WHEN ABUSERS DIE: ON GRIEVING PEOPLE WHO WERE ALSO WOUNDS
ESSAY SUMMARY
What happens to grief when the person who dies was also someone we had to survive?When Abusers Die: On Grieving People Who Were Also Wounds explores the complicated emotional territory that can emerge when someone who harmed, controlled, frightened, neglected, abandoned or failed us dies. Drawing on my own experiences of an abusive childhood caregiver, a coercive romantic relationship and the death of a biological father I never knew, I consider grief that does not always arrive as sorrow. Sometimes death brings relief, anger, numbness, tenderness, guilt, finality, or the resurfacing of losses that began long before the person died. The essay moves through disenfranchised grief, ambiguous and nonfinite loss, betrayal trauma and continuing bonds to ask what, exactly, we are mourning when the relationship itself was unsafe, absent or unfinished.
But this is also an essay about the stories that gather around the dead. I examine the gap between public memory and private experience, the sanitising rituals that can turn serious harm into the softer language of imperfection, and the cultural expectations that ask survivors to remain gracious, loyal, forgiving and silent. Race, gender, family mythology, faith and respectability all become part of the question: who is permitted to tell the truth about someone once they are gone? From there, the essay turns towards forgiveness, release and self-authorship, asking whether healing must end in absolution at all, and what it might mean to loosen our allegiance to an unfinished past without pretending that it never happened.
“Survivors often try to understand their abuser’s pain so deeply that they begin carrying what the other person refuses to hold for themselves. ”
EXCERPT 1
Sometimes we do not grieve the relationship we lost. We grieve the relationship we never received. Some grief is the weight of what happened. Other grief is the weight of what never did.
We grieve the protection that did not come. The sincere apology that was never offered. The ordinary tenderness that should not have been extraordinary. The parent who never learned how to parent. The partner who was never a safe haven. The conversation that never took place. The version of the person we kept hoping might one day arrive. While the person is alive, however distant or disappointing the relationship may be, some faint possibility can remain. Death turns that uncertainty into finality. Some deaths close a chapter. Others reveal the margins we were still writing in.
Pauline Boss’s concept of ambiguous loss helps us understand some of this terrain. Ambiguous loss describes loss without clear resolution, including the experience of someone who is physically absent but psychologically present, or physically present but psychologically absent (Boss, 1999). The body and mind remain caught between presence and absence. The relationship cannot be cleanly held or cleanly released.
The death of an abuser can feel like an unlatched garden gate knocking in the wind: insistent, unresolved. Elizabeth Bruce and Cynthia Schultz use the term nonfinite loss for losses that do not resolve neatly because their consequences continue over time and aspirations repeatedly collide with reality (Bruce and Schultz, 2001). Their work was not developed solely for grief after abuse, but the concept belongs here. A caregiver’s death may be finite. The loss of the childhood they failed to protect may not be. A partner’s death may be finite. The work of rebuilding self-trust after coercion may not be. A parent’s absence may begin decades before their death and continue to shape the person long after the funeral.
Not every wound discussed here is the result of overt abuse. Some are formed through abandonment, neglect, or the absence of a relationship that should have existed.
I was socially orphaned at birth, adopted at the age of four, then orphaned again when my adoptive mother died when I was eight. In my mid-thirties, I learned that my biological father had died. I had grown up without contact or a relationship with him. I cried for someone I did not know. At first, the news felt almost ordinary: a human being had died, and that was sad. But the tears came from somewhere older. I was not mourning intimacy. There had been no relationship to lose. I was mourning potential.
Could there ever have been a conversation? A reunion? A question answered? Some form of coherence? Intellectually, I knew the possibilities were faint. Emotionally, death turned uncertainty into certainty. The possible, however remote, became impossible.
“Complicated grief is not only the difficulty of what we feel. It is also the difficulty of what other people need us to feel, perform, forgive, remember and conceal.”
EXCERPT 2
The world remembered the version of him it had access to. I remembered the version I had to survive.
Other people’s positive memories did not need to be false in order for my experience to be true. A person can be kind in contained roles and unsafe in intimate ones. They can be generous elsewhere and treacherous at home. They can be publicly admired and privately feared. None of their goodness elsewhere atones for the devastation they caused in the relationship. None of their suffering obliges the survivor to soften the truth.
After his death, his sister told me that he had always spoken highly of me. She said that he had respected me deeply and held a particular love for me that he had not held for anyone else. I understood that these words were offered with fondness. But they did not resolve the contradiction. In some ways, they sharpened it.
Perhaps his admiration was genuine. But admiration is not the same as safety. Idealisation is not the same as care. A person can place someone on a symbolic pedestal while diminishing them relationally. One possible reading is that my proximity also helped him preserve a particular story about himself: if a woman like me had loved him, perhaps that became evidence that he was capable of goodness. Speaking well of me allowed him to say, implicitly, look at the kind of woman who loved me.
But being valued as a reflection of someone else’s goodness is not the same as being protected as a person in your own right. Public praise does not atone for private harm.
I think of posthumous sanitisation as the social editing of complexity after death. It is not a formal clinical term. It is a way of naming what happens when a person becomes more coherent, admirable and harmless in public memory than they ever were in private life. Funerals often require compression. A whole life becomes a carefully composed service, a solemn reading, a museum of selective memories, a sequence of flattering photographs and a polished tribute. But the sentence 'they were not perfect' can become a euphemism so spacious that serious abuse disappears inside it.
None of us is perfect. Abuse is not a minor imperfection.
“The people who wounded us do not get to take credit for who we became in the aftermath. What we created while healing belongs to us.”
EXCERPT 3
Abuse does not happen outside culture. It borrows its language.
It can hide behind family loyalty, religious respectability, the sanctification of motherhood, the instruction not to air dirty laundry, and the expectation that girls should become useful before they have been allowed to become children. In racialised communities shaped by histories of surveillance, stereotype and survival, public composure can become a complicated inheritance. Respectability may have offered forms of protection in hostile worlds. It can also become a demand for silence when the family’s image is treated as more valuable than the child’s reality.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham named the politics of respectability in her study of Black Baptist women’s activism, describing a strategy through which conduct, self-presentation and moral authority were bound up with racial advancement and public judgement (Higginbotham, 1993). The concept has a particular historical context. I do not use it to flatten Black family life into pathology. I use it to ask what happens when the pressure to appear respectable becomes stronger than the commitment to tell the truth.
The language of adultification is also useful. Research by Epstein, Blake and González found that adults surveyed viewed Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like than white girls of the same age, particularly between five and fourteen, and as needing less nurturing, protection, support and comfort (Epstein, Blake and González, 2017). My own story cannot be reduced to a single framework. But the question matters: when is a Black girl allowed to be recognised as a child in need of protection rather than treated as prematurely capable, endlessly resilient or responsible for surviving adult decisions?
I was told to leave my toys behind because I was a big girl. I worked. I studied. I became skilled at holding myself together. I completed A-levels while homeless and went on to study and graduate at university. People saw capability and missed the conditions that had demanded it.
