The dark reason I cut off my mum & refused to speak to her for 11 years – I had zero regrets, even on her death bed

The Sun

21-07-2025

WHEN a police officer knocked on Stephanie Peirolo's door on a rainy evening in 2003, she instantly knew why they were there.
Her 16-year-old son, RJ, had left home just half an hour earlier to visit a friend - when he was involved in a horror car crash at a junction.
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He was sober. He was wearing his seatbelt. He was doing everything right.
'I just said, 'Is he dead?' And he said, 'Not yet,'' she recalls.
Stephanie followed the police car to her nearest trauma hospital in Seattle, where she lives, Harborview Medical Centre.
The journey was a blur of rain and panic, and to her shock, she arrived just moments after her son's ambulance.
The officer led her through the emergency entrance, and that was when she saw something she'll never forget.
'Some paramedics were hosing blood out of the back of an ambulance,' she remembers.
'There was so much of it. And I knew. I just knew that was for my son.'
She stood in shock, knowing that what she was about to face was far more heartbreaking than she had previously imagined.
RJ survived the crash but suffered a catastrophic brain injury.
The accident took place on a rainy winter night, at a junction known locally for poor visibility.
Lisa Riley opens up on the grief of losing her mum
RJ had passed his test almost a year earlier, when another car accidentally drove into his vehicle.
The other driver thankfully escaped uninjured, and neither of them were found to be at fault.
For months, RJ lay in a coma - his eyes open, but unresponsive. It took nearly a year before he could begin to communicate, signalling 'yes' with a lifted thumb and 'no' by lowering it.
RJ spent several weeks in intensive care, and several months in hospital, before Stephanie was given the difficult choice to bring him home, despite still being in a coma, due to health insurance issues.
A single mother, she was raising two teenagers at the time - her sunny and outgoing daughter Emma, then 15, and her bright and sensitive son RJ - while trying to hang on to her job as the vice president of an ad agency to keep their much-needed health insurance.
She had previously split from their dad, who had moved to France when their kids were in nursery.
Alongside the trauma of RJ's condition, Stephanie was also navigating her crumbling relationship with her mother, Diane Peirolo.
The two had always had a strained dynamic. When Stephanie's father died unexpectedly, she was 19 and says she was left to plan the funeral alone.
Her mother, then 47 and recently retired, remained sedated on the sofa, after taking 'one too many Valium'.
'After my dad's death, Mum always talked about 'her husband'... never 'your father,' even to me,' Stephanie recalls.
'It was always her grief, her story. We all just knew the rules.'
Where to seek grief support
Need professional help with grief?
Child Bereavement UK Childbereavementuk.org
Cruse Bereavement Cruse.org.uk
Relate Relate.org.uk
The Good Grief Trust Thegoodgrieftrust.org
You can also always speak to your GP if you're struggling.
You're Not Alone
Check out these books, podcasts and apps that all expertly navigate grief…
Griefcast: Cariad Lloyd interviews comedians on this award-winning podcast.
The Madness Of Grief by Rev Richard Coles (£9.99, W&N): The Strictly fave writes movingly on losing his husband David to alcoholism.
Terrible, Thanks For Asking: Podcast host Nora McInerny encourages non-celebs to share how they're really feeling.
Good Mourning by Sally Douglas and Imogen Carn (£14.99, Murdoch Books): A guide for people who've suffered sudden loss, like the authors who both lost their mums.
Grief Works: Download this for daily meditations and expert tips.
How To Grieve Like A Champ by Lianna Champ (£3.99, Red Door Press): A book for improving your relationship with death.
Years later, when RJ's life hung in the balance, the same pattern re-emerged.
'She was one of those women who grew up being taught to compete with other women for everything. That extended to her daughters,' Stephanie, who has a sister, says.
'In her world, attention is a pie. If one person gets a bigger slice, there's less for her.'
That competitive edge morphed into something even more painful as RJ's condition worsened.
Just months after his accident, as Stephanie sat with Diane next to RJ's hospital bed at home, her mother told her a bizarre story about how she'd been in a car crash as a teenager.
'She was never in one. Her sister was. But she looked me in the eye and claimed it as her own.
''My son, who had actually survived one, was lying next to us.'
Stephanie stopped inviting her over after that.
For 10 months, she cared for RJ at home, in a makeshift hospital room, before he was moved back to a specialist nursing facility.
She was supported by her aunt, who had worked as a rehabilitation nurse.
'The staff did their best,' she says. 'But they were underfunded and overwhelmed.'
In 2006, RJ died aged just 19, after he caught flu and then developed sepsis due to complications with his feeding tube.
It was two-and-a-half years after his accident.
But Diane's worsening behaviour only added to Stephanie's trauma.
The grandmother, who should have been grieving with her, began acting as if RJ had never existed.
'I was having lunch with her near my university, where I was studying for a post-graduate degree in transformational leadership,' says Stephanie.
'She was talking about her husband's death, and I had this very vivid sense that people at the next table would assume her husband had just died.
''And that I was just some stranger she was talking to, telling the story for the first time.
'Not her daughter. Not the mother of a child who'd died just a year earlier.
'To anyone nearby, it would've looked like she was a grieving widow having lunch with a kind stranger.
''But I was her daughter. And I was the one grieving, for my son.'
Drowning in grief, Stephanie never managed to finish her degree. She says: 'I just couldn't concentrate.
''Grief made everything foggy. Eventually, I left the programme.'
'I couldn't do this anymore'
Later, her mother even began borrowing RJ's medical details, inserting them into her own life story.
Sitting beside her at a doctor's appointment, Stephanie was stunned when her mother claimed she'd once been in a wheelchair and undergone extensive rehab.
'That never happened to her. But it happened to my son,' she says.
She claims her mother looked at her as if to say, 'What are you going to do about it?'
'That's when I realised I couldn't do this anymore,' Stephanie says.
'My mother was of sound mind. She wasn't confused. That was her choice.'
Cutting family ties - and shock diagnosis
At this point, Stephanie made the decision to cut her mother out.
'I never regretted it. Not once,' she says.
'My life got lighter without her in it. There was more air in the room.
'She didn't make things better. She made them harder. And I had already survived enough.'
But family pressure mounted when Diane was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2019.
'My aunt would ask, 'Would you see her on her deathbed?'' she recalls.
After 11 years of zero contact, Stephanie saw her mother one final time.
'I did see my mother on her deathbed, a decision I made at the last minute, largely because it was important to other people in my family who matter to me,' she explains.
Her mother died in January 2022 at the age of 85, and Stephanie went to and planned the funeral, finding a surprising source of comfort during the Catholic priest's eulogy.
'He acknowledged that Diane was a difficult person to get close to. And that helped me,' she says.
Stephanie said the huge grief that followed caught her off-guard.
'It was jagged and harsh. Maybe because it came with a huge sense of relief that she was no longer in the world,' she says.
In the years since, she's channelled her story into her writing.
Her book, The Saint and The Drunk: A Guide to Making the Big Decisions in Your Life, explores how we make choices in emotionally complex moments, especially when they go against family or societal expectations.
Stephanie is now 62. She works as an executive coach and consultant and writes.
Her daughter Emma, now 37, is a nurse, who worked in the ICU during the pandemic, inspired by her brother.
'The book is about learning to trust your own reality. Even if people around you don't approve or even acknowledge it.'
She says toxic family dynamics can drown out your instincts.
'It's like trying to hear a far-off sound in a windstorm. You have to fight to access your inner compass.'
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Navigating grief
Her advice? Surround yourself with people who reflect your truth back to you, friends, support groups, even strangers.
'Grief looks different for everyone,' she says.
'Someone might be shattered by the loss of a pet. Someone else might feel relief after leaving a marriage. There are no rules.'
She stays connected with other bereaved parents, those who've lost children through stillbirth, suicide, accidents, or gun violence.
'We're in a horrible club. But we support each other. We understand that grief is not a competition.'
One of her family friends lost a baby on the day he was born. Stephanie lost RJ at 19.
'She feels sad for me, that I had to let him go. I feel sad for her, that she never got to watch him grow.
''There's no comparison. There's just love.'
It offers a powerful framework for tuning into your instincts, especially in the face of grief, family pressure, and emotional overwhelm.