Mary Weiland, the mother of Scott Weiland’s two teenage children, penned an essay in Rolling Stone where she spoke about her ex-husband’s death, his inability to function as a father and his flailing career.

It was a sober and reflective piece, where she honored the praise his career received after his passing last week, but she also painted a darker picture, of a man divided by his career and the choices he seemed to not be able to make.

“Even after Scott and I split up, I spent countless hours trying to calm his paranoid fits, pushing him into the shower and filling him with coffee, just so that I could drop him into the audience at Noah’s talent show, or Lucy’s musical,” she writes. “Those short encounters were my attempts at giving the kids a feeling of normalcy with their dad. But anything longer would often turn into something scary and uncomfortable for them.”

She examines her own decisions in things, however, ultimately, she ends not with sadness, but in hope. A desire not to demonize or lioness the Stone Temple Pilots frontman. Instead, she hopes it serves as a reminder that children are often left behind with too many questions and not enough answers.

“Let’s choose to make this the first time we don’t glorify this tragedy with talk of rock and roll and the demons that, by the way, don’t have to come with it,” she concludes. “Skip the depressing T-shirt with 1967-2015 on it – use the money to take a kid to a ballgame or out for ice cream.”