Cleaning Up The Mess 45:03

Before we begin, a quick warning that in this show, we discuss child abuse, and this content may be difficult for some listeners. If you or anyone you know is a victim or survivor of medical child abuse, please go to MunchausenSupport.com to connect with professionals who can help. One of the reasons that I wanted to share Joe's story this season in full and really go deep is

their entire process that they've been through in the past few years is because I wanted to look at the after effects of this abuse. And in previous seasons, we've talked a lot about investigations into medical child abuse and looking at evidence and looking at what children are going through when they're experiencing this abuse. And this

has been our chance to really look at what it is like to survive this abuse. What does life look like after this was your childhood? I think in some sense, both Joe and I knew that Donna's death was going to be this ultimate hurdle that they were going to have to go through at some point. And it was this looming thing that Donna would always have these brushes with death

and then survive them. And so it was just sort of this cycle, and that when that cycle finally ended, it might be freeing on some sense, but in the immediate aftermath, it was really going to bring all of these things that have been building up in Joe their entire life, it was going to bring them right to the surface. I think this has really given us an opportunity to get away from thinking about

oh, it's this many surgeries and it's this many lies and it's just sort of this laundry list of horrible things that happen to a child. And obviously, whenever I'm covering these cases, I try not to cover them in that way. I really try and focus on the humanity of all of the people involved. And I think you don't see how this affects someone on a human level until they are out of it, until they have...

space and distance to be able to even articulate their experience. I think that is one of the things that has really

Hit me talking to Joe and talking to other survivors and hearing people's experiences of talking to each other with Munchausen Support, with the nonprofit that both Joe and I do work with, and B Yorker, who we heard from this season. We have seen how much value there is in people talking to each other about a shared experience because...

It's a very hard thing to put into words. I think a lot of survivors are never able to do that. One of the things that I hope this podcast does overall, and especially with this season as we are zeroing in on the experience of survivors, is...

I hope it makes people feel less alone with this experience because that isolation really compounds the pain and the trauma and it inhibits our ability to heal. And I think what has happened is that in being able to share this story and make others feel less alone, I think Joe has realized that

also all of the ways in which they are not alone. And part of that is because of you. I've heard from so many people how moved they are by Joe's story, how much they admire them as they've been listening to this season. And I want you all to know how much those messages have meant to me, how much they've meant to Joe. And this outpouring of support really came at a time when, as it turned out, Joe would need it the most.

People believe their eyes. That's something that is so central to this topic because we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something. If we didn't, you could never make it through your day. I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me.

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Word of mouth is so important for independent podcasts. For more, you can now find us on YouTube, where we have all of our episodes as well as bonus video content. Back in April of this year, Joe had just learned that their mom had died alone in her apartment. And a few hours after hearing the news, they hopped in the car.

So I drove 12 and a half hours straight all the way to Minnesota because I had to be there by 9 a.m. the next day if I wanted to be able to see her body. That's kind of the big thing.

To say Jo was in disbelief would be an understatement. This was a moment that they've been reckoning with all their life. They couldn't even remember a time when they weren't worried about their mom's death. But now that it was here, it was surreal. The last time I saw her was March of the 2023 when she was in the coma. Yeah.

So she, that was, I mean, that was her text to me. It was like, I'd love to see you when I'm conscious. Because she has no recollection of seeing me because she was like very out of it when she was in the ICU. In the days leading up to their mom's death, Joe had gotten calls from the hospital about Donna. As Joe was apparently still listed as an emergency contact, despite their estrangement. But this was par for the course. Donna was always in crisis and it wore on Joe.

The night before my mom passed, I had therapy with Angie and I brought up the fact that it was really triggering and really hard still to get those phone calls from Hutch and how I said that. I said, sometimes, sometimes I just wish that my mom would die because I'm sick of being so scared every day and I'm sick of these phone calls.

And then less than 24 hours later, I got the phone call. So I think that made it extra hard and hard. Like, I don't think that I really blame myself or think that it was me, but it is very hard to like, why did that happen? It's hard to not go into that.

I think we all engage in this kind of magical thinking from time to time. I certainly did when I heard this news, given that this is the second time a perpetrator had died while I've been in the midst of reporting on their case. But for Joe, this goes much deeper.

They were taught from birth that their purpose in this world was to give Donna what she needed, to take care of her, the exact opposite of what most of us would ever want for our kids. The news of Donna's death turned Joe's world upside down. I didn't sleep for like close to 40 hours.

So, I mean, I was sleep deprived and like fully in shock and in my hometown and like looking at my dead mother. So I think that all of that was just too much, really. I talked to Joe frequently in the days following their mom's death. And the one truly reassuring thing was that I knew they weren't alone.

Joe has built the kinds of friendships in their adult life that any of us would count ourselves lucky to have. The kind of friends who would drop everything to drive to Minnesota with you in the middle of the night, as one of Joe's close friends did. And during our trip to Hutch earlier this year, Joe had also re-established some of their oldest friendships. So they had people nearby, like their childhood best friend Bree, who we heard from earlier this season.

We didn't have time to go to a hotel because we only got there a few hours before we had to be to the funeral home. But I really wanted, I just wanted to shower. That's all I wanted was just to take a shower and brush my teeth. And so I actually reached out to Bree, which was so wild because I would have never reached out to her before the podcast. But I reached out to her and was like,

hey, can I possibly just come shower at your place? And she, of course, was like, absolutely. So I got to meet her child for the first time, which was really cool, too, and just, like, really special. I saw Max, her husband, so it was kind of fun. But I have a different...

view of Hutchinson now in a lot of ways than I did before we started the podcast. Like there was people that I could reach out to now in Hutch. There were people that I knew like would want to see me and things like that. I feel like I was just like teetering between both of those like realities of still holding some of that fear of Hutch, but then also simultaneously holding this new reality of not

there's people in Hutch that like want to hold you. So I like reached out to like my youth leader and I got to go like spend time with her and just kind of be held by her. And I like talked to some old neighbors. I went and like had a really lovely conversation with them and that was really nice, but it was weird. I spent a lot of time with my sister and with my grandma and I saw my aunt. Like it was just very different than it would have been pre-podcast.

Donna's relationships with the people in her life were either fractured or non-existent by the time of her death. So it's not surprising, albeit maddening, that dealing with the aftermath fell to the two people she'd harmed the most, her children. We had to figure out the funeral stuff on our own. And I think my sister obviously still...

is like the older sister. So I think she didn't want to put stuff on me or didn't want to like ask for help or things like that. So she tried to take on as much as she could with the funeral stuff. I would have to like kind of like, no, let me help. We're sisters, like we're in this together. We met up for the funeral home thing. It was me, my sister, Tyler, her husband and my grandma. And yeah, that was like,

I like can't get the images out of my head. That was probably one of the hardest things I remember. We like talked to the person because you have to talk about all the financial things and stuff as if like that matters when like your mother is dead. So we had to like talk about that. And it was kind of funny. There was this peppermint jar on the table. And like one by one, each person in my family just would like take one. So we each just kept grabbing them. And so it's kind of funny.

Jo had a complicated relationship with their grandmother over the years, but it was nonetheless comforting to have her there because the reality of Donna's death threatened to pull Jo under at every turn. When we went to the chapel, because that's like where they had my mom ready or whatever, we like walked down.

and we're waiting for them to open the doors to go in. And I just started to feel like I was going to have a panic attack. And I kept getting really scared and backing away. I couldn't walk in there. I couldn't go and see what was inside that room. And my grandma just kept holding me, which was obviously really nice. And then when we went in, it was the same thing. I couldn't...

It was really hard to walk up to her body. It was weird because it was like she was on like what looked kind of like a hospital bed. I just kept saying mostly in my head, but I whispered it to her. I just kept saying like, just get up. Stop doing this. Like, get up. Stop. You're OK. Just wake up. And obviously she like wouldn't wake up.

But it was like so confusing and I think still is because I've seen her in a coma so many times throughout my life. I've seen her appear lifeless and then the next day sit and eat oatmeal in a chair. Like she always gets back up. And so it was just really, really hard to comprehend.

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We'll be right back.

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Joe's relationship with Donna was fraught, to say the least. And that didn't end with Donna's death. If anything, her death just brought everything up to the surface. Grieving an abusive parent is different than grieving a loving one. And I wanted to understand better what Joe and other abuse survivors experience in this moment. I'm Carly Osler. I'm an LMFT, licensed marriage and family therapist, and I specialize in working with

Trauma, complex PTSD, complex trauma, complex grief, systemic trauma. For those of us on the outside, especially those who are close to the survivor in question and feel protective of them, the bond a survivor feels with their abuser can be confusing. It's hard not to wonder why someone would grieve the loss of a parent who is responsible for doing so much harm. The way I understand it, it boils down to what I understand as Stockholm Syndrome.

We are entirely dependent as babies on the adults that are given authority over us, that are given responsibility of us. Our brains develop around them and how they interact with us. And so we don't even consciously...

know anything about that. We're just acting from the ways we have been programmed. Like zero to two is when attachment patterns start. So if you have a parent who is

is using you to get their needs met. Even just like, oh, I want to cuddle. Really harmless, right? But it still is going to wire the brain to like, I take care of parents' needs. So it's complex for so many reasons, but that dependence, that initial dependence and attachment and how our brain is shaped around that is a big part of it. There's

There is love. We love the people who've harmed us because we had to. And most people don't unpack what they understand love to be, what they understand relating to be. We think there's this one idea, but it's dependent on how you learned it. And unpacking that, unlearning that, trying to decide for yourself what does love feel like? What was that that happened?

Not everybody does that. Not everybody has to do it. And generally, if you have trauma in relation to your parents, you have to. Jo learned what love was from someone who wasn't really capable of love. There's no evidence that Donna had any actual empathy for either of her children. She didn't do the number one thing a parent is supposed to do, protect her children.

Like every perpetrator I've covered on this show, Donna left a stunning amount of wreckage in her wake, both emotional and physical. And it fell to Crystal and Joe to clean up after her. And we had to go through my mom's stuff, which I think was one of the hardest things. What was your mom's living situation like?

And was that just you and Crystal that went through all that stuff? Yeah, it was me and my sister and Tyler. So my mom lived in this little apartment that was a one bedroom. And my mom has always been and I guess always was a hoarder. So there was just stuff everywhere.

everywhere. There's garbage everywhere. So when you walk in, you see the kitchen right away. And that's where my mom was found by my grandma. And then if you turn left, then there's the living room and there's just a reclining chair that's there. But there was no TV, which that to me was really striking because like my mom walked

I don't think there was a time in my life growing up that the TV wasn't on. So for there to be no TV, like, and my mom doesn't drive and she wasn't like leaving the house. So I don't, I just like picture her literally sitting in this chair doing nothing. And the bedroom was just boxes. There's just boxes everywhere, no bed. And then the closet was just boxes everywhere. And the bathroom was just like a mess and like,

The smell of smoke was so strong that I had to wear a mask, sometimes two masks, the entire time that I was there because I would get so sick from how strong of a smoke smell there was. And there were like smoke burns all over the chair and the carpets and like blankets and things like that. And my sister found a thing of alcohol in

And I knew she was still drinking. She said she wasn't and stuff. So I think finding that was really hard. So I poured out her alcohol for the last time ever. Perpetrators run the gamut in terms of outward appearance, intelligence, and charm. But the one thing they all have in common is that beneath their exterior, however carefully crafted, exists pure chaos.

And over time, the mechanisms that they use to hide that, youth, beauty, wear away. And while medical deception is one maladaptive coping mechanism, it's not an isolated one. Substance abuse is also common, as is hoarding. I asked Carly about Donna's living situation. Joe was describing their mom's house, the way that it looked when they went to have to clean it out, which obviously was heartbreaking. And I'm very upset with Joe's family that they made

them and their sister do that. But anyway, you know, that it was this disarray and this sort of hoarding and finding all this stuff and it was a mess. And that's how my sister's house...

And after she had this fake pregnancy and my mom went to found out that she'd been evicted and not told anybody and the power had turned out and like she had rotting food. And then this was a person that seemed from the outside at that time, you know, very well put together, was still going to her job every day, was like clean and cute and everything else. And just like that, this sort of like, I remember hearing my mom talk about going into the apartment and just finding it in this horrific state where you just think like, oh, I'm

Something is really wrong. I think that speaks to the internal world of this type of abuser. If you are in a constant state of threat and internally there is this constant state of threat, like what compels the research and the thoughtful cruelty is this internal constant stress.

that really keeps you disconnected from yourself. Every human develops a way of not looking at what is too much inside ourselves. Actually taking all of us in and our entire experience in is way too much all at once most of the time. So we prioritize with what's most conscious. And yes, that can build up in extreme cases to like

I can look at this tiny delusion of how I exist and how I believe myself to exist and everything else, I am just unconsciously putting so much effort into hiding and pushing away and dissociating and ignoring. If you're running from a tiger, you can't think about cleaning your house or feeding yourself or connection and desire. You're just trying to outrun the tiger.

All of Donna's disarray that she was neglecting and ignoring, this was the detritus Crystal and Joe were in charge of sorting through. Cleaning up Donna's mess was nothing new, but now it was the last time they'd ever do it. Going through her house was even more weird because once again, me and my sister and my aunt have done this.

hundreds of times, whether it's when my mom had to move and we all had to like go and try to like get rid of stuff so we could help her move. Or my mom was in the hospital because she overdosed. So we were searching the house for pills and alcohol and things like that. We were

We were always doing like this exact same thing. So it just felt, oh, mom's just in the hospital. She OD'd again. So like, we just have to clean this up so she can come home to not having all this stuff here. And I think that felt really weird. And once again, made it hard to comprehend. ♪

There was still vomit in the kitchen from where she died. And so I had to like go to Walmart and pick up cleaning supplies. I just stood there for like five minutes or more because it was just probably the weirdest thing and the most like uncomfortable thing.

And in all this chaos, Joe was somewhat startled to find their own words, literal messages from their childhood self.

I had written these letters that were supposed to be like confessions, I guess. I guess I had read somewhere that some kids did this with their parents and it helps them build relationships. And so...

I have a very faint memory of writing these now. I didn't before I saw them, but I guess I would write them and I remember I would always set them by her when she was passed out. I would never give it to her when she was awake. But the first one, I told her I have an eating disorder and I think it's because I just want to...

be better at Crystal than something. And I just, I said, I'm really sick of being compared to her. I'm sick of always not being good enough and her being better than me, which was like wild to see.

I talked about how I didn't forgive her for the sexual abuse stuff that happened with my landlord and how like how would a parent ever do that to their child and how I just wanted her to stop drinking and it was just like a lot of things like that and then there were poems that I found in her closet that I had written her

All the poems said were like, "I'll never tell anybody. I love you so much. And like if social services comes, I'll lie to them and I won't tell them." Like I guess I had been convinced that if I got caught lying to social services as a kid, that I would end up in jail. In both of these poems, I like talk about how like I'd be okay going to jail if it meant that you could still live and be okay.

The interior life of someone like Donna is the ultimate black box. They lie to everyone, including, perhaps most of all, to themselves. And as we've been careful to emphasize on this show, Munchausen by proxy abusers are not suffering from delusions. They understand and are culpable for their actions.

But there is an intense level of justification and compartmentalizing that happens around these actions. In some sense, they are hiding even from themselves. So what does it mean that Donna kept these letters? How did she justify her behavior? Not to the people she deceived, but to herself. What did she tell herself about who and what she was?

I've wondered the same about my sister Megan over the years, especially as we've been engaging for years now in this bizarre proxy conversation. Because despite our estrangement, I am speaking to her. I was speaking to her when I wrote her my own sad letter. I was speaking to her when I wrote my novel. And on this show, I'm speaking to her always. This was the whole point, to speak to her and to speak to the people who shielded her from consequences. To all of you, I see you.

But of everyone Meghan has fooled, is she on that list? Has she found ways to deceive herself? What is she when she's alone, with no one to put the mask on for? Many people around Meghan have been fooled, but I know the truth. And I think she does too.

And I wonder, thinking about Donna in her final days, was there ever a reckoning with herself? Did the evidence of her shattered and disordered life make her face how she had ended up there? She kept all these letters from Joe, evidence of her worst misdeeds. What did she make of Joe's words? Did she ever, despite her persistent and public denials, consider coming clean?

Even though Donna likely caused many of her own brushes with death over the years, she had to know she couldn't keep it up forever. In all of the stories I've heard from survivors, though they include the occasional deathbed confession, I've never talked to a person who's received a full accounting from the parent who's harmed them.

But I still wonder if it ever even occurs to them to do so, if only to alleviate their own pain. Because as Carly discussed with us, harming others takes a toll on the perpetrator as well as the victim. There is trauma that lives in our bodies. When we perpetrate and we're not able to process, I did something, I caused harm to

My actions were outside of my values and there's something in me that is doing this. And when that builds up and builds up and builds up and, you know, trauma compounds on trauma, that's when it becomes kind of those hopeless situations where somebody will not take accountability because there has never been any evidence of safety to do so. And, um,

This idea that like, well, those are the bad people and these are the good ones. And it just perpetuates it, making it difficult to process the harm that all of us cause because we are humans and we're capable of harm. And we just we just do cause harm.

As we've discussed at length this season, Joe's memory has many gaps due to the trauma they experienced. So I was struck by the discovery of these letters, messages from their past self. And I wondered if these artifacts gave them a chance to step outside of their complicated dyad with Donna. I just want to say, like, if you found those kind of letters from a young person to their parent, would you think, oh, this is a bad kid? No. No.

What do you think you would think if you saw those letters? That's a deep question. I would think something happened in this house and that clearly the parents were not showing up how they should have been. So do you think you can kind of maybe see that a little clearer with your younger self now? Yeah, I feel like in a lot of ways, I've gotten a lot better at being able to see it with myself now.

But there's still such a strong fear of how others view me. Joe always thought of themselves as a bad kid. They thought they were somehow responsible for what their mom put them through. But everyone else we spoke to from Hutch saw Joe for who they really were, a good kid in a terrible situation. Joe and Crystal's family members, however, many of whom were responsible for enabling this abuse, were a different story.

The week of the funeral was a disorienting whirlwind, as Joe and Crystal were tasked with not only cleaning up Donna's apartment, but organizing her funeral. And worst of all, on one of the most difficult days of their life, Joe had to face people who'd never believed them about their abuse. So we drove to St. Anastasia, which is a Catholic church.

church that my grandparents went to sometimes my mom went to sometimes and pretty much instantly when me and my sister walked in and went to like set the ashes somewhere we both just started to like sob and we just kind of like held each other and then we just laughed and we're kind of like back and forth with crying and laughing and we just set everything up and then we

people came and I was terrified the whole time because like I said, I don't know who hates me

loves me, who likes me, who would be upset that I was there. Because, I mean, there are definitely people for sure that think that I don't love my mom, think I wouldn't do things like this if I loved her, think I wouldn't have left the house if I loved her, think that I wouldn't talk about anything that happened if I loved her. So I was really nervous about what might be said or what might happen.

Do you think the expectation was that you should take care of your mom no matter what? Was that kind of what it felt like? Definitely. There were definitely some family members who would say, like, just be a good girl. Your mom's an adult and can make adult decisions. And that were upset that I got taken out because...

Yeah, like I ruined my mom or something. But... So that narrative wasn't only coming from your mom. That was corroborated to some extent by some other family members. Okay. 100%. And even in 2016, like when I reached out to family, like there were some family members who did respond saying like...

no, your life was great. And like, you need to just be nice to your mom and forgive her and like all this sort of stuff. That was an overt message that was there. And there's also like people outside of the family, like friends of my mom who even at the funeral wouldn't look at me. But I'm glad I was like shocked, honestly, that it was only one person that treated me that way. I

at the funeral and most a lot of people came up to me and would say a lot of family would say like I know like you didn't have the best relationship with her but she's still your mom and things like that and that felt really validating because it felt like people like still understood that I would be really upset and that it would be really really hard and a lot of times I would just say like yeah like she was my mom

It's understandable that people would want to see Donna in the best light as they were grieving her death. But there were also so many reminders that Donna was Donna. Because since I was probably, I don't know, four or five, she would tell me that she wants, wanted me to sing Amazing Grace at her funeral. And I was like, I don't know.

So that's all I had in my head was like, "I'm supposed to sing this," but obviously was in no sort of emotional state to be able to. But when I made sure that they played it, of course, and when they play, I just completely lost it and was just like not okay.

My daughter is five, and she's at a developmental stage where she's wrapping her head around the idea of death. Hers, mine. And every so often, usually when I'm trying to get her to go to bed, which as any parent knows is prime time for deep existential questions, she'll ask me if I'm going to die.

It's a tough one because you got to teach your kids about death. It's a bit of a non-negotiable. But you don't want it to be too scary. So I say that I'm going to live for a long time, knock on wood, but that everyone dies someday. And this is one of the really tough parts of life. And it's a good reminder to enjoy our time together. The idea of telling my five-year-old what to sing at my funeral? Yeah, that's odd. But of course, it tracks for Donna.

Working on this show has made me hyper aware of the legacy that I'm leaving my kids. Again, hopefully not for a long time, but I can't help but think about it. The idea of my own death is so much scarier now that I have kids. And truly the only thing scarier than dying young when you have kids is the idea of something happening to them.

But we all have to prepare to leave our kids on the earth without us someday. And the number one thing you hope for is to leave them with the best possible memories of you. To leave them with a healthy version of what love is. And to leave them with no unfinished business. Therapist Carly explains that for abuse survivors, they're left with not only the loss of that person, but also the loss of what they wish that parent had been.

There's the loss of the hope that things could be different, right? When you lose a parent, there's so much that you lose, but there's a loss of, will there ever be a reconciliation? Will things ever be different? Will I finally feel safe in relation to this person, have the kind of loving relationship that I want? The opportunity for that is gone.

I think abuse is a form of dependence and it creates a dependence, right? The abuser depends on the abusee to get their needs met. And so when you are a tiny spongy computer and you are developing under this dependence,

you learn also to depend on your abuser. And so sometimes part of that complex grief is dealing with that loss of who you were depending on. You were never taught to be okay on your own. And so that is a new reality that can be really disorienting. Even if it's like a beautiful reality, there's just so many layers of...

loss and complexity and newness that can be really overwhelming. Even though it was grueling, there were moments of levity at Donna's funeral, and Joe and Crystal found what felt like a fitting way to put Donna to rest.

Some people shared little stories or memories. And then we ate Oreo cakesters. My mom at one point literally for over a year only ate Oreo cakesters. Then she like moved on to like Oreo blizzards and then Dairy Queen cake. So anyway, she loved sweets. We found so much candy in her place. Everyone ate some Oreo cakesters and then we...

put the urn in the ground and we buried like an Oreo cake stir with her, put it literally in the urn as well as some cigarettes and some vodka. Um, yeah. And then me and a couple of family members, we all took a little drink of vodka to go with it all. But, um, and then we just kind of

all kind of held each other. And that's all we can really do in a moment of crisis. Hold each other. Maybe have a little sweet treat and a chug of vodka. Joe's loss of their mom illuminates the two sides of dependence. On the one hand, if it's unhealthy, it can destroy us. On the other hand, we all need each other. It's the only way to survive our worst moments. Next week on our season finale...

Until she died, I did not realize how much of my daily life still surrounded around her. Nobody Should Believe Me is written, hosted, and produced by me, Andrea Delmonk. Our senior producer and editor is Mariah Gossett. Greta Stromquist is our associate producer. Engineering by Robin Edgar. And administrative support from Nola Karmush. Music provided by Johnny Nicholson and Joel Shupak. With additional music and sounds from SoundSnap.