Poor Little Narcissist…

In March of 2012 I wrote a blog entry entitled “Empathetic Narcissist = Oxymoron.” In reviewing that post recently I came across this line: “Empathy is that quality that allows us to identify with the feelings of another…Narcissists don’t know how to do this—they don’t have the capacity and because of that, they find no value in it.”^[1]

In re-reading this line it occurred to me that some will read this and their own natural empathy may lead them to feeling sorry for the narcissist. After all, the narcissist is being deprived of something natural and fundamental and even essential to the building of character. That which most of us take for granted has been denied, either through trauma or the fickleness of nature, to narcissists and some of us are prompted not only feel sorry for them but find the fact of this privation sufficient to give them a pass on their behaviours. This may be our natural inclination but, believe me, to do so is a grave mistake.

While it is true that narcissists lack empathy—it is one of the defining features of narcissism, after all—it is not necessarily true that the narcissist experiences suffering as a result of this lack. Empathy is not part of our survival instinct, selfishness is, because selfishness helps us to hoard resources that guarantee our survival, even at the expense of others. If we had empathy and shared our resources, we might die.

Very young children are naturally very selfish and lacking in empathy. Your infant doesn’t care how sleep-deprived you are, he only cares that his discomfort is relieved. Empathy is supposed to evolve as the child matures and becomes more cognizant of others and more capable of fending for himself. Children are supposed to gradually outgrow this selfishness, to become increasingly aware not only of others but of the needs and feelings of others and eventually to respond to them with emotional resonance. By the time we reach adulthood, if our development has been on track we not only can read and write and have the basic skills necessary for autonomy, we have developed the empathy for others that allows us to function well socially.

Unfortunately not all of us develop that empathy—narcissists are chief among those who lack it. We who have grown up with an ingrained sense of empathy find it difficult to grasp that someone can be without one. It is further difficult to grasp that they don’t miss it at all.

How is this possible? Well, think of it this way: if you had never eaten jellied moose nose^[2], would you miss it? You might even think that it was an undesirable thing to eat and be glad you’ve never tasted it and have no wish to ever do so. And because you have never tasted it, you most definitely would not miss it, would you?

Well, narcissists lack empathy. They have never had it, they don’t recognize it when it is directed at them, and when they realize that it can make you very vulnerable, they don’t want it. They like to see it in others because it gives them a way to manipulate those others, which is precisely why they don’t want it for themselves. Narcissists do not miss being empathetic because they have never experienced it—they quite literally do not know what they are missing. But, like you and the jellied moose nose, they aren’t exactly eager to experience it.

So, ask yourself—should I feel sorry for you because you have never tasted jellied moose nose? Should I excuse bad table manners and look the other way when you eat your spaghetti with your hands—both hands—because you, poor thing, have never been able to eat jellied moose nose? If you don’t care about it, don’t want any for yourself, and don’t feel deprived by the lack, why should I feel bad for you because your life—and diet—has been deficient in the jellied remains of a moose’s nose? Wouldn’t I be guilty of wanting it for you more than you want it for yourself? What business, actually, is it of mine?

Is it any different with empathy? If the narcissist doesn’t miss it (because he never had it) and doesn’t want it (because he believes it leaves him open to manipulation), why feel bad for him? Don’t say “I know how I would feel…” because that doesn’t matter—what is germane here is how that narcissist feels. If you think he feels the way you would, that is projecting (which is a narcissistic trait—check yourself for fleas!) and it has absolutely nothing to do with how that narcissist feels.

So, because he lacks empathy, he doesn’t know any better and you should cut him some slack, right?

Nope. Unless he has been living under a rock in a cave in the bowels of an ancient volcano, he knows better because the clues are everywhere. Movies and TV shows often are no more than elaborate morality plays that effectively demonstrate that characters who lack empathy end up negatively. Books, news articles, overheard conversations—all contain the general consensus that people who lack empathy are assholes and idiots, disliked and disrespected.

That means that narcissists know what empathy is and they know that the society expects some degree of it from all of us. The narcissist also knows that he can use the vulnerabilities that empathy exposes to manipulate others—which means that if he develops empathy he will be vulnerable to people like himself. The narcissist well know what empathy is and she knows that it is a powerful means to manipulate and control others, either by manipulating their empathy or feigning her own.

The truth is, you cannot miss something you have never had. You can want it, you can yearn for it, but you can’t miss it. If you are inclined to feel sorry for a narcissist for his lack of empathy, imagine how you would feel if I were to feel sorry for you for your lack of jellied moose nose experience? You might appreciate that I was thinking of you, but if I offered to bring you a nice big plate of it, wouldn’t you quickly decline my offer?

And so it is with the narcissist and empathy—she doesn’t feel bad, she doesn’t suffer from her lack of empathy any more than you feel bad or suffer from your lack of acquaintance with the jellified moose snout. You might think the narcissist is missing out on something beautiful and necessary but the narcissist will have a very different—and quite valid—point of view.

Why is it valid? Because it never works to want something for someone more than they want it for themselves. Because, no matter how much we believe we are right, we don’t have the right to impose our wishes for someone onto them, not even narcissists. They have the same right of self-determination as you and I do, and it is just as sacrosanct, even if it is self-serving and counter-productive. Because we don’t have the right to try to change other adults to suit ourselves, no matter what. But most important, because that narcissist has a perfect right to be a narcissist, to continue being a narcissist, and to even enjoy being a narcissist. We do not have a right try to change them or even to expect them to change.

This can be difficult to accept because their lack of empathy can make life very difficult for us and when something is going wrong in our lives, we have a natural instinct to want to change it. If our narcissistic parent is wreaking havoc in our lives it is natural to wish for that parent to change and stop doing it. We impute the same emotional processes to the narcissist that we, ourselves, enjoy and so we believe that those things that motivate us will motivate them. But we are wrong. You cannot appeal to the empathy of a person who has none and you cannot give empathy to someone who doesn’t want it.

Most of all, you cannot empathize with a feeling that is not there. When you feel bad for the poor narcissist who is devoid of empathy you are not empathizing, you are projecting. You are assuming that the narcissist is feelings the same pangs you are feeling when, in fact, the person is not feeling bereft at all. That is how you believe you would feel if your empathy were to disappear tomorrow and you are projecting onto that narcissist—it is not at all the nothingness that the narcissist is feeling.

1.      Sweet Violet. “Empathetic Narcissist = Oxymoron.” The Narcissist’s Child. http://narcissistschild.blogspot.co.za/2012/03/empathetic-narcissist-non-sequitur.html (accessed January 19, 2018).

2.      Wisniewski, Laura. “Fresh Eyes: Jellied Moose Nose.” Bozeman Magazine. http://bozemanmagazine.com/articles/2014/02/27/22796_fresh_eyes_jellied_moose_nose (accessed January 19, 2018).

Friends and Frenemies: ACoNs and Friendship

When we first begin to grasp what narcissism is and learn how to recognize it, many of us are surprised at how many narcissists we find already in our lives. By the time someone comes to this blog, they are pretty sure someone in their family—usually one or both parents—are narcissistic, but they are totally unprepared for how many other people they know seem to be Ns as well.

This can lead to self-doubt because it doesn’t seem possible that all of those people are narcissists, too. So we begin to dig deeper into narcissism and its traits because we are unwilling to trust our initial assessments or, because we assume we are wrong, we deliberately ignore the red flags that are tossed our way by narcissistic bosses, co-workers, siblings, doctors, shopkeepers, other family members, and people we call friends, because we aren’t sure of the difference between real narcissism and fleas.

Most people gravitate to what they know. They seek the familiar, even when that familiar is toxic or painful. They seek it and tolerate it because they know the territory. They can run on auto-pilot (habituated awareness and responses) when in the presence of the familiar. You know not to say this or do that in order to avoid conflict, you know when to disappear or to put in a strategically timed appearance to maintain a fragile peace. You can recognise the run-up to a fight or a confrontation or an ass-chewing or even a beating and your life is predictable—if unhappy—and predictability brings a measure of security in and of itself.

When faced with what we don’t know—a person who seems genuinely warm and giving and interested in us, for example—we experience two immediate emotions: fear and distrust. We are afraid because we are in unfamiliar territory and don’t know what to do or think or trust and we don’t want to make fools of ourselves in our ignorance. Most people like us will respond to such a situation in predictable ways: they will remove themselves, they will bluff it out, or they will attempt to make light of the discomfort. But they will not feel at ease.

We tend to distrust that with which we are unfamiliar. In our experience, this kind and giving behaviour on the part of another person has often been no more than a façade designed to lure us in and make us vulnerable. If we stick around at all, it is because we are waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the monster to emerge from behind the mask—or we are studiously ignoring the red flags that are popping up all over the place. We simply cannot be sure this lovely person is genuine and due to previous experiences, we may not ever completely drop our suspicions.

But that can make us feel guilty. As the children of narcissists, we are conditioned to be givers, pleasers, and without any expectation of reciprocity. Misplaced guilt acts as a goad that propels us to give even more: it drowns out our doubts, blinds us to those red flags, and chides us for not being charitable in our thoughts.

We are conditioned to see the best in everyone and to overlook, ignore or refuse to acknowledge the kinds of character flaws that would otherwise alert us to something being wrong. This conditioning coupled with our desperate desire for someone in our lives from who we can get (or earn) approbation, makes us very vulnerable to the con artists and narcissists of the world. Women are conned out of their life savings and assets by romantic con artists in just this way: they so want to be loved in the ways these monsters pretend that they deliberately put their common sense on a high shelf in a dark, seldom-visited corner of their minds and then forget about it. We, the victims of narcissists, do much the same thing.

It has been said that narcissists are drawn to us in the same way that wolves are drawn to the weakest, most vulnerable member of a herd. The wolf doesn’t care if their prey is old and chewy or if it is young and tender—the only thing the wolf is interested in is whether or not the prey can be caught: a haunch of venison is a haunch of venison whether it is from an old stag or a new fawn—the wolf does not care as long as the wolf gets a meal. And so it is with narcissists: whatever it is they want, if they perceive we can and will provide it, that is all they need to pick up our trail.

These narcissists can be—or at least seem—romantically inclined like the con artist lover or clingy gold digger, and they can be platonic. All they require is a person who feels in need of a friend badly enough to overlook any flaws that might inadvertently pop out. All we require is someone we think will be a real friend to us. Symbiosis…

It is important to realize that what the narcissist wants does not have to be major: it doesn’t have to be a large sum of money or huge favours like borrowing your car or moving into your house. It can be as small as using you as a “cork” for a hole in their life. They are between the kinds of friends they can usually prey on and you only need a few strokes now and then to keep you around: low maintenance friends are easy to manage while looking for the “right” friend. Maybe the N has managed to get herself stuck in suburbia, cut off from the bright lights and party atmosphere she thrives in. She needs to jog or cycle or do Pilates or boxing or whatever to keep fit and she needs a partner. I briefly had a friend like this: she moved into my neighbourhood and we met by chance at the local 7-11. She seemed to want a friend but what she really wanted, it eventually emerged, was a running partner, and I was just pudgy enough that she could use the promise of shedding a few pounds as a way to get me to run with her. I thought she would take it easy on me because I had never done this before: nope—she did her normal 2 mile circuit and I ended up walking home alone…with shin splints and asthma. She never called me again after that and for a very long time I could not understand why. Everybody knows that a novice doesn’t have the stamina of the experienced, so I couldn’t understand why she was so upset—disgusted is the word she used—with me. It seemed so unreasonable—and I couldn’t understand why she couldn’t see how unreasonable she was being—but I didn’t know anything about narcissists back then.

Once you turn out to be inadequate to plug the hole in their lives or, more likely, they find the “right” kind of person to befriend, you are on your way to becoming history. They might drag you along for a while, as they solidify this new relationship or they may drag you into an established social circle into which you would otherwise not be accepted: this is to instil a sense of obligation in you: without the narcissist, you would not have access to all of this wonderfulness... But there is always something in it for the narcissist so when you no longer supply what the narcissist wants or when they find someone they deem better to supply it, or they no longer feel a need for what you supply, you then for them, it is over.

This ending of the relationship can play out several ways but I suspect “ghosting¹” is the most common because it allows the narcissist to simply move on without wasting any of her precious time on something she does not value, like your feelings. If you manage to corner her, you might get a lame excuse for her disappearance (“I have just been so busy…”), you might get blamed for it (“…what makes you think I’d want to hang out with a liar like you ever again?” when you told her a truth she didn’t like), or you might get a vague promise of a future meetup (“let’s do lunch next week…I’ll call you…”) that never comes to be. Too often we are left holding the bleeding remains of an executed relationship with no idea why it was put to death, and the other party is simply unwilling to give a clue. This can be very painful—it is a serious betrayal of trust and that always hurts. It can also make you fearful, particularly if you confided anything sensitive or confidential to your absconding friend. Will she keep your confidences? Or will she consider her obligation to maintain your confidentiality dead with the ending of the relationship?

In my experience, the vast majority of people go through these kinds of endings but ACoNs seem to have them more often and are also more emotionally injured by them. It makes sense, if you think about it: our FOOs are untrustworthy and emotionally unavailable to us so we are hungry for connection. And that hunger, coupled with our sense of familiarity with narcissists, draws us into relationships—I hesitate to call them “friendships” because these people really aren’t our friends—with people who seem in the beginning to be warm and welcoming, empathetic and supportive, loving and giving, only to discover later that we projected onto this person what we wanted to see, not what and who they really were.

We often suffer with this kind of “friendship” for years, silently questioning hurts both large and small, but always forgiving, making excuses, rationalizations, justifications. Friendship requires compromises, after all, and forgiveness. And then one day something occurs and you start seeing that you are the one compromising, not your friend. You are the one forgiving, not your friend. You get left out of important events—or given only a minor role—and when you need someone to lean on, she is mysteriously—and consistently—absent.

These kinds of “friendships” come from two places: lack understanding what a real friendship is and our own desperation and fear of aloneness. We may not really know what true friendships are because we have not yet experienced one nor have we had them modelled for us. If our Ns manage to keep a long-term friendship, a close examination will likely reveal the same kind of pathology we have in our own: someone who is well-versed in toadying to an N in order to keep the one-way relationship alive.

Real friendships have reciprocity—but neither friend keeps score. They don’t need to because they know that the other one will be there when they need them and that is enough. Real friendships wax and wane: there are times you hardly see or talk to each other, and time when you are virtually joined at the hip. And real friendships can end, too. Emotionally healthy people grow and sometimes they grow in different directions. But the end of those friendships are soft…there is no painful dump or bump, your lives just grow apart and you remember each other fondly.

Narcissists are not capable of real friendship so you can’t “save” a friendship with a narcissist because there is no friendship there to save. We, however, often don’t know how to deal with the waxing and waning or eventual wind down of a friendship that has run its course. When coming from a place of deprivation, we want to grab onto our relationships and hug them to us—and when we do that, we run the risk of strangling the life out of them.

I treat friendships loosely—if my friend is a call-once-a month kind of person, fine—because I do not need friends in my life to feel whole. I am whole all by myself and have lots of stuff that keeps me busy and engaged, thinking and writing, coming and going. I love my friends but I have discovered that I do not need them—and that is a good thing. If a friend drifts away into another phase of life, I am happy for her, happy to see her progressing. Only those friends who try to put a stranglehold on me, who want my constant company, who cannot seem to function without my presence or at least my approval, only these friends do I have difficulty with because they are not creating their own lives, they are creating lives they hope I will approve of, and that is not healthy for them—they should be creating lives that fulfil them regardless of my opinion or approval.

After divorcing my NexH I stayed away from men for two years. During that time I concentrated on school and on my therapy. When I started dating, I came to a remarkable discovery: I didn’t “need” a man! My previous hunger for male companionship had not only disappeared, I found myself not responding in my previously programmed ways to men who were, if not full-on Ns, full of fleas. I didn’t try to please them—I didn’t care if they were happy with me or not! I was gobsmacked because this was just so out of character for me! But I really, truly, didn’t care if I was paired up or not. I did things on my own, I was comfortable with myself and didn’t need someone else to distract me from what I used to perceive as my inadequacies. I was just fine the way I was and if I was going to have a man in my life, he was going to have to be someone who added a dimension to my life, not someone who took it over expecting me to jump at his expectations like a trained dog.

This realization brought me to the further realization that friends, while lovely to have and entertaining to hang with, weren’t necessities. This made me much more circumspect in the people I came to call friends. I stopped tolerating behaviours I didn’t like and walked away from friendships with women who thought feminism was synonymous with man-hating, who thought men were meal tickets, who judged other women. I began looking at friendships like informal marriages: this person will be in my life, have access to sensitive information, and I will go out of my way to be there for her/him when needed—is this person worthy? Is she trustworthy? Is she tolerant? Is she kind? Does she love?

At some point in therapy I realized that friendship is actually about ME. I know that sounds narcissistic but it isn’t: it is a manifestation of healthy self esteem. I want a friend who will be my friend, not a person who sees me as the supplier of whatever is missing from her life because these are the people who dump their friendships as soon as you get tired of always having to shovel love, attention, advice, sympathy and understanding into that bottomless pit of need and moves on to someone else with a bigger shovel. I have a long-term friend who recently experienced this: a friend of hers (acquaintance of mine), after years of waiting and hunting, finally found “the guy.” And suddenly she disappeared out of my friend’s life. She would stand her up for meetups, lunches, movies, dinner parties—you name it and you couldn’t depend on her to be there anymore because the hole in her life…a man who might marry her…came ahead of a girlfriendship of more than ten years. It made my friend angry, but beneath the anger I could see she was hurt—she had been dumped for a man...for those ten years she had been only a “filler,” a placeholder, until her friend found what she really wanted.

When we as ACoNs choose friendships, we need to be careful and make sure we are not friending just anybody because we are needy, because when we do that, we sow the seeds of our own disappointment. We are prone to repeating old, unhealthy patterns by relying on that comforting feeling of familiarity, so we need to be consciously aware and look for—and heed—those red flags. Most of all, we need to learn how to be alone with ourselves, to be our own best friends, before we go out looking for more. If we don’t like ourselves well enough to spend lots of time alone with ourselves, why would we expect people—the kind of good people who will make true friends—to be friends with us? Other people are not tools to be used to distract us from our own unhappiness with ourselves, nor are they security blankets to keep us shored up as we are try to survive without digging into the quagmire of our dysfunctional emotional history and actually fixing what is wrong with us.

Healing can be a long and lonely process, but it is longer—and lonelier—if we take a gaggle of faux friends with us, people who sabotage us or hold us back or have expectations of us that are unhealthy to our own psyches. You have to be your own best friend first, before you can recognize and reciprocate a healthy friendship with someone who loves you just as you are, regardless of how you might be at any given moment. Friends like this are rare, so don’t expect to find one around every corner and don’t expect to have a horde of them. Fair weather friends—those who love you when your fortunes…and moods…are good but who can’t be found when you have troubles—are a dime a dozen and narcissistic opportunists who masquerade as friends are no less plentiful. You cannot close yourself off to people because there are so many frauds out there looking out only for themselves, though, because if you do you won’t be available to find the real friends who are out there, just waiting for someone like you to buddy up with. You have to put real effort into learning how to separate the chalk from the cheese—you have to stiffen your own spine and exert the self-discipline to not ignore those red flags, to not follow the comfortably familiar path back into a dysfunctional relationship. You have the power here, and it is up to you to use it.

It’s not easy, but it is truly, truly worth it.

1    “Ghosting refers to the act of breaking off a relationship…by ceasing all communication and contact with the [other person] without any apparent warning or justification, as well as avoiding and/or ignoring and refusing to respond in any way to…attempts

The Evolution of a Smear Campaign

I had one of my epiphanies the other night…in reviewing my last post—the one about closure—I found myself lingering on the paragraph about why my mother moved in with Nana to take care of her. I was surprised when this happened because my mother never liked her mother and was not shy about admitting it. She never stopped resenting her parents for not letting her run wild when she was a teenager and despite the fact that she snuck out regularly and finally eloped with a guy she had known less than a month, she blamed their strictness for those choices of hers, choices that ended up with my birth and the subsequent ruination of her life.

She never grew up enough, emotionally, to accede to the simple fact that during her adolescence, the social mores of the time included more restrictions for girls than boys and much different expectations. According to NM’s older brother, my Uncle Gary, my grandparents were no more strict than the parents of her peers, the girls she went to high school with, but to hear her tell it, they all but chained her to the house, they were so old fashioned and restrictive. But in reality, it was my mother who was different from the norm, not her parents. Where other girls complied with their parents’ wishes and restrictions, my mother did not. Where other girls stayed home in their beds and slept at night, my mother climbed out her bedroom window and went out and partied in places normally off-limits to the under-aged (she was 15 and 16 when doing this). In typical N fashion, however, she blamed her parents, particularly her immigrant father, for “forcing” her to such extremes in pursuing her happiness—“…if he had let me go out, I wouldn’t have had to sneak…” (An interesting aside: two generations later my daughter, beginning at the age of 14, was doing the exact same thing—without knowing about her her grandmother's antics—and also making it the fault of her parents!)

My mother never outgrew that resentment. When I spent summers with her parents and expressed a wish to stay there full time she told me that they were “different” during the summers and that if I lived there full time I would see that and I would regret it. But my grandparents were somewhat strict with me anyway and I didn’t mind because I interpreted it as a sign they cared about me. But my mother, while happy to dump me in their laps every summer, never stayed even overnight at their house. She was different when she was around them—like she was a kid again and compelled to obey…or dissemble… She had never truly grown up but remained a resentful, spiteful child, hiding her normal bold, brassy, bossy self from them the same way my daughter, at 14, hid the fact that she was wearing makeup from her adoptive parents.

When my grandmother was 69, my grandfather died in his sleep—they had been married for 53 years. For many years, my grandparents had been friends with a couple, Rob and Frances, with whom they liked to play cards and to go travelling in their Airstream trailers. Not too long after my grandfather died, Rob’s wife also died. Before long, Rob and Nana’s friendship went to the next level and soon they were married.

My mother was livid. Rob was a man of very modest means and NM was positive his only interest in Nana was her money. He had an Army pension and some income from his late wife’s estate so he could pay his own way, but that didn’t stop my mother’s projections. On each of my annual visits to my father’s farm, I would stop in and spend some time with Nana and after she married Rob, Nana introduced us. I liked him: I found Rob to be a gentleman who truly admired my grandmother—it was easy to tell by the way his eyes followed her when she walked around the room. I liked him and I was glad she found some companionship in her waning years.

When my grandmother was in her early 80s she fell and broke her hip. The surgeons botched the job, leaving her with one leg shorter than the other and her foot turned outward. The surgery had to be done again and during the second surgery, Nana had a stroke.

In the 1960s Nana and Grandpa built a large 2-story house where, after they were married, Nana and Rob lived together. But disabled by her stoke, the house wasn’t the best place for them, so they moved into a retirement village while Nana recovered from her stroke and her surgery. My mother, suspicious as ever, took it upon herself to divest herself of all of her meagre holdings in the Nevada desert and high-tailed it to Oregon, moving into Nana’s house to “take care of it” while Nana was in the assisted living facility. And that is when the real smear campaign began.

I am 70 years old—a couple of years ago I began seeing spots crop up on my skin, particularly on my forearms—that looked like purple-and-red bruises. They weren’t painful like a bruise but they were vivid and took longer than a bruise to clear up. These marks are called “purpura” and they are a normal part of aging. In older people who have sun-damaged skin (and Nana was an avid gardener in the days before the invention of sun screen), there is a thing called “solar purpura,” bruise-like spots that can be as much as 5cms (2 inches) across.¹ These are perfectly normal on aging skin and when I first saw them crop up on my own arms, I remembered seeing them on Nana’s forearms and on the arms of other elderly people.

But that wasn’t what my mother wanted to hear—even after I explained to her that this was normal (I worked in a nursing home when I was in my early twenties—I have seen plenty of elderly skin!) she wasn’t having it. My mother insisted they were bruises because Rob was abusing Nana and she couldn't speak up because of her stroke. Of course Nana could nod her head “yes” and shake her head “no,” so she could have been asked if Rob gave her those marks but my mother wrote that off saying “she’s been confused since her stoke,” and insisted Nana had to come out of that assisted living facility immediately. Rob could stay there, as far as she was concerned, just as long as he paid for it out of his own money, and not Nana’s. And there was my first clue to what was going on with this uncharacteristic “dutiful daughter” mask my mother had inexplicably donned.

She succeeded in getting Nana back to her house and she hired a home care aide to come a couple of times each week to give Nana a bath and a few other heavy-lifting type jobs. During this time NM wrote to me occasionally but wrote frequently to my daughter. The information I got was that Rob had been beating up on Nana, leaving bruises on her (the purpura), and that he was after her money but she (NM) had put a stop to it. Rob wouldn’t dare lay a hand on Nana while she was around to protect her!

Anybody who ever met the diminutive Rob would have had a laugh over this—he was a small man to begin with, and now shrunken with advanced age. He had severe emphysema and literally could not walk across a room without his oxygen tank, a little green cylinder on wheels that he towed behind him everywhere. If he had exerted the kind of energy necessary for assaulting my grandmother, he would have collapsed of oxygen starvation—the man barely had the energy—or air—to walk to the other side of the room!

But the accusations didn’t stop there. Mother scoured the house looking for Nana’s jewellery and other valuables, certain that Rob had a hand in the disappearance of anything she couldn’t find. His list of character flaws ran from marrying a rich widow and expecting her to make his final years luxurious to being a Catholic to being a wife beater to being a thief. And his whole family were no better, in her estimation.

And my mother wasn’t covert or even bashful about her voicing her suspicions and unkind thoughts. Knowing how confrontational and contentious she was, it would not surprise me to learn that she had even said some of these things to Rob’s face. After all, Nana’s stroke had rendered her speechless, so she could not silence her daughter’s poisonous tongue or lay her suspicions to rest.

This was very much in keeping with my mother’s modus operandi. In the past, my mother liked to create a crisis out of whole cloth, then swoop in as the rescuer, garnering appreciation and accolades from those who thought themselves rescued, and admiration from observers. These campaigns were invariably kicked off with a smear campaign, a series of lies that had known or observable kernels of truth but which could not be disproven. Nana’s purpura—having been robbed of speech, Nana could not refute NM’s accusations that Rob had injured her in a violent altercation. And nobody bothered to ask Rob if my mother was telling the truth: they could see the purple marks on Nana’s skin, and Nana’s daughter indignantly accusing him—not to his face, mind you—and people just believed her.

This tactic had worked for my mother on numerous occasions, as far back as the mid-Fifties when she ran a woman out of our neighbourhood by stirring up the neighbours against her. She also used the same tactics to turn the FOO against me in her campaign to take my children to give to her younger brother to adopt. It was a tried-and-true approach and she didn’t waste any time putting the accusations, inferences and innuendo to work for her.

My mother used her accusations of Rob’s abuse to justify removing Nana from the assisted-living facility so she could “keep an eye on things,” the staff’s lack of diligence, according to her, was the only reason that Rob had not been caught abusing Nana. But the only thing she was really keeping an eye on was Nana’s bank account. NM had spent the previous few years of her life living a hand-to-mouth existence in a run-down trailer in a dusty hamlet in the Nevada desert and suddenly she had a cosy, up-market roof over her head, access to endless supplies of cash, and an unprecedented opportunity for NSupply. The situation was tailor-made for her trademark MO, and she wasted no time setting the wheels in motion. She had found herself a comfy berth that was going to eventually pan out as her nest egg for the future, provided she could keep Rob’s fingers out of it.

During the time my NM lived with Nana—after Nana’s stroke—NM got Nana to make some changes to her will. Since NM is the one who told me about those changes, I will never know what exactly was changed, but at one time Nana asked me what, from her house, I would like to have as a memento of her—she wanted to put it into her will. But when her will was probated, I received no bequests. Uncle Pete also said that Nana had promised him something in the house but when the will was probated, that item was missing from the will.

My mother also told me that she had seen to it that Nana bequeathed her the house, its contents, and the money in Nana’s bank account, and that the investments and cars would go to my uncles. I have no idea what Nana’s will was before, but I know that neither Rob nor I received anything.

Like Grandpa, Rob died in his sleep one night. Fifteen hours later, Nana was also gone. When I came north for the funeral I was shocked to learn that Rob would not be buried near Nana—he wasn’t even buried in the same cemetery—that his funeral had already been held and no one from our family attended, and that his children were coming to collect his personal belongings and all they were getting was a single small cardboard box with his Missal, a Bible, his Rosary, some papers—like his military discharge papers—and a few bits of clothing. Everything else NM had already discarded or was keeping. She wasn’t even going to let them into the house—the box was on the front porch for their collection. I had liked Rob and I found it very sad that my mother treated him so shabbily but I was still a few years from the breakdown that pushed me into meaningful therapy so I was simultaneously loathing my mother, afraid of her, and yearning for signs that she might someday love me.

For the few years that my grandmother was married to Rob, my mother bad-mouthed him daily. By the time he was dead, nobody spoke his name at my grandmother’s wake. Nana had spent her last years with him, but it was as if he had never existed in her life. Nana’s funeral was well-attended with many people coming to the funeral home, the burial, and later to the church hall where each attendee had brought something to eat and a pot-luck supper was laid out for us. It was as if Rob had never existed, as if my grandmother had remained a widow until her own death. My mother had erased him for posterity, not even giving him a final resting place next to his wife. He ended up buried next to his first wife, which I can appreciate his children probably preferred, but that doesn’t undo my mother’s small-mindedness in essentially cutting him out of our family’s history like a cancer and assassinating his character from the day she found out he had booked himself and Nana into an assisted living facility when my grandmother became disabled from the stroke. He did the right thing—he was older than Nana and tethered to that oxygen bottle: he could not take care of her alone, and this way she would be comfortable with her own furnishings and possessions, but safe and professionally cared for.

But all my mother saw was the money going out of the account every month, her inheritance dwindling with each check. Better that money should go to her, but she couldn’t be satisfied with just saying “Hey, let’s put Mother back in her own home and I will take one of the guest bedrooms and be there 24/7 when you need me.” No, that would be too humble, too ordinary, lacking in NSupply—and some people might actually suspect what she was really up to. No, vilifying Rob and making him look like a decrepit version of Bluebeard gave her a plausible reason to yank Nana out of the assisted care facility, killing two birds with one stone: stopping the haemorrhage of funds that was diminishing her inheritance and covering her real motive for the move.

Smear campaigns are done for a reason. Often the reason is no more than to gain NSupply from listeners, but many times they have a much more sinister purpose behind them. I am sorry to say I did not suspect my mother’s character assassination of Rob for what it was until long afterwards. I thought it was just her nasty suspicious character in action rather than a deliberate way to discredit him in case Nana died first and she had to fight him for the estate. But through the clarity of hindsight, I can see now just what was going on, what she did it, and how well it succeeded: there is no doubt in my mind that if Nana had died before Rob, the very next day my mother would have put that little old man out on the gravel road in front of the house, a small box of possessions in one hand, his little oxygen bottle trolley in the other, and shut and locked the door.

I am sorry, Rob, that I didn’t stick up for you back then—but neither of us really knew, at that time, what she was really up to or to what lengths she would go to achieve what she wanted, which was as much of Nana’s assets as she could get her hands on. I am sorry she assassinated your character and created a bed of lies upon which she could rest a court case against you in the future, if necessary. She did the same to me, but I literally did not see what she was doing to you until it was long over—Nana has been gone more than twenty years and only today am I seeing what went down. I wish I had done more…

¹ https://www.disabled-world.com/health/dermatology/skin/bruising-limbs.php