Supporting sick dad

[SlothIsma]

My dad has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. No idea yet how bad it is. I'm really struggling with how to navigate the situation as we don't have a close relationship and can't help but feel uncaring.

Background is that growing up he really wasn't great. Very 1950's set up (despite being in the 80s), he thought his job was to bring in income and left everything else to my mum. He always belittled her, lots of shouting, eventually openly cheated on her.

I now realise he was a textbook narcissist, but I think at the core it was driven by low self esteem.

Despite all that I think he fundamentally does love us, and our relationship in adulthood has been OK. We just barely ever speak as we have nothing in common.

He's spent his whole life going to doctors and bigging up minor health issues as he just loves attention, so I got used to ignoring most of it, but this time it sounds like it really is something.

And now I just have no idea what to say or how to act.

It doesn't help that we lost my mum to cancer so the situation is really triggering all round.

Any advice?

I would maintain your distance, both physical and mental here. He’s not going to suddenly become a nicer person because he now has prostate cancer. He has not changed: he was once young and abusive and now he is old and abusive. Such people never apologise nor accept any responsibility for their actions.

How can you state your relationship in adulthood has been ok though when you go onto write you barely speak and have nothing in common. You cannot make a silk
purse out of a sows ear.

You will need to grieve for the relationship you should have had rather than the one you actually got.

Thanks @AttilaTheMeerkat I do realise writing it down makes him sound awful.

And you make a good point, by "OK relationship " I just mean I don't hate him anymore, which is hardly an OK relationship indeed. I regularly receive monologues from him containing every detail of his latest ailment but never a question about me.

I've always been irritated as my mum really went through it and never complained, meanwhile he always made mountains out of molehills so my sympathy levels are so low. And now he's actually ill I feel like there is something wrong with me for not feeling sympathy.

I just can't help but give him the benefit of the doubt and feel like he doesn't mean to be that way. I think it's low self esteem, potentially some depression thrown in.

He has had pockets of stepping up, he could never provide love or emotional support but was pretty good when financial or practical support was needed, so I guess that was his way of showing he cared.

Such a hard situation to navigate

It is not possible to have a relationship with a narcissist and besides which he was abusive to your mother and in turn you in childhood. He now potentially having cancer does not make him a nicer person.

Its not your fault he is like this and you did not make him that way either. His own family did that. But he had a choice when it came to you and your late mother and he chose the same old.

Abusive people are not nasty all the time but their nice/nasty cycle of abuse is a continuous one. He I would think does not feel guilty about how he treated you or your late mother. You may be one of the last people who actually bothers with him and that is because you've received the Special Training to put him first with your own needs and wants dead last. I would consider further lowering all contact levels further over time and at the very least keep his calls short by saying you have to go now, someone's at the door. You do not owe him anything here let alone a relationship. He has and continues to fail you utterly.