I fled the house of horror and the pain came with me
We didn’t have a home waiting for us in Ohio. Just a hotel room, a few suitcases, some houseplants, a cooler, and the stunned silence of everything we had just fled.
We hadn’t planned to leave Florida like that—abruptly, desperately. But when your soul starts suffocating, you don’t wait for a polite exit. You run. You flee. And that’s exactly what we did.
I was rapidly falling inward at this point. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just crossed a threshold through a one-way door into something vast and cold and dark.
The days that followed didn’t feel like safety. They felt like a barren aftermath.
Everything felt muted and distorted, like I was walking underwater.
We checked into a hotel in our hometown. I remember the patterned carpet, the heavy blackout curtains, the muffled hum of the heating unit against the Ohio February cold, and the cozy, fluffy-white bedding.
My wounded self needed that safe, fluffy, white bed. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, too numb to cry and too tired to think.
I remember wondering how the rest of the world outside those hotel walls could keep moving. How people could be ordering pizza or scrolling social media or going to work when I had just left my sick dad behind and walked out of the version of reality I had clung to my whole life.
I was numb, detached, and so empty on the inside. I was so far gone I didn’t know what day it was.
I moved through those first days in Ohio like someone who had survived an explosion. I was out of the toxic Florida house, but still hearing the blast echo inside me.
Our adult children came to visit us that week because they wanted to welcome us home, but I had no idea how to let them in.
Because how do you look at your adult kids and say: I just left your sick grandfather in the hands of a woman who spent decades psychologically and emotionally torturing both of us. I’m grieving the mother I never had and the daughter I tried so hard to be. I feel like I’m dying inside. Oh, and by the way, this is the same deranged woman I let babysit you when you were little.
You don’t! I couldn’t.
Instead, I smiled. Asked if they wanted to get dinner. Laughed too loudly. Made light conversation. Talked about our road trip home and time in Savannah. Kept it moving just like I’ve done my entire life.
I wanted to protect them in a way I had never been protected.
I didn’t want them to see the monster that raised me for the monster she really was and I didn’t want to color their world with the horror of mine.
So I performed my own version of normal, even as I felt myself breaking inside.
Through it all, my husband was my anchor. He watched me unravel without flinching and without looking away. Every time I felt like I might not make it through another wave of grief or guilt or panic, he was there—steady, soft-spoken, and endlessly patient.
This experience took something from him, too. But he never made it about him. His only concern was me. He protected my peace when I couldn’t find any. He reminded me who I was when I couldn’t see myself. He held me through the worst nights of my life and somehow never let me feel like I was too much.
I don’t know how I would’ve made it through this time without the safety of his love. He was my harbor when I couldn’t stand on my own feet.
Later, during a channeling session with my soul, it was revealed that he incarnated as my anchor point in this lifetime. You’ll read more about that in one of a channeling session.
We found a lovely apartment a week later. Signed the lease, moved in, and I bought some art for the apartment’s new walls and some new wine glasses.
From the outside, we were home. But inside, I wasn’t anywhere. I was nowhere. I was still in that godforsaken toxic Florida house.
Still walking on eggshells. Still scanning the air for her next outburst. Still flinching at sounds that reminded me of her footsteps shuffling with her metal walker on that ugly, fake wood floor in their Florida house.
Still feeling intense despair from leaving my dad alone and unprotected with her.
Freedom doesn’t come all at once. Sometimes, it comes through the tiny cracks. Painfully. Quietly. Uncertainly.
I was in that liminal space now—not hers anymore, but not yet mine either.
Unfortunately, moving into our apartment in Ohio didn’t bring peace. The pain just changed zip codes.
I experienced some of the darkest, most disorienting days of my life.
I was hollow and turned very inward, crushed by the weight of everything I experienced and by what I couldn’t yet name.
I was trying to settle into our new apartment by unpacking boxes and organizing a life we had fled to virtually overnight (organizing is soothing for me).
But, I had to show up as a wife, a mother, a functioning human being. Our youngest was living with us for her final year of college. She still needed laughter, a sense of normalcy, home cooked meals, support during the semester. And I gave what I could.
But behind the closed door of my safe bedroom, I completely lost it.
I spent as much time as I could in bed, staring at the ceiling, sobbing in waves that felt too big for my body.
I missed events because I couldn’t pull myself together. I felt like I failed my dad by leaving him behind. I felt like I failed myself by not seeing it sooner. I felt like a ghost in my own body—worthless, powerless, and so very lost.
There was no map for this kind of pain. No one tells you what it’s like to grieve someone who’s still alive or how much it hurts to sever a bond that was made of a poison you couldn’t detect.
This wasn’t depression. It was something else entirely. It was The Hollow Passage, a space I named years later after I finally began to climb out of it. Because I needed language for the place where I almost disappeared.
And now, I use that name so no one else has to walk through it unnamed.
My mother died, then the guilt and fear came flooding in
She died six months after we fled Florida. I didn’t see it coming. We weren’t in touch because I had gone completely no-contact the day we backed out of her driveway. No text. No call. No birthday card. Just silence between us, which somehow felt inexplicably painful and confusing (no one talks about how painful and confusing no-contact can be).
And then came the final-goodbye call.
My mother was in the hospital, barely conscious and not stable. My bullying sibling, whose role in our family of origin was the golden child, was arranging a group video call so everyone could say their farewells.
I didn’t know how to feel. I was terrified, yet I was relieved. Terrified of her power. Relieved that maybe, just maybe, it was about to permanently end.
I chose not to turn my camera on during the call. There was no way in hell I wanted her to see me. I knew she’d be livid that I hadn’t communicated with her for the last six months. I hated her for what I had witnessed her do to my dad and my dog and me. And yet I was still scared of her. I didn’t trust her.
Even in her final hours, I was afraid of what she might say—how she might use her last moments to humiliate or shame me in front of everyone.
I gripped my iPhone tightly, standing in my bedroom, my heart racing.
And then her image appeared on the screen.
Her face filled the frame, disoriented and frail. The oxygen mask she kept trying to take off covered her mouth. Her eyes were heavy, glassy, and swimming in pools of confusion.
I stared at my iPhone, my body frozen and my breath shallow because for the first time in my life she couldn’t hurt me!
Not with words. Not with silence. Not with that venomous sneer I had studied for decades. I took a screenshot for proof because I needed proof.
It was one of the most surreal moments of my life.
She wasn’t in control.
She couldn’t glare.
She couldn’t spit venom.
She couldn’t launch her casual, cutting remarks that always hurt while everyone else just acted normal.
She couldn’t be who she really was.
It was the strangest experience!
Because when you’re used to being shamed without a word and when your body has spent a lifetime bracing for tone, for eyebrows, for sighs, for impact—seeing her powerless wasn’t just strange.
It was fucked up.
It was freeing.
It was terrifying.
It made me realize just how relentless and consistently cruel she had been. And just how much I had shaped my entire nervous system around surviving her.
Everyone else chatted casually while waiting for more people to join the call. They laughed and filled the silence with small talk.
They didn’t know what I knew.
They didn’t feel what I felt.
Only my dad and I lived in the warzone. Only we knew the brutality of her life. Only we knew how much worse she got in her final years.
My aunts and uncles and cousins and sibling might’ve known her character, might’ve seen glimpses of her edge, but they had zero fucking clue what life was like under her abusive rule!
I wanted to scream into the phone: “Why are you all so casually cheerful!!! Don’t you know what she’s done!!! Don’t you see how deeply she’s damaged us!!!”
But I stayed silent.
Camera off.
Mute button on.
Invisible. Just like I tried to be my whole life.
When it was my dad’s turn to speak, he simply said, “I’m sorry you’re in the hospital. Keep your oxygen mask on.”
That was it. No I love you. No tearful goodbye.
And I didn’t blame him one bit! She made his life a living hell!
She told him to kill himself more than once!
She withheld food and water!
She refused him medical care!
She used her vile words and her fists when he was too sick to defend himself!
And now here she was, fading and silent, no longer in control.
The next morning, at 10:38am, I logged into the hospital camera feed from my home 1,000 miles away.
This time, the camera was perched further back. She was lying on her back, motionless, head tilted to the right, facing the camera.
The oxygen mask had been removed. Her mouth hung open, jaw slack. Her eyes were shut.
Her body lay still beneath the hospital bed’s stiff white sheets.
I watched her take nine irregular breaths in 60 seconds.
At 11:11am, I watched her take her final breath.
Intense RELIEF flooded my mind, body, and soul.
And that relief revealed the depth of her abuse.
As I watched her slip into death from a thousand miles away, something unexpected yet familiar quickly rose up in me: compassion.
Not for the mother she had been to me, but for the soul beneath all the cruelty.
The one buried beneath 77 years of bitterness, rage, and pain.
The one who never knew safety or softness, peace or love.
And so I did what came naturally to the part of me she could never touch—I quietly and genuinely prayed.
I asked God to show her unconditional love, joy, happiness, delight, and all the wonderful things she fought against and pushed away her entire angry, miserable, rage-filled life here on earth.
Because no matter what she had done to me and my dad, somewhere deep inside me I still wanted her to be free.
I took another screenshot of her lying dead in that hospital bed.
It might sound morbid, but I needed more proof.
Proof that it was real.
That she was dead.
That it was finally, actually over.
Proof that the monster who haunted every cell of my being was gone.
That she couldn’t claw her way back through a phone call or a text.
That she couldn’t hurt me or my dad anymore.
I sat there, numb, staring at the photo on my iPhone.
Her mouth—the same one that had purposefully spat cruelty and venom for decades—was finally and permanently quiet.
Her eyes—the same ones that pierced through me—were closed for good.
And for the first time in my entire life, I felt it: relief, freedom, and stillness.
But they didn’t last long because the fear came rushing back in. What if she could still hurt me from the other side? What if death wasn’t enough to sever her grip on me? I panicked because I felt like I had nowhere to hide!
I asked my new therapist if she could hurt me from the grave. She assured me I was safe. I wanted to believe her, but my nervous system didn’t. Not yet. My body was still flinching, still anticipating, and still bracing for the next explosion.
It’s a strange thing to feel liberated and still flinch.
I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
For something in my life to fall apart as punishment for breaking away because I had spent a lifetime anticipating her cruelty.
But, even dead, her presence lingered.
Not because she haunted me from the other side, but because the imprint of her had woven itself so deeply and tightly into the fabric of my being.
That’s what no one tells you.
Sometimes, the relief is real, but it’s not clean.
You don’t just walk away from a maternal war zone and feel peace. You carry the war inside you until something helps you put down the weapons and turn off your responses to her screaming and abuse.
She may have died, but the war was still raging inside me.
And it would take a lot of time—sacred, slow, spiritual time—to silence it.
A grief that looked nothing like grief
I didn’t cry for her.
I cried for me.
And I cried for the life my mom could’ve had—the life I tried so hard to get her to embrace.
I cried for the child in me who never had a soft place to land.
For the decades I spent trying to decode her moods, tiptoe around her fury, contort myself into someone more likable, more obedient, more invisible, more worshipping, all while trying to maintain status quo and act like everything was OK.
My grief wasn’t a clean picture of sadness. It was a jumbled mess of fury, confusion, emptiness, and odd moments of misplaced longing. I didn’t long for her, though; rather, I longed for the idea of the mother I hoped for, I imagined, and I begged God for.
For a while, my mind actually tried to give Nice Mom to me. I went through a phase where I began imagining her differently: softer, warmer, more maternal. Not because she had changed and certainly not because she deserved it, but because I couldn’t yet face the full weight of what I actually lived through, what I survived.
My therapist gently explained that this, too, was a trauma response. A coping mechanism to soften the unbearable truth that she was never going to be the mother I needed and so desperately wanted. I wasn’t grieving a person at that point. I was grieving a fantasy. The fantasy of being mothered in a loving, kind, grace-filled way.
And all the while, I couldn’t even talk to our adult children about their grandmother’s death. I was too fucked up to offer comfort and too hollow to show up.
I was too raw to explain the full story of what had happened over the past year—the way the truth whispered first, then screamed. I couldn’t soothe them because I was reeling and trying to breathe and trying to survive the brutality of what it felt like to finally know the truth about my mother.
My oldest daughter accused me of being a narcissist. She said I made her grandmother’s death all about me. That didn’t just hurt—it poured salt into a wound that was already bleeding out beneath the surface.
Because if they had known—if anyone had truly known—what it took just to keep breathing, what it cost me to survive her, then lose her, then not fall apart completely—they’d understand this grief had nothing to do with making it about me.
Yet, it was about me. It always fucking was because for over fifty years it was never allowed to be about me. Not my feelings. Not my fear. Not my grief. Not my needs.
I spent a lifetime being erased in the name of keeping the peace, walking on eggshells, silencing myself, worshipping her, making sure her moods were okay while mine didn’t matter.
So, I had collapsed under the weight of what I had endured, then I heard someone say I was making it all about me—it ignited something very deep and anguished.
Because this wasn’t about performance or pity.
It was about survival.
This was my nervous system. My trauma. My bare wounds.
And I have every right to say that out loud.
I wasn’t trying to be seen.
I was finally refusing to be invisible.
I understand my daughter was hurting with her own grief, but I couldn’t fully comfort her because I was barely surviving.
So, instead of compassion, I got accusations.
As if I hadn’t just crawled through the wreckage of the most psychologically and emotionally abusive year of my life.
As if I hadn’t just left behind the only person in that Florida house who ever felt safe—my dad—the one who never raised his voice, never hurt me, the one soft place I had. It changed me!
As if I hadn’t spent months holding in my screams so no one else would feel responsible for them.
And hearing her say she could barely tolerate me just twisted the jagged knife deeper.
No, it did more than that. It shoved me down when I was already on the floor.
I was at the lowest point of my life and she kicked me further.
If the important people in my life knew how many times I swallowed my pain to protect everyone else.
How many nights I wept in silence so no one would feel burdened by me.
How deeply I was unraveling while pretending to be OK.
Maybe then they’d understand that I wasn’t trying to make it about me.
I didn’t want attention. I wanted to disappear.
And, I almost did.
Disclaimer: This is my story, not my adult daughter’s. I’m sharing what I lived through from the inside out as I tried to survive the darkest season of my life. I know she had her own experience of grief and I understand she was hurting. I believe now, with the clarity that only time, healing, and spiritual perspective can bring, that her reaction was part of our pre-birth plan. A soul-level agreement to push me deeper inward to pry me open in a way only she could so I could finally break the karmic cycle. This doesn’t mean the pain was easy. It means I’m finally seeing its purpose.