Just a post I did in a group I belong to.

Had a meltdown last night. I feel tremendous guilt and there's really nothing anyone could say that could assuage that. See, when my mom died in 1990, I promised my dad that whenever the time came that he needed me, I'd be there to help him. Fast-forward to 2012, and his wife has Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and he needed us. We (my husband and I) begged him for five years for them to move to NC. We offered to help move them. We offered to buy the duplex adjoining ours so we could be right there, but we could each have our own privacy. No dice. My daughter, Amanda, had bipolar. Even though we REALLY didn't want to move from NC where we loved it to OK, we thought maybe it would be a fresh start for our daughter. We had to leave our then 23 y/o son there, which I also hated. Granted, Dad never held this promise over my head...I did. And so in Oct. 2012, we moved. Our daughter HATED it here. The place was not this quaint country town like we anticipated but impoverished and riddled with meth and a host of other drugs. She was supposed to start cosmetology school when we got here, but we were trying to give her a little leeway to adjust to her new surroundings (especially given her bipolar and great anxiety). She ended up, instead, meeting up with people that drug her down, used her, and with her low self-esteem, she thought these people were friends, despite our constant warnings. She would get away from certain ones eventually only for them to be replaced by more. If I hadn't forced my way, basically mandated that we move to help my dad, then I really feel in my heart of hearts that she would be alive today. No one will ever convince me otherwise. I single-handedly tore our family apart when I insisted we move. And then there's the guilt I also feel regarding my dad because I WANT to help him (we do live with them now to help out) but I'm also mad because why couldn't they just move?????? All for some stupid land that will be sold off and we will move when he's gone anyway?? And where the heck are HER kids? Oh yeah, it takes 3 of them to take care of their father and 0 for their mother. Dad's reasoning was, "well they'd have to quit their jobs and sell their homes to move here." Excuse me, but we had to do exactly that and as a result of our move, now our daughter is dead, which all winds back at the same place...if I hadn't forced my will...I'm so sorry, Amanda. You were right, this place was going to be the death of you.