ve lost him again, and need to come to terms with the fact he’s not coming back.

I’ll never have the Father of the Bride dance with Dad, and he won’t see the women my sister and I turn out to be.

We wasted so much time on the sad rupture, but maybe it needed to happen for us to all come full circle.

I can’t come to terms with words I said which can now never be taken back. How can I forgive myself?

LEIGH

This week Bel Mooney advises a reader who regrets not making amends with her late father.

Your sad letter makes me reflect on forgiveness — something of an obsession of mine.

What happened in your family is (sadly) very common indeed: a terrible falling-out due to a change in circumstances which nobody is strong enough to deal with.

Your poor father lost his lifelong, much-loved job as a carpenter and had a breakdown. Neither you nor your mother could cope, the rows began, furious accusations and counter-accusations were hurled, life became intolerable.

Your story shows why I’ve advised people to imagine how they’d feel at the funeral of the one they quarrelled with. But Leigh, there is nothing to do now but accept what happened, think hard and use it to teach you the true meaning of love. There is no forgetting; there is only coming to terms with our faults, mistakes and regrets.

The moment of release might come if you try this: sit still, breathe deeply, close your eyes, hold out your open palms in acceptance and say: ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’

I’ve done this more than once recently, thinking about my own late father — and it’s helped me to realise that, for all my faults and his, the love between us still outweighs all the rest. Your natural grief is made worse by remorse, so try to believe that at the end your dad did indeed know that his family were at his bedside, united, focusing on him with love.

Truly, I believe he must have known, simply because love is stronger than death. That, Leigh, was the time of forgiveness, beyond words.

Now let me introduce you to Margaret, who is also grieving. She writes:

Dear Bel, My beloved husband died last month after battling a stroke and dementia. We were together for 50 years. 

THOUGHT OF THE DAY 

Death brings our life into the sun

And we are grateful. Grief is gracious when

It takes the character of this kind one,

This gentle person. We re-live his life

And marvel at the quiet good he’s done.

Elizabeth Jennings (English poet 1926-2001)

My mind accepts he died and I will never see him again, but my heart can’t. Neither of us believed in the afterlife . . . but it’s hard. 

How do I accept his death and tell my heart I will never hear his voice again? You are both asking the hardest question of all: how we can carry on living without the beloved dead. 

I have read countless books on bereavement and know there is no single piece of advice to help. 

But we can still hold out hands to each other. Margaret doesn’t believe in an afterlife; you, Leigh, grieve that your father won’t see your future. 

Yet none of us can know what happens after death. In any case, my own faith is in the indestructibility of the spirit, given all its power by love. I believe we carry our precious dead along with us, living on their behalf, noticing the glory of the world all the more because we are looking for them as well. 

Their voices are in the air we breathe, we listen with their ears — and our hearts beat for them and with them, sounding a message of love and sorrow and acceptance which can never be silenced. 

Your sad letter makes me reflect on forgiveness — something of an obsession of mine.

What happened in your family is (sadly) very common indeed: a terrible falling-out due to a change in circumstances which nobody is strong enough to deal with.

Your poor father lost his lifelong, much-loved job as a carpenter and had a breakdown. Neither you nor your mother could cope, the rows began, furious accusations and counter-accusations were hurled, life became intolerable.

Your story shows why I’ve advised people to imagine how they’d feel at the funeral of the one they quarrelled with. But Leigh, there is nothing to do now but accept what happened, think hard and use it to teach you the true meaning of love. There is no forgetting; there is only coming to terms with our faults, mistakes and regrets.

The moment of release might come if you try this: sit still, breathe deeply, close your eyes, hold out your open palms in acceptance and say: ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’

I’ve done this more than once recently, thinking about my own late father — and it’s helped me to realise that, for all my faults and his, the love between us still outweighs all the rest. Your natural grief is made worse by remorse, so try to believe that at the end your dad did indeed know that his family were at his bedside, united, focusing on him with love.

Truly, I believe he must have known, simply because love is stronger than death. That, Leigh, was the time of forgiveness, beyond words.

Now let me introduce you to Margaret, who is also grieving. She writes:

Dear Bel, My beloved husband died last month after battling a stroke and dementia. We were together for 50 years. My mind accepts he died and I will never see him again, but my heart can’t. Neither of us believed in the afterlife . . . but it’s hard.

How do I accept his death and tell my heart I will never hear his voice again?

You are both asking the hardest question of all: how we can carry on living without the beloved dead.

I have read countless books on bereavement and know there is no single piece of advice to help. But we can still hold out hands to each other.

Margaret doesn’t believe in an afterlife; you, Leigh, grieve that your father won’t see your future. Yet none of us can know what happens after death.

In any case, my own faith is in the indestructibility of the spirit, given all its power by love. I believe we carry our precious dead along with us, living on their behalf, noticing the glory of the world all the more because we are looking for them as well.

Their voices are in the air we breathe, we listen with their ears — and our hearts beat for them and with them, sounding a message of love and sorrow and acceptance which can never be silenced.

I’m gay — but I haven’t told my wife  

Dear Bel,

I am a married man with young children, but I’m actually gay. I always knew it but never admitted it for fear of the reaction.

I think my mother suspected, but has never confronted me; she does make the odd negative comment about ‘gays’ — and I feel uncomfortable.

My father would be devastated — and even if my parents died I could never come out, never truly be myself. The guilt would be too much.

I always wanted children, and my wife is oblivious to the truth. I know she loves me, as I do her. I’m a good husband, father and provider — and would never put my wife’s health at risk because of what goes on in my other life.

Contact Bel 

Bel answers readers’ questions on emotional and relationship problems each week.

Write to Bel Mooney, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT, or email [email protected].

Names are changed to protect identities.

Bel reads all letters but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.

My job allowed me to travel and keep my two lives separate. But lockdown changed things, and I can’t see myself travelling as much as I used to. My company is saying I can work from home with just the odd trip to head office.

The prospect fills me with dread, as I won’t be able to give a reason for staying away.

I’m becoming depressed, feel trapped and can’t see a way out. While I genuinely love my wife and children, I feel the loss of the other side of my identity. I can’t share this with anybody close to me.

Am I the only person like this? Am I destined to live the rest of my life feeling trapped and longing for the other side of my life that makes me happy and complete?

DANIEL

Other men and women have found themselves in your situation and I’m sure all would agree that to deny your true sexuality is to choose a life of deceit, stress, unhappiness and anxiety.

Since you have fathered children with the wife you love, have you considered whether you might be on the bisexual spectrum? Sexual definitions seem increasingly complicated these days, but why should you bother about them?

You see yourself as having two distinct personalities, with different needs — a situation at once very complicated and uncomfortably simple. The complicated bit is that you love your wife and children and the good life you have created together, while admitting that it only satisfies a part of your nature.

That exists side by side with a blindingly simple truth: when you enjoy a homosexual encounter (no matter how fleeting), you are cheating on the wife you love.

If a friend were to confide that he loves his wife and children dearly, but when working away he picks up women in bars and sleeps with them, what would you think? I suspect you might judge him.

You say you could never ‘come out’, even if your parents were dead. I was interested to read that Kate Winslet recently said she knows of ‘at least four’ well-known actors who are gay but are afraid to admit it. In their case, it’s apparently because they’re worried they won’t get ‘straight roles’. In your case, I suspect you were brought up to see homosexuality as wrong and so chose to live a lie because of fear and shame.

   

More from Bel Mooney for the Daily Mail…

You wanted children, so I’m wondering if that deep urge pushed you towards heterosexual marriage. Have you ‘used’ your wife? Some might say so. Like anyone serially unfaithful, you must have lived in fear of one of those illicit lovers blowing your cover.

It took a lot of courage for you to write, and it’s clear from your longer letter that you are terrified of your ‘other’ self being discovered. So what to do?

The organisation Switchboard runs a LGBT+ helpline, which you can call on 0300 330 0630. But what if you are urged to ‘come out’? You won’t, will you?

For now, I’m afraid you’re destined to endure frustration and depression, feeling trapped by the family you love. One day that may change and you’ll tell your wife the truth. She’ll be shocked and devastated. But she may learn to live with that knowledge — and the ‘new’ you.

For now, pitying your confusion and pain, I hope an understanding voice on the telephone might provide some reassurance that you are not alone.

And finally: The blessing that made my week…

It was just another cold day, reading letters, writing my column — when a single email made me happy.

It sped across continents from Ayesha S — ‘a Pakistani woman who is fast approaching the ripe age of 40.’

Her glorious letter reminded me how words can reach out to different cultures — shared human emotions unrestricted by boundaries of race and religion that are sadly (often destructively) put up between people.

Ayesha just loves this column — and let’s pause right there to celebrate the internet that can bring us together. ‘One day my son came home brandishing his class 1 English textbook and while glancing through, my eye suddenly fell upon one of your short stories and the squeal of excited joy I gave made me realise that I had started thinking of you as a friend!’

Ayesha tells me how she loves people, how an elderly man told her about ‘his two brilliant, successful and accomplished sons who live abroad and all he wanted was for one of them to return to their home country because he missed them so much.’

She describes a wedding where a neighbour described her husband as ‘sooo handsome.’ When Ayesha finally met the ordinary older man she found it ‘so sweet how his wife felt he was George Clooney and Cary Grant all rolled into one!’

Mourning her beloved cousin (Covid, of course), she says we must all tell people how we feel.

‘So Bel — thank you for every well modulated, carefully chosen word you write in your column since it gives me — sitting in my breezy, beach-side vibrant city of Karachi — such pleasure.

‘I wish you and your family the very best of health, happiness and love always. To paraphrase an Irish blessing: may the road rise up to meet you, may the sun shine golden upon your fields, may your hearth always be lit and your home always ring with the laughter of family and friends.’

Ayesha’s Irish-Pakistani blessing from Karachi made my week.