When Someone Who Hurt You Becomes Seriously Ill

There are situations in life for which there are no simple emotions.

What happens when someone who caused you enormous suffering becomes seriously ill?

What happens when you know that person is frightened, vulnerable or struggling emotionally, perhaps even expressing that they no longer want to live?

You may feel compassion.

You may feel sadness.

You may even genuinely want them to receive help and not take their own life.

But that does not mean that everything that happened in the past suddenly disappears.

You cannot erase decades of pain because someone is now ill

For around 20 years, I was prevented from seeing my children.

With my son, the separation lasted around 30 years.

Those were not simply years on a calendar.

They were birthdays missed.

Conversations that never happened.

Milestones I was not there to witness.

Family memories that could not be created.

Years of a mother’s life that could never be recovered.

When a person has lived through that kind of loss, being told to simply forget the past because the person responsible is now seriously ill is unrealistic.

Serious illness can change the circumstances.

It does not change history.

Compassion and accountability can exist together

One of the most difficult things to understand is that compassion does not require you to deny what happened to you.

I can recognise that someone is seriously ill.

I can recognise that they may be frightened, distressed or struggling with their mental health.

I can genuinely hope that they receive professional help.

I can even hope that they do not take their own life.

And at the same time, I can acknowledge the profound damage that their actions caused me.

These things can exist together.

Compassion does not require self-erasure.

The years still mattered

When someone has lost decades of contact with their children, there can be a particular kind of grief attached to it.

It is not only grief for what happened.

It is grief for what should have happened.

The ordinary things.

The conversations.

The celebrations.

The growing up.

The opportunity to be there.

The relationship that might have developed if circumstances had been different.

Those lost years cannot be returned.

And acknowledging that loss is not bitterness.

It is recognising reality.

Illness does not rewrite the past

When somebody becomes seriously ill, there can be enormous pressure — sometimes spoken and sometimes unspoken — to put everything aside.

There can be an expectation that the person who has been hurt should suddenly become entirely compassionate, forgiving and available.

But serious illness does not automatically resolve unresolved relationships.

It does not remove responsibility.

It does not make harmful behaviour harmless.

And it does not require the person who was hurt to pretend that their experience did not happen.

A person’s present vulnerability and their past behaviour can both be real.

What about suicide?

This is perhaps the most emotionally difficult part.

If someone who caused you profound harm is now talking about suicide, you may experience conflicting emotions.

You may feel concern for their life.

You may feel anger about the past.

You may feel guilt for not being able to comfort them.

You may feel sadness.

You may even feel numb.

None of these emotions necessarily make you cruel.

If someone is genuinely suicidal, that situation requires appropriate professional intervention and support. It should not become the responsibility of the person they previously harmed to keep them alive.

There is an important difference between caring about someone’s safety and taking responsibility for their emotional survival.