My step-father spent the majority of my teenage years systematically raping me and making me keep quiet about it with horrendous threats It was only I only once I was in my 20s that I learnt that he couldn't have used his lies against me.
I did pluck up the courage to tell my mother when I was approx 17 what was happening, and she blatantly denied that he would ever do such a thing, labelling me a liar in the process, so, I feel that she enabled him by allowing the situation to continue for a further approx 18 months.
If we were both in a room at the same time as someone else, he treated me with hatred/contempt, constantly throwing insultss@!!!, etc, but as soon as he knew that I was in the house alone, that was when the attacks would happen. I tried, desperately, to avoid being in the house when there was no-one else there, but it wasn't always passible.i eventually found a way to escape his rules and abuse when I was 19.
Fast forward to approx 5 years ago, after I'd intentionally had very little to no contact with my mother for several years, and she wrote me a letter, saying that my abuser (my word, definitely not hers) had died a couple of months previously, with dementia and bowel cancer, and that she hadn't informed me at the time because she 'knew that I wouldn't care or be interested in his passing'.
That was the day that I felt as though a massive weight had been lifted from my shoulders, I then knew that he couldn't ever hurt or threaten anyone ever again. My relief was palpable.
I do still bear a massive grudge against my mother and have spoken to her literally 3 times since receiving that letter, twice, accidentally, (she called me by mistake instead of someone else with the same first name), the other time, i listened to her explaining about some of the things her husband had done as a result of the dementia. As you can probably imagine, I was secretly smiling to myself about a) him being struck with dementia (which I would never wish on anyone, except him and probably my mother), b) the pain and suffering she was subjected to as a result of this (karma), and c) the fact that the doctors said that it wasn't worth operating on his bowel cancer because he would need a stoma, and the dementia meant that he likely wouldn't understand why it was needed, and would probably 'mess about with it', and cause my mother even more messy, unwanted work, so they left him for the cancer to overtake him and eventually become his cause of death.
Now that he's dead and gone, I await my mother's demise. I know my sibling will inform me, but there will be no grief, I won't attend the funeral, and I'm fairly certain that I will feel relief again.
As a previous poster said, they had already mourned the lack of the decent, caring mother they had never had, and I feel exactly the same way.
So call me nasty, uncaring or any other word you can think of, but the removal of these two 'monsters' from my life hasn't been/won't be reason for me to mourn, but the release I've waited for for over 40 years.