First time poster here. I’ve been no contact with my mother for about two years due to her lifelong alcoholism, abuse and neglect. This week I got a call from my estranged brother to tell me she had fallen drunkenly down the stairs and suffered severe brain damage, a bleed on the brain, several broken bones and internal bleeding. She is in a coma and the doctors aren’t confident she’ll come out of it, and if she does, she’ll most likely have severe impairments and need care for the rest of her life.

Deep down I knew something like this would happen. She drinks excessively, has no job, and has burned all her bridges besides my brother and her enabling partner. I feel so many things at once. Angry, mourning for her and for the child she once was, and for myself too. Disgusted by her enablers and also at her. She has had so many opportunities to get clean and sober but nothing, not getting arrested for drunk driving, not me going NC, not her friends and family giving up on her, not her nearly dying several times from forgetting her insulin due to her being wasted. If she ever wakes up, which we aren’t confident she will, I know this won’t have any affect on her either. She is in denial that there has even been a problem.

My head is a wreck. I hate her but I don’t want it to end like this. I can’t cope with any of this, and I feel guilty for saying this but I feel like she deserves part of this for making my childhood hell. I’m at a loss and I’m so scared.