Posted by mair on January 30, 2005, at 11:16:02
My mother in law died Friday morning in an assisted living place facility Florida. She was 91 or 92. She's had Alztheimers for a few years and more than a year ago had to be placed in a memory unit apart from my father in law who is in another section of the same facility. However, regardless of poor health and her age, her death still wasn't really expected. She broke her knee about 10 days ago and while in the hospital, just stopped eating and drinking and slipped into a light coma that got deeper. We only found out maybe 2 days before she died, that she was likely not going to recover.
There was a certain coincidental convenience to her death. My son is on break this week from college, and my husband and he had planned weeks ago to go down to Florida for 5 days, mostly for golf and also of course to see my husband's parents - you can't spend alot of time with them at any given time - my father in law gets so tired and sleeps much of the time and my mother in law has been pretty out of it. So as it turned out, they flew down there yesterday, the day after she died. Because my in-laws are Jewish, funerals and burials are done quickly - she's being buried today, just 2 days after she died. There is no other family in Florida - a few relatives (but by no means all of them) flew down from Chicago, where my in laws used to live. They've outlived most of their friends, and in recent years, have withdrawn socially in the way that very old people do. So it will just be a small graveside service.
In the whole time I've been married we've never lived near them. For most of those years, they drove up to Vermont every summer and would stay with us, sometimes for as long as 3 weeks (which seemed longer) and we'd go down to Florida generally once in the winter or spring. So when my children were much smaller, they were a pretty big part of their lives, if even only in intense spurts. However, 7 or 8 years ago, the summer visits ended because we didn't want his parents driving all that way and they refused to get on an airplane. Once or twice I think we met somewhere in between. We did continue to spend every April break down there, staying with them, and after they moved from their house to an independent living apartment, we'd rent a condo somewhere fairly close by. My husband groused alot about these trips; they didn't seem like vacations to him. But I thought it was really important and my kids were perfectly happy going - they liked the places we stayed, liked the city they live in, and liked seeing their grandparents in the comparatively small doses that my in laws were up to.
A few of years ago my in laws started declining more rapidly and my husband and his sister started making alot of trips to Florida to make arrangements for their care - finding in-home nursing care and then moving my mother in law to the memory unit and then later moving my father in law to an assisted living apt. My father in law's mental faculties started fluctuating so he'd get pretty confused.
Once my husband started spending more time dealing with them, the contacts my children and I had with them lessened considerably. When he called his Dad, it was generally from the office so the kids never got on the phone - just things like that. And last spring, for the first time, we didn't go to their area of Florida for spring break. My husband really wanted to go somewhere else and didn't feel that same need to see them since he had made several trips down there in between.
The end to this long tale is that my children haven't seen their grandparents in almost 2 years. Because my husband and son already had tickets to go to Florida, it never occurred to either my husband or me that my daughter and I should come down also. (I did offer, but my husband just couldn't see the point) Cost aside, (but not irrelevant), the funeral was going to happen very quickly; my daughter has school and sports obligations and I think because my mother in law's memory had deteriorated so much, my husband and I had already been through this emotional withdrawal for awhile so her death certainly didn't come as a shock to us.
What we didn't anticipate was the emotional reaction of my 16 year old daughter, who has been in and out of tears ever since she got the news. She never found out that her grandmother was so close to dying until before she went to school on Friday morning, and because she had an out of town basketball game Friday night, never found out she actually had died until fairly late Friday night. My husband and son left pretty early Saturday morning, as had always been planned, so there really wasn't much of an opportunity to throw her into the mix even if we had had our wits about us more. And since she hasn't seen or really talked to her grandparents for almost 2 years, we simply didn't anticipate the strength of her on going attachment to them.
My father died this fall and while my daughter was emotional about that, she really didn't take it so badly at all. But my father lives alot closer; we saw him more frequently so she was a more frequent witness to his steady decline, and maybe it was just different because she was there to gather with the family and attend the funeral. And frankly I don't think my father was ever the kind of grandparent who was alot of fun, so I don't think the attachment was the same. The last time she saw my husband's parents they were certainly in decline, but not so out of it - my mother in law's memory problems were more incipient and frankly somewhat amusing. At that point she was still able to engage with people. My daughter told me yesteday that she's having so much more of a difficult time with this because she didn't think her grandmather was going to die. I think she also feels badly that she's not there, and both my children think it's awful that more relatives haven't made the trip. Now it's occurred to me that since my father-in-law's health is so poor, she'll probably never see him again either.
I'm realizing that I really am not particularly good at helping my daughter deal with her grief - maybe because we had seemlessly but not necessarily deliberately eased them out of our life. I also think that it was probably a big mistake not to find a way to get my daughter to Florida. Mostly though I'm thinking it was a mistake not to involve my children more in what was happening with their grandparents over the last year and a half. It just doesn't occur to my husband that maybe the kids have needed to talk to them on the phone, regardless of how out of it they have been - and not going down there last year certainly didn't help. Anything that would make the death of a 92 year old woman less of a shock.
As I regrettably discovered last fall when my father died, I'm not much of a griever these days - but it's a real failing on my part not to realize that my daughter, who's feelings are always so much more on the surface, is.
Mair
poster:mair
thread:450111
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/grief/20041230/msgs/450111.html