When officers told me my estranged mother had been living in her car outside my house, it reopened wounds I thought were long buried. She had left when I was eleven, and my father had rebuilt our lives alone. Seeing her weakened by illness and asking to spend her final days “in the home she raised me in” struck a painful chord, because that home belonged to my father’s sacrifice, not hers. Still, I couldn’t let her sleep in a car, and as her cancer progressed, I found myself helping in small ways. The anger stayed, but the sharpness slowly faded as she spoke honestly about her regrets and the damage she couldn’t undo.
Continues…
