Where does the anger go?

I just finished reading Caring for Mother: A Daughter's Long Goodbye by Virginia Stem Owens which is the chronicle of her mother's final seven years of life. The fear, the denial, the guilt, the anger, the doubt, the frustration of her experience in shouldering the responsibility for her mother are all too familiar. As I read, I realized how tremendously helpful it has been to have been in analysis during this time to make sense of the widely conflicted, ambivalent and intense emotions that come to the surface as I watch my mother slowly dying.

So where does the anger go? Physical malfunction is common. Owens develops serious glaucoma around the same time her mother's Parkinson's is diagnosed. Metaphorically she might not have wanted to see what was ahead. Constipation is common ie holding on. Constipation often results in headaches (a big pain). Anger may also manifest itself in skin eruptions, irritations one might say.

Anger is sometimes projected. After placing her mother in a nursing home, Owens talks about the rage of the residents there of which she becomes aware every time she enters the building. It could well be that she attributes her own rage to them. This rage is also mixed up with her guilt about having to put her mother there. I can relate to that. In the past, my mother let me know many times that if she needed to be put into a nursing home, we had her blessing . Still it was not something she wanted at the time. She felt able to return to her apartment when there was no way she could. Her inability to help make the nursing home decision when the time came was never factored in. And inevitably there are those people, like the "helpful" cleaning lady at the hospital, who let it be known that it was such a privilege to bring her dying mother into her own home.

One of my ways of handling anger is displacement. For example it is safe for me to displace my anger on to the "helpful" cleaning lady and maybe for her on to me. Perhaps she couldn't afford to place her mother in the hospital's nursing unit. The "privilege" of caring for mom in her home may have been foisted on her by economic reality.

Recently in conversation with TA, I complained that I was angry that I couldn't get the hubster to travel with me and that I didn't want to travel alone. Later it dawned on me that it wasn't traveling without the hubster that was making me angry. He is a great traveling companion and I do sincerely wish he'd break free from work and join me, but this traveling alone had to do with Mother. She has traveled with me for 58 years and soon I will have to go on without her. Grief and anger all rolled up together in that one.

The more complex the mind, the more complex the defenses.