A Conversation for How Best to Cope with Bereavement

Being Ready

Post 1

J'au-æmne

I know this is probably inapplicable in most cases, I'm just speaking from my own experience here and I hope it helps someone.

My grandmother died in June. She'd been ill with 'progressive cognitive impairment' for years. She didn't die of that - she had a fall and broke her hip and didn't recover from the operation to mend it. But she was 86 years old, she had a weak heart & whatever, she didn't have a vast amount of time left, and I knew that.

Because of her illness she wasn't 'herself'. She was all unreasonable, she could be an absolute nightmare to look after - like a 2 year old who believes she should be the boss. She'd deny at 2am that anyone ever slept at night; she wouldn't understand that because it was 11am and light outside people shouldn't be going back to bed.

The other thing she did was to point out that 'things will be much better when I'm dead'. I always replied, 'I'll cry when you die, I'll be so sad', and she'd believe me for all of three minutes, forget that she believed me, and we'd start the discussion/argument again... This was maddening and frustrating, and I couldn't help but think that things *would* be easier when she'd died, and in a way wish her dead. And now she has died, things are easier.

The being ready part was that I tried to face up to the fact that one day gran would die, and when that day came I'd feel really guilty for thinking how much easier it would be her dead. I knew that was a natural consequence of my feelings, and confronted it then and there before she died, so that when she did die, while I did still feel guilty, I knew that it was better for her sake to have died too; she didn't have to suffer the indignity of not being 'with it' any more, and the frustration of being unable to communicate her thoughts and so on.

My advice is that when faced with the situation that someone you know will die in not a lot of years, you think about how you think you'll feel when it finally happens, and see if there's anything like the guilt I knew I would have to face waiting for you. And then try to face up to it straight away, to take time to deal with that so that when you are finally bereaved your grief needn't be quite so painful as it could have been.

Something that I'm always going to try to remember if I possibly can is that if I'm ill from something I'm not going to get better from, or if I'm just very, very old, I'm going to try to not point out to my carers that it'll be better for them when I'm gone. It's not fair to people who'll have a hard enough job already.

And finally, I did cry when gran died - I never lied to her, and I miss her terribly. smiley - cry


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