There is no tidy end to this story

The end of my relationship with my mother came in the form of an email. From her. 

We never had a particularly good relationship, though we both pretended otherwise, and I suppose that's how it could disintegrate in such a mundane way after an event that was more of a non-event. Or perhaps it's that our relationship had been disintegrating since day 1, so that 40 years later, it could simply stop without us having to engage in a screaming match.

In her typical manipulative way, she wrote me to "let me off the hook" from ever interacting with her again. I suspect she meant me to read it and then run after her and beg her to not break it off. But by that point, I was well and truly over her inability to be straightforward. If you have something to say, then just say it; and if you say something that isn't what you actually mean, then don't be surprised if I take your words at face value instead of engaging in the sleuth work required to make assumptions about what you actually meant but didn't say. 

I didn't do any sleuthing. 

I said something akin to "fine" and then spent the following 10 years trying to make sense of what had happened. 

I think now that there is no making sense of what happened, because it simply doesn't make sense. There is no logic here. There is no tidy end to the story. There is only the grey area where you can't help but think "it didn't have to be like this" - while simultaneously acknowledging that too much would have had to have been different for any other ending to have been possible.