A Long, Slow Dance Of Death

by ComputerBob

April 25, 2008

It's always a sad day for me when a close relationship ends. Today is one of those days. At least I've been through it enough times that I saw it coming over a year ago, so I was prepared for it.

Sometimes I meet someone who really, really needs my help. I do my best to help them, but over time, I also try to help them grow to the point where they no longer need my help. Over the years, I'm very happy to have successfully accomplished both of those tasks with several different people. "Teach a man to fish..." and all that.

But every once in awhile, I fail miserably at the second task. I choose to help or mentor someone who turns out to be so needy, so damaged by life — and so "carved in stone" — that even after a few years, they're still extremely dependent on me. In fact, that type of person often becomes even more dependent on me over time. Maybe it's some sort of coping mechanism to help them feel better about themselves, but the longer I help them, the more they make almost constant demands (yes, demands) on my time, energy and resources, while employing some sort of mental jujitsu to convince themselves that they're doing it all on their own. They convince themselves that they're getting better, stronger and more independent, but the only thing that's changed is that they've simply stopped being grateful for my help and instead take both it and me for granted. In fact, that type of person often bitterly resents me for not helping them even more than I do. At that point, any effort on my part to encourage them to do things on their own causes them to angrily accuse me of "abandoning" them "just when I need you" — a manipulative guilting tactic that I instantly recognize from my past. It's like they have an irreparable hole in their "trust bucket" — no matter how much I've done to help them in the past, none of it counts for anything unless I'm willing to help them again today, with whatever little thing they think they need help with, but which I know they're perfectly capable of doing without my help. And I know that if I help them today, they won't remember any of my efforts tomorrow, when their next need comes along. But I have always had a soft spot in my heart for people who are in trouble, and — as anyone who's read my other articles in this site's DV Information section knows — it takes a awful lot of abuse to make me finally give up on people who I care about, even if it's obvious that they don't care about me. So even when their polite requests turn into expectations, and then those expectations turn into demands, and then those demands become more and more frequent and insistent, I have always tended to put up with that behavior without complaining, hoping against hope that I can help them learn to stop being such a black hole of emotional need.

In other words, even though I may have helped someone do hundreds of big and small tasks, answered hundreds of their phone calls at all hours of the day and night, and given them tons of solicited advice and information on a myriad of subjects over a period of several years, while expecting (and getting) nearly nothing in return, sometimes all they ever care about is "What have you done for me today?" When I finally come to that realization about someone, I end up with a hollow feeling that all of my time and effort to help them has been a big waste — I've been a good-intentioned fool who has allowed himself to be used by a selfish manipulator. Not only have I failed to help them be a better person, I've unintentionally enabled and encouraged their destructive, self-centered behavior.

On the phone this morning, one of those one-sided relationships reached that volatile, "you're abandoning me" phase for the third or fourth time in the past year. I'm talking about an elderly widow who lives an hour away from me. During the past four years, I have driven to her home at least 250 times, and have stayed at her home overnight countless times, while working on long-term projects for her. I spent five months helping her care for her husband 24 hours a day before he died of cancer in 2005. Since then, I've sorted through all of her husband's paperwork, given her advice on countless legal, financial and personal matters, worked on both of her houses, helped her learn to use her computer, done her taxes, showed her how to work her VCR, fixed her cars several times, trimmed the branches of her trees, helped her buy appliances, taken her pets (who I dearly love and really care about) to the vet, put up fences in both of her yards, helped her deal with troublesome neighbors and relatives, helped her buy a cell phone, helped her sell one of her cars, helped her sell her rental house, researched, explained and helped her set up a revokable trust that will save her heirs at least $26,000 in probate fees when she dies, gone with her to the bank when she opened, closed and transferred money into her various accounts, so that they wouldn't cheat her, and done hundreds and hundreds of other important and unimportant things, including — at her insistence — calling her long-distance every morning, to make sure that she hasn't "fallen and can't get up." In the past, when she's been angry with me for not helping her enough, I've allowed her to say everything that she wanted to say, and then I've tried to figure out, along with her, why she feels that way — without telling her how much her words have hurt me. Several of those times, I discovered that she was angry and jealous because I had spent some time helping someone else instead of her. This time, just like the others, she threw everything she could think of at me, trying to hurt me as much as possible, to "guilt me" into continuing to enable her dependent behavior. "I'm all alone! I have no one! I thought you cared about me! Boy was I wrong! You sure had me fooled! You're not the nice guy that I thought you were!" (Even though I know that it's not true, that one really stung, especially coming from someone who said that she thought of me like a son.) I silently listened to her rants, responding only with "I understand" for quite awhile. Finally, she stopped, and I had an opportunity to speak. But after my first four or five words, she immediately interrupted me with more angry accusations that I wasn't helping her as much as she needed me to. So I silently listened again. When she finished, I tried to speak again. Again, she interrupted me in mid-sentence. That sequence repeated for what felt like an hour (so it was probably about 5 minutes).

As she went on and on about how she was disappointed in me, I thought about the thousands of times that I've willingly put her needs ahead of my own needs. And how I've bitten my tongue hundreds of times when she's said hurtful and even abusive things to me — how I've repeatedly walked on eggshells to keep myself from expressing even the slightest disagreement with her about anything, having learned from hard experience that any such mistake would spark her tinder-box of emotions, instantly provoking her white-hot wrath at me for "not supporting" her. I had even remained silent when she had bitterly complained several times this past year that she thought that I haven't helped her as much as I used to since I had my stroke. In the combination of those memories and her current onslaught of verbal abuse, I heard the last few chords of our relationship's long, slow dance of death. So, with a great deal of sadness and an overwhelming sense of tragic finality — as though I were closing the casket on a woman who was still alive — I finally did what I've thought about doing many times in the past, and probably should have done several months ago: I waited for her to pause, and then I said, "If that's how you feel after everything I've done for you over the past four years, then there's really nothing left for us to talk about." Then I said "goodbye" and quietly hung up the phone.

I know her well enough to know that I'm probably out of her life forever. During the past four years, she told me countless stories of how she banished many, many of her friends and relatives (and even her children) in the past, for offenses far less serious than my unforgivable sin of "abandoning" her. I know that all of the good that I did for her over the past four years has already been completely obliterated from her mind. My portrait has taken its place in her cold, dark, dusty mental gallery of former relationships, hanging on her "wall of shame" with all of the others, illuminated only by twin piercing spotlights of anger and bitterness.

Like I said, this kind of thing has happened to me before. But this time, I think I've finally learned my lesson. In the future, if I start to help someone, and I notice that they have very few friends, and they treat the few friends that they have very badly, then I'll know that, eventually, they're going to treat me that same way if I let them. No matter how hard I work to try to help them, there will always be people that I just can't help.

I have mixed feelings about how things turned out today. On the one hand, I'm glad that I already feel a lot less stressed out, knowing that she is no longer going to be constantly trying to turn all of her many, many problems into my problems. But at the same time, I grieve the loss of the tiny parts of our relationship that were good and true and honest and fulfilling and hopeful. And I'm really, really going to miss her pets, especially Gina, the Boston Terrier who I loved like she was my own dog.

So this is a very sad day for me.

You see, the woman that I've described here isn't some stranger that I met on the street. She's my aunt, the wife of my beloved Uncle Dom.