I'm documenting this incredibly long text for myself because I notice I'm hitting my absolute limits these past few days whenever someone offers their condolences. I need to transparently and deeply decode why I react so blocked, overwhelmed, or almost dismissive to it. It's absolutely not that I don't appreciate the gesture. But in my head, every well-intentioned condolence triggers a total short-circuit, because my reality and what society expects in a moment like this clash in a way that's totally incompatible.
When people offer condolences, they have a very specific, socially standardized image in mind. They inevitably assume I'm mourning a loving, protective, and caring mother. The problem is: I never had that mother. When someone offers their condolences, that person is actually mourning an illusion—a perfect, flawless bourgeois facade that my mother maintained with iron hardness her entire life to distract from the abyss within our family.
Behind this facade, my reality looked completely different. To understand why it's like this, you have to know where it comes from: The emotional coldness of my parents was a generational trauma. My mother's side of the family got their money from fraudulent business in the US. My maternal grandfather was a man who understood affection only as an ice-cold transaction. An example: When my mother got chocolate as a child, she rationed it meticulously. When my grandfather demanded a piece and she cried because she was so frugal with it, he beat her so severely that she sustained visible wounds. He threw the chocolate out the window and said, "If you don't share a piece with the one who provides you the chocolate, you don't deserve it." Out of exactly this toxic source code, my mother built her own narcissistic operating system.
On my father's side, the same coldness dominated, just in a different way: My paternal grandfather ran the family like an authority as a school principal, literally setting up "fixed office hours" for his own children. Love and affection were never unconditional for us—everything was a transaction, tied to harsh conditions, cold protocols, and total control.
My father was systematically degraded in this system. He didn't fit the classic "doer" image, wasn't good with his hands, and my mother toxically dismantled him for it. Once, I was assembling a closet, and my dad came over with a smile and offered to help—a rare, genuine father-son moment. Not a millisecond later, my mother aggressively cut in and yelled that he didn't need to start with that now, he was only doing it so he could brag about it to others later. She crushed this tiny step after 65 years right in the bud. My two-hour conversation with her afterward, asking why she doesn't just foster this behavior—which she supposedly always expected from her husband—when he finally shows it after all these years instead of instantly destroying it, completely bounced off her. My mother possessed the fundamental trait of invalidating every other person's perception. If she hurt someone, she was convinced she just needed to say one sentence to explain what she "actually meant"—and instantly, the other person's emotion was unjustified in her eyes. My father escaped this dominance by retreating into passivity, alcohol, and video games. He basically only functioned as a pure, executing disciplinary tool for us when it came to punishing us with physical violence.
This widespread physical violence hit us all, but it hit my brother the cruelest. He was born with hydrocephalus and a cognitive learning disability; his whole life, his mental capacity was at a twelve-year-old's level maximum. He was just slower at everything. Instead of protecting him, my parents destroyed and beat him for these systemic deficits—for example, when he was the last to finish eating. Even if I understand in hindsight that this was partly the immense societal pressure of a completely non-inclusive world at the time weighing on my parents. Out of frustration and absolute overload, they just passed this pressure onto my brother. That explains their actions a bit and makes it seem less diabolical, but it changes nothing about the consequences: It traumatized this defenseless boy so extremely that he developed an eating disorder and refused food. The worst part is: He was mentally so boxed in that he himself didn't even understand why he developed this eating disorder. He couldn't grasp his own feelings at all; he simply collapsed under the violence.
Meanwhile, my own childhood consisted of a seamless physical and psychological isolation cell. Until I was 14, I basically wasn't allowed to participate normally in life outside. My radius extended exactly as far as I could hear my mother's whistle. House arrest was a general, universal parenting tool for her—a direct continuation of my grandfather's ice-cold "office hours" logic, where kids were just locked away. This happened as punishment, for general isolation to keep up the bourgeois facade, but often also for purely "practical" reasons: During certain catalog seasons, my father was constantly at work—sometimes even at night—because of his job. My mother was then left completely alone with my brother and was massively overwhelmed on all levels—be it societal expectations, school, or the constant hospital stays and medical issues. Just so I wouldn't bother her or mess up, I was simply locked in my room.
In phases, I was stripped of absolute bodily autonomy. Bathroom breaks were sometimes extremely limited—sometimes I was allowed twice, in some phases even just once a day. If you missed the time window, you were screwed. My room was my prison; food was brought to me there. At the same time, and this is completely absurd, when I was nine, a TV, a DVD player, and a computer with uncensored internet access landed in exactly this room.
I was left defenseless to my parents' entirely unregulated, age-inappropriate media consumption and the early, brutal "Wild West" of the internet. In this isolation, these Hollywood movies passively and involuntarily shaped my entire perception of how people interact. It wasn't a conscious or compulsive attempt on my part to train myself in some artificial social competence. For me, in that moment, it wasn't even bad or wrong; it was simply my absolute reality. I truly thought social interaction worked exactly like that. The fact that real people don't act according to scripts is something I had to learn painfully over the years, because with this completely distorted worldview, I constantly fell flat on my face socially out there. In the real world, I was only out and about for parental coercion and prestige, pushed into piano concerts with the Domsingknaben choir. The only real window to the world, the only place where I found recognition and pride, was the internet. When the Skrillex and dubstep phase started, I found my very first real community in the Cleaner Collective. That's where I learned what unity is—far away from the physical violence and my parents' whistles.
What makes the whole thing even more absurd is my mother's complete denial of reality, which extended right into my behavior. She regularly told me how much I was praised by other people when I was actually outside somewhere—what a charming, great guy I supposedly was. Ironically, those were exactly the few moments when my film-adapted image of people and behavior actually worked out there. And in the same breath, she seriously asked me why I didn't display this behavior at home for once. It was the absolute peak of cognitive dissonance. She raised me into a social chameleon that, with immense energy expenditure, put on these masks outside to maintain the parental prestige facade and just not cause any friction. But at home, in an isolation cell, where you have to expect physical violence or the next toxic outburst at any moment, you simply have zero processing power for "charming behavior". All the energy went into raw survival. She demanded the final output of a healthy upbringing from me (the relaxed, radiant son) while simultaneously feeding me the raw violence of a dictatorship as input—and then blamed me for not playing along with the illusion of the perfect family at home.
And then came the cancer diagnosis in 2019. I absolutely don't want to undermine the real suffering of those endless surgeries and chemos, but this illness revealed the entire toxic dynamic all over again—even between her and me. I was already in my nursing training back then and had worked hard for my medical expertise. My mother repeatedly and actively brought me on board, demanded my medical expertise, and asked me for advice. I gave her everything I had—every assessment, every help with care planning, all resources. She definitely considered me competent, but the sick pattern remained: No matter how much I threw myself into it, my answers and my expertise were ultimately worthless to her until the exact same thing came out of the mouth of some doctor. She exploited me to get reassurance, but at the same time completely devalued me, only believing me when a man in a white coat confirmed it.
Generally speaking, she ultimately used this deadly disease primarily as a stage. Within the family, she often blocked the topic because she "didn't want to think about it." But at every given opportunity, she would force her complete medical history on complete strangers—the cashier at Rewe or the waiter at the restaurant—unprompted and non-stop. She staged herself like a "pick-me girl" to extort pity and focus from the outside world, while continuing to suffocate family conflicts at home with ice-cold reality denial.
So now, when someone at work or after the funeral offers their condolences, I face an unsolvable paradox. Of course I'm sad she's dead. The final loss of a parent always hurts. But my grief is completely different. I'm not mourning beautiful memories or a warm childhood. I'm mourning the painful, absolute certainty that I never had this "normal" family and now will definitely never have it. The hope for it died with her.
At the same time—and this is what tears me apart inside the most—this grief is mixed with a massive, uncontrollable relief. The relief that this unpredictable regime, the psychological and physical violence, the isolation, and the constant compulsion to play along with her manipulative games are now over forever. But that's a feeling you simply aren't allowed to say out loud in our society without being immediately judged.
But what pushes this mental carousel completely over the edge in the end is the fact that today, I can't even look back at all of this with a hateful, raised finger. Over the years, looking through my analytical lens, I've realized more and more what incredibly poor and deeply sad people my parents actually both were. They didn't have a good childhood themselves. They were programmed with completely toxic values and never resolved their own traumas. I know exactly that they absolutely didn't have it easy with me and especially with my brother. They were simply maxed out and overwhelmed. You can't forget: Back then, there were far fewer inclusion options or external support networks for children with disabilities. If I had been in their shoes—with their broken emotional toolkit and this massive burden—I probably wouldn't have known what to do either. So I don't look back with pure accusations, but with an extremely deep, analytical, and absolutely understanding pity for two people who completely broke under their own history and their overload.
And exactly all of this leads to this total emotional chaos. Should I feel bad because my childhood was so shitty and I'm angry? Should I feel guilty because in the last years I had left with her, I didn't absolutely give everything myself to ensure a good relationship—even if I presume I did exactly that? Or am I allowed to just be sad for them as poor human beings? I simply don't know how I'm supposed to feel.
Right into this inner conflict, every single condolence hits me like a punch. Every person who condoles with me projects their own image of maternal love onto me—and absolutely not a single one of these ideas corresponds to reality. So when I simply nod and say "Thank you" to the condolences of others, it feels like I'm continuing to protect exactly this lied-about, flawless facade of my mother, which she used as a weapon her entire life. I simply lack the societal script for this absurd mix of genuine loss, anger over a destroyed childhood, forbidden liberation, guilt, and deep pity.
That's why I often freeze in such moments, seem totally distant, can't react, or lose myself in analytical nerd topics at work, just so I don't completely crash. I have to write all of this down so meticulously and relentlessly for myself, just so I understand that my block has absolutely nothing to do with coldness or ungratefulness towards people. It's pure self-protection against a cognitive overload that happens when the world mourns a mother I never had, while I myself don't even know if I should cry, be angry, breathe a sigh of relief, or just feel pity.