feeling guilty after my mother’s suicide
My BPD mother killed herself after years of threatens and attempts. I am 26 y/o. Last month I lost my mother with her suicide. My sister and I had a very hard childhood of mental abuse and physical violation. I lived in another city since 18 but we were in contact. We saw each other frequently in my or her house. At least I thought our relationship was not that awful. I really cannot remember my childhood obviously but I know it was hard. She threw us away from house. We called our father to come and bring us. We slept in the car until tomorrow when she called and bring us back. She always blamed us for ruining her life and wasting her money, though we were good people in our own community. She used to humiliate my father and beat him severely. She blamed him for all her misery. I always had fear that some day she will kill him in one of those argues. She would tell my father she wanted a divorce, but at the last moment she would always back down. When I was a child, she would send me to convince my father not to leave. She openly wished for my father’s death in front of me.
Because of the war in my country, I was forced to stay for a month in their city because it was safer there. I myself was extremely depressed and emotionally broken, and I could no longer take care of her.
On the last day, when my father was not home, she started arguing with me and humiliating me again, and I became very angry. I pushed her away so she would let me pack my suitcase and leave. I hit her in the face with a pillow so she would move away from the doorway of my room, because I genuinely could not bear to look into her eyes anymore. Her eyes were driving me insane.
We argued, and I was truly falling apart emotionally. Then my father arrived, and she attacked him too. When I saw the marks of her fingers on my father’s neck, I lost control and told her, “I hope you die,” just like throughout my childhood when you wished death on me. She told me, “I never really meant those things.” I said, “But I truly do wish death on you.”
Then she told me, “I’m going to take 80 pills.” I thought she was lying again, like she always did, just to make me feel guilty. I told her, “Go ahead, take a hundred.” I am sure she had already prepared the pills beforehand, because I was paying attention and I never heard the sound of pills being pushed out of a blister pack.
After all those years when my father and I had to constantly stop her from killing herself — taking pills away from her, stopping her from opening the car door, preventing her from throwing herself out of windows — that night I came home and realized she had actually died.
I feel horrible. I have overwhelming guilt. I do not want to live anymore, and I feel responsible for her death.