Is there a right time to cut ties with toxic parent?
An in-law, age 95 and on her deathbed, was having some final conversations. She brought up a memory of her own mother, who had lost a 2-year-old daughter to a childhood disease. When she misbehaved as a child, the elderly woman recalled, "My mother would say, 'I wish you had died instead of Alice.'" She then tried to reason that her mother, enduring a hard life on an Indiana farm, was probably just expressing grief. Possibly true, but the hurt haunted the surviving daughter until her last breath, nearly a century after the words were spoken. A trend has grown in recent years of ...
