When faced with death, she chose being a mother first

Published by: Miss Usato on December 13th, 2025

AvoidJW recently received an email from a former Jehovah’s Witness who wishes to remain anonymous. He asked that his experience be shared so others might better understand the depth of harm caused by shunning.

For nearly a decade, his mother strictly followed Jehovah’s Witness shunning rules and cut off all contact. In 2023, As she lay dying in hospice, something shifted.

We hope this account helps others who have lived through similar experiences make sense of what happened.

Dear Avoid JW

My mother was a Jehovah’s Witness.

I was too, but I was disfellowshipped in 2001. Almost ten years later, in April 2011, she came to my home and told me she would no longer speak to me unless I returned to the religion. I suppose she hoped it would produce the result she so desperately wanted. From that point on, we had no relationship.

In December 2023, my older non–Jehovah’s Witness sister called to say our mother was in the hospital and would likely die of cancer within days.

She was moved to a hospice. In the days before she passed, she asked for me to be there. On one occasion, she had me feed her oranges, despite the scripture that says Jehovah’s Witnesses should not even eat with someone who is disfellowshipped.

At no point did she mention religion or ask me to return. When I asked her how she felt about dying at 68, she said she felt “cheated.” She died on January 8, 2024.

I cannot reconcile the years of shunning with the tenderness she showed me at the end. How would you explain her behavior toward me?

Dear Reader

What you witnessed was not inconsistency. It was conflict finally resolving itself.

For many years your mother lived under a belief system that required her to suppress natural maternal instincts and re-frame that suppression as righteousness. That is not something most people do easily or peacefully, even if they appear firm on the surface. Shunning is an act of obedience, not an absence of love, and it often coexists with deep private grief.

When death becomes imminent, the structures that hold rigid belief in place begin to loosen. Fear of judgement, fear of authority, and fear of doing the wrong thing spiritually all fade when the future disappears. What remains is attachment, memory, and the need for human connection. In those final days, your mother was no longer managing a religious identity. She was facing the end of her life.

The fact that she asked for you, allowed closeness, and made no attempt to bring religion into those moments is significant. It suggests she wanted peace rather than correctness, and relationship rather than resolution. Her comment about feeling “cheated” speaks to a quiet reckoning. It sounds like someone aware, perhaps painfully so, that life had been constrained and that time had been lost.

This does not erase the hurt she caused you, and it does not require you to reinterpret the past more kindly than it deserves. It simply means that, at the end, her love was stronger than her fear. You were not witnessing hypocrisy. You were witnessing a human being stepping out from under doctrine when it no longer mattered and choosing, at last, to be a mother.

You are allowed to hold grief and anger at the same time. You are allowed to treasure those final moments without forgiving the years that preceded them. The tenderness you received was real, even if it came too late. And it says something important. Not about what you failed to be, but about who she was beneath everything she had been taught to fear.

It is real

Stories like this remind me that beneath doctrine, rules, and fear, there is still a human heart trying to find its way back to what matters. Shunning asks people to silence love in the name of obedience, but love rarely disappears, it waits. Sometimes it resurfaces too late, and that truth is painful to sit with.

If you’ve lived through something similar, please know that the tenderness you received was real, even if it came at the end. It does not erase the harm, but it does speak to the humanity that survives even the most rigid systems. You are not alone, and your story matters.