The NY Times Ethicist column talked about how to deal with abusive parents’ bad conduct:
My parents maintain relationships with many friends and relatives both domestically and overseas. Many people think fondly of them, and when they are in public they imitate friendly and kind people.
My issue is that they were terrible, abusive parents. They terrorized my brother and me, telling us every day we were failures, morons and worthless losers. My dad is an addict who has lied about his addictions and only seems to care about getting attention from others, and my mother is anxious and depressed. They’re old now, and we never developed an actual relationship. I don’t think they are capable of liking or loving their children, and I’ve given up on trying. The most important thing to them is cultivating the good opinion of others.
I want to know, what are my obligations to keep the family secrets once they die? Am I supposed to pretend I care when they die? And what are my obligations to care for them as their health declines? I have a cousin who lives in the same town as them, who they are very nice to and who acts like their child. But do I have a responsibility to two people I suspect are mentally ill who have treated me with unrepentant cruelty? We haven’t spoken in a few years, and I don’t miss them. Name Withheld
As a rule, you shouldn’t display feelings you don’t have or misrepresent the truth about your childhood. The further question of whether you owe them some kind of care, though, is made more difficult by the fact that you think their bad behavior may be a result of mental illness. The philosopher Hanna Pickard has written, in the context of personality disorders and addiction, about “responsibility without blame.” She argues that it’s possible to hold people responsible for harm without blaming them for it — and that it’s actually important for clinicians to do so. (She worked with such patients for a decade at a facility in Oxford.) You’re blameworthy if you’re responsible and have no excuse, but, she says, “different disorders point to probable incapacities or deficits” and may indeed provide an excuse.
Yet your experiences have been outside the clinical context; you’re the one who has been harmed. In those circumstances, you may recognize that mental illness provides some sort of excuse and still resent your mistreatment. Ordinarily, we take care of our aging parents because we have loving feelings that grow out of a loving relationship — even if it has had its ups and downs, even if it’s stressful, even if, as the light fades, we get less out of our time with them because they have less to give. Philosophers use the term “special obligations” for responsibilities or duties that we have toward others in virtue of who they are to us. These obligations arise from relationships that we value. But if our parents were seriously abusive and, in consequence, we have no relationship with them that we value, then we may have no special obligations to them either.
Your parents are, in the brutal expression, dead to you. If they have the resources to look after themselves, what they will probably need in later life is loving care. And that’s something you can’t provide to people you not only don’t love but actively dislike.