The Midults: My two adult daughters have cut me off

Dear A&E,

Following an acrimonious separation and divorce three years ago, my two adult daughters have cut me off and are effectively estranged from me. They are very upset about the family breakup which has hit them harder because we also lost our youngest child to cancer a few years before.

My ex-wife leans on them heavily for emotional support and they mistakenly feel they cannot have a relationship with me without being disloyal to her. Should I just be patient and hope time will heal or is there anything proactive I can do to win them back?

– Devastated

Dear Devastated,

We want to express how incredibly sorry we are for your loss. Every grief counsellor we have ever spoken to – anyone who has sat at the coal face of grief and listened to the shattering of hearts – has agreed that the death of a child is the most brutal of all. It’s an unimaginably hard thing to go through and our hearts go out to you.

Perhaps it might be most helpful to try and imagine, if we can, this as a problem in two parts, even though loss seeps horribly into your story at every turn. So bear with us while we focus on you, painfully for a second. It may feel harsh, given what has happened to you, to ask you to look at your part in the break-up of your marriage.

Statistics vary but again there is a broad consensus that relationships often crack under the pressure of such devastation, so you are not alone in this. But we do not know the circumstances around your split: we do not know your role in it or her side of the story.

We haven’t witnessed all the misunderstandings, miscommunications, false starts, false hopes; all the everyday, domestic awfulness that leads to an ending. However, whatever the truth, if your daughters and ex-wife are a unit, supporting each other, we would suggest that you don’t become a lone wolf, calcifying in your grief and your confusion. We would really, REALLY, recommend that you have grief counselling or find a grief group, because trying to do this alone feels too cruel.

Whatever has happened in the years since your child died, you need a tool-box for the future. You need an opportunity to understand, and to grow. And probably to acknowledge that in this most delicate and heartbreaking of situations, you lost one child and now you feel as if you’ve lost all of them.

As we said, loss suffuses this problem and your daughters will be grieving on multiple fronts: the loss of their family unit, their sibling, their father. We think you need to remind them that they are not fatherless. Despite the estrangement you can do something to let them know that you are there, even if you are not in their lives right now.

We spoke to Cariad Lloyd, author of the remarkable You Are Not Alone (which is based on the equally remarkable Griefcast podcast, where she listened to fellow grievers share their stories) about your story. Lloyd says that for all of you, the grief will still be very raw and you will need to be patient. To your daughters she suggests sending “a letter to each of them, explaining that you love them very deeply.

That what happened to them all as a family is something they will spend the rest of their life trying to process, and learn to carry; and when they are ready to talk to you, you would love a conversation where you give space to how they are feeling.” Lloyd, with her hard-earned wisdom, thinks that grief is something that cannot be rushed and that your daughters “need to know you are there for the long haul and not looking for an immediate fix (for your benefit not theirs).”

We cannot pretend to imagine how it must feel for you to have lost all these roles in your life. In the space of a few years you have gone from family man, to grieving father to divorcé, to estranged parent. Perhaps you do not feel as if you deserve to recover, or you feel that you will only recover if you have revived your daughters’ faith in you.

But we think that probably you need to take responsibility for your own emotional rehabilitation, and not feel that this is selfish or indulgent given what you have all been through. If and when your daughters decide that they do want you back in their lives, you can be ready with an open-heart to listen to their pain, and an apology that isn’t followed by a litany of excuses, but instead seeks to speak to their hurt. There is, and has been so much hurt, dear Devastated, and, lonely as it might feel, you may need to let the healing begin with you.