Thank you for sharing your story.  The part about not ending conversations with past history of slights imagined, angrily, why a lot of us end up not conversing with our older family members.  How hard and inappropriate, yet not changeable that is when someone has become "that's the way they are" and nothing you can do will alter their view no matter how much you wish it were different.  It does seem like it would be a reprieve to not have that, yet to look in someone you love dearly, in their eyes and not see them, is unimaginable even as it occurs.  
Love big and keep moving.