Our son cut off contact with my wife and me about four years ago. After he started therapy, he suddenly started talking about his childhood in a way that we couldn’t understand. He said we had been emotionally abusive and eventually said that he needed to “go no contact” for his mental health. He also didn’t allow us to see his children, our grandchildren, to whom we were very close — especially my wife. I was very angry and my wife was heartbroken. Maybe there’s more we could have done, but we truly felt we tried everything to heal the distance between us. He has struggled with depression for years, and before he ended contact, we helped pay for his therapy and medication.
Tragically, my wife died suddenly from a heart condition. The funeral is next week and he wants to come. Given everything he put her through, I don’t want him there. I don’t think he deserves to be there. My sister says, “family is family,” but I’m not so sure about that.
I can understand why you would hesitate to have your son at the funeral. His decision to cut off contact was deeply painful for you and devastating for your wife. You may believe that he forfeited his right to stand at her graveside, and you might worry about how his presence will affect you, other mourners or the emotional tenor of the day.
As a way to help you make the best decision, let’s start with your son’s perspective: He believed that you and your wife were emotionally abusive in his childhood. As painful or baffling as that description may have been to you, raising those concerns was probably an attempt to deepen his relationship with you and his mother, or at least to make sense about something in his life he was trying to better understand and master.
As a psychologist who specializes in family estrangements, I often find that cutoffs can result from a parent’s difficulty or inability to address the child’s report in a way that causes them to feel seen or heard. That doesn’t mean the report is accurate — only that it is meaningful to the child and has to be taken seriously.
While I never know for certain who will reconcile or when, one study suggests that the majority of estrangements aren’t permanent. In my practice, I hear some estranged adult children say that they plan to eventually reconcile with a parent, even if they have no clear idea when. For those sons and daughters, a parent’s death can be profoundly destabilizing. It brings not only grief, but also guilt: the sense that they waited too long or missed a chance for repair. Although the estrangement feels final to you, it may not feel that way to your son.
Your son’s long history of depression may also help explain his decision. Depression can make facing conflict with one’s parents intolerable. It can sap someone’s ability to initiate difficult conversations, acknowledge harm, or hear a parent’s opinions without feeling overwhelmed themselves.
You — like most estranged parents — are understandably confused about why a conflict with you needed to also mean an end to contact with your grandchildren. While every family is different, some estranged adult children fear their children will want more time or closeness with a grandparent than they themselves can manage. Others may think that estrangement is a way to set limits on the parent’s challenging behavior, which nullifies the parent’s right to contact with the grandchildren. For these and other reasons, grandchildren often become casualties of a parent-grandparent estrangement.
As I often hear, losing access to grandchildren is as painful — or even more painful — than losing contact with your own child. You’re left wondering: “Do the grandchildren think we abandoned them? What were they told? How do they make sense of our sudden disappearance? What if we never get to see them ever again?”
What refusing him might mean
Funerals often have significant meaning for family members. Making the right decision about the funeral may determine your future relationship with not only your son, but also your grandchildren. Just as refusing to let a parent attend a wedding leaves a permanent mark on the parent, refusing to let a child attend a parent’s funeral does, too. If you have any hope for a reconciliation — even distant, hypothetical — telling him he can’t come makes that far less possible.
It’s important to name something else: He’s still your son, and your wife was still his mother. The parent — child relationship continues to shape us long after one party has died.
What would your wife have wanted?
Finally, what do you believe your wife would have wanted? Would she have wanted her son barred from saying goodbye? Would she have wanted her funeral to be an opportunity for healing, even symbolic, or would she have wanted the estrangement itself to be his final message? Maybe she would’ve also recognized that it could provide a potential pathway to reconciliation between you and the grandchildren.
Only you can answer that, but her wishes deserve space in your decision.
Taking the high road
Parents and children are both limited, imperfect and shaped by forces we don’t always understand. In the same way that our parents can’t always be who we need them to be, our children can’t always be who we wish they could be. You feel rejected and angry — and understandably so. But you are still the parent.
From my perspective, taking the high road here is both the more compassionate choice and the one most likely to serve you in the long run. Allowing him to attend isn’t an endorsement of his choices — it’s an expression of yours. It’s a way of saying that even in the hardest moments, you are guided by a steadier compass than the hurt that brought you here.
Joshua Coleman, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in the Bay Area, keynote speaker and senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. His newest book is “Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict.” His Substack is Family Troubles.
If you have a question for a therapist about mental health, relationships, sleep, dating or any other topic, email it to [email protected], and we may feature it in a future column.
The post My estranged son wants to attend my wife’s funeral. Can I tell him ‘no’? appeared first on Washington Post.
