Please post your replies to raybbr
Please know that I am praying. May God provide peace and comfort as needed.
Blessings,
trussell
If you want on/off my prayer ping list, please let me know. All requests happily honored.
Posted on 06/14/2008 6:47:09 PM PDT by raybbr
Fellow FReepers,
My wife is up in upstate NY caring for her dying father. She and her sister are trying to make him comfortable at his home during his final days.
She's an RN and fully understands his condition. He won't go to the hospital. He's had a pacemaker for over twenty years.
He's very weak and she said, "He's going to die tonight!"
He may not die but is in very bad shape.
She is a good woman who needs help from God to help get her through this.
Thanks,
Ray
ping for prayers, please....
Prayers up, Ray. May God bless all three of you.
Prayers for all
Godspeed.
Ray, I am so incredibly sorry to hear that!
Prayers have definitely been sent up for your wife, her sister, and her father; may God give them all true peace, comfort & strength as they go through this together.
God bless her for being with him to the end...
Prayers for you and your family.
You are in our prayers and warm thoughts.
One of the greatest gifts I ever received was to be with my mother when she was dying. It was a very close time for both of us and I remember it and am grateful to this day I could be with her.
My heart goes out for you Ray
I’m praying with you for your wife comfort and peace.
In Jesus name. Amen
Comfort Peace and Love for your wife and father in law raybbr.
prayers up for all of you!
Your wife is certainly in my prayers tonight, Ray. Last spring, my husband died at home, and our grown children helped me care for him so he could. He didn’t want to go to the hospital for any reason, either.
Prayers for all of you and with a husband like at her side she will get through this......
+
Prayers joined from here.
Prayers for all.
May God support and bless your wife and her sister for being with, and caring for, their father at his end time on this earth.
Prayer BUMP
Saying prayers for your wife and your father in law. As many here at FR, I understand all too well what your wife is going through.
Your family is in my prayers.
Prayers for you and your family.
You all have my prayers. This is difficult indeed.
Prayers for your wife, her sister and their father. God bless them that they can be there to care for him in his final hours. they WILL meet again. Prayers for you too.
Been there...
A humble Prayer for her, her Dad, and her sister...
Saying Prayers:)
Please post your replies to raybbr
Please know that I am praying. May God provide peace and comfort as needed.
Blessings,
trussell
If you want on/off my prayer ping list, please let me know. All requests happily honored.
And you are a good husband to have posted this thread. May God uphold, bless, and carry your wife and sister-in-law through this time, and may your Father-in-law pass peacefully into the arms of Jesus.
Prayers for your family and especially your wife and her father.It is so wonderful to care for and love our family members.God BLESS your wife.
Polly
AMEN to this!!
Prayers on the way!
I know that the prayers are giving her strength. She's holding up okay.
I am having a hard time not being angry at her other six brothers and sisters. They can't find the time to come up. In fact, they are trying to get her to bring him back to CT so they don't have to travel.
His wishes are to be in his home on lake Chenango when he passes.
God's will be done.
Ray
From a distance I can say, that your wife’s siblings are the one who are losing out. The gift of being with a loved one, especially a parent, when they are dying is a spiritual gift.
Afterwards, your wife will have more peace in her grief than the others.
God is gving her his grace to stand firm and walk through this. He is also giving you the grace to support her. She will always be grateful for your support during this time.
Our prayers are with you all.
Job 12:10 ~ “In His hand is the life of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.”
Ray, your wife is a woman of honor, and the value of what she has given her father is beyond calculation.
As for her brothers and sisters, it is their loss.
Ray, please hang in there. I know how difficult this is, and it can be very difficult for the entire family in a lot of ways, be careful not to let it fracture your family.
I want to tell you her story, not to make you miserable, but to help you understand that you are not alone on this, and that if you aren’t careful, it can have long-lasting consequences on your family’s relationships.
My mom was diagnosed right around this time last year with a grade 4 non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, which was pretty bad at her age. We have six kids in our family, and my dad passed away back in 2000.
When we found out, it fell to my two older brothers and myself to figure out what to do. My youngest brother was estranged and didn’t have much contact with my Mom, one of my younger sisters just could not emotionally handle it, and was out of the picture...nobody could blame her, she just couldn’t deal with it. My other younger sister lived about 100 miles away, but in four months after the diagnosis, she only came down once or twice and did not offer any help. I did not hold this against her, though, because I know that people often don’t know how to navigate this territory, for their own reasons. It was what she DID do later that I had an issue with.
My oldest brother and his family lived with her, so they handled her day to day living, the most difficult job of all. She became angry and bitter, and they bore the brunt of it while working their tails off. My other older brother handled finances, and my wife and I did a large part of her medical stuff, advising, taking her to appointments and such.
Complicating all of this was her mental state, since we did not know that she was having metastases to the brain at the time. She originally had said she didn’t want to undergo chemotherapy (she was 75 years old and had never quite got her vitality back after caring for my dad who suffered a major stroke and could not care for himself) She felt she was tired and ready to go. But one of her grandchildren pleaded with her to have chemotherapy, so she decided to do it. It nearly killed her, as frail as she was, and after many tearful talks, she decided once again to forgo chemotherapy. By this time, however, her mental state had deteriorated a great deal, and it was difficult to tell how much she understood completely. I tried to have her sign a DNR form, but she just was not quite ready to do that, so I just left it for her to think about. (You don’t want a fireman, policeman or a doctor trying to revive her if she is not going to undergo chemotherapy)
As anyone who has ever done this knows, it is a full time difficult job that is not only physically exhausting but emotionally exhausting as well. My mother had a serious episode with a case of shingles that spread to her entire back, buttocks and legs. The people at the hospital said it was the worst they had ever seen. She spent a week in the hospital, and there was no way we could care for her at home, so we had her placed in a short term acute care facility where they could administer IV antibiotics and other drugs. (Basically a nursing home with medical people onsite who handle that kind of thing.)
Needless to say, my mother HATED it and wanted to sign herself out and go home, but we had to keep convincing her that she could not, because we could not care for her at home because she could not get treatment, could not feed herself or use the bathroom on her own. Our plan was to get her healed as best we could so that she could get rid of the shingles, exercise her so she could walk on her own (or with a walker) and use the bathroom and eat. But she just didn’t want to participate in rehab.
She wanted to die, but wasn’t there yet.
My sister, who had not come down more than once or twice the entire time or helped in any way, showed up one night and took my mom home. Didn’t call us to tell us, those who had been taking vacation time to care for her, taking her to all of her appointments, feeding her and helping with her bodily functions 24x7 for nearly four months. Nothing. Just came down, signed her out and took her home. A done deal.
We had worked damned hard to get her in there and get the treatment she needed as well as the home care that we could get (Visiting nurses several hours each day, etc.) Signing yourself out AMA has consequences on the availability of those scarce resources...they are not going to give them to you if you are not following medical advice...other people need them too.)
I was angrier at my sister for doing this than I had ever been in my entire life at anyone. As were my two brothers, especially the oldest one who not only runs his own business at home, but was taking care of my mother pretty much 24x7.
There is a lot more to the story, my sister and brother brought in my mother’s lawyer to try and change the will to give the house to her instead of to my oldest brother who had been caring for my parents in many ways for nearly ten years.
The lawyer, who knew my family personally for most of his life, came to the house to talk it over the changes with my mom, sister and youngest brother , but refused to become involved. He could see my mother was not competent to make those decisions, even though my mother, sister and youngest brother maintained that she could. the lawyer walked out.
At this time, the cancer had a hold of my mother’s brain, and like the proverbial candle that burned the brightest right before it sputters out, she was burning brightly with an intensity that made her someone I didn’t recognize. She was able to speak intelligently, but this person was not her.
My mom burned brightly like this for a week or two, then crashed spectacularly. As we had predicted, when the going got tough, my sister basically took her to the hospital and dropped her off in the Emergency Room and went home, and my two brothers and I showed up there and arranged to take her home, since it was clearly getting towards the end for her. She was in and out of consciousness from that point onward, and not lucid. For a week or so, this was how she existed.
My brother called me one night and said the hospice nurse and his wife (a nurse) didn’t think she was going to make it through the night. They had been up for days taking care of her, and were burnt, so I spend the night over there.
I held her hand for nearly 12 hours straight and spoke to her. I told her how much she had meant to me, and how the things she had done for me helped me in life. She was completely unconscious the entire time, except for one 10 second interval when she opened her eyes and looked at me. It was around 3:00 AM.
I had been thinking a lot of our last real words together, on the last day I had gone over to talk to my sister. My mother was still speaking and interacting, and was trying to justify what my sister had done. I had left after a heated discussion with my sister, probably the most heated discussion with anyone I had ever had in my life, as my mother looked on. I wanted to speak privately with my sister, but both she and my mother wanted to be present, so that is what I had to do. I had very angry words with my sister, but I stayed respectful to my mother, and she to me.
I wondered how much my mom had been with it during that discussion, and how much had been the brain tumors talking. As I sat through that long night with her, I wondered if she knew how much I loved her, and always had.
When she stirred around 3:00 AM, opened her eyes and looked at me, I saw her in there looking back at me, even if faintly or nearly non-existent. But I saw her eyes seeing me and recognizing someone.
I looked at her and said, “Hi Mom. How are you? Mom, you know how much I love you, how very much I do?”
She said in a clear, soft, voice: “Yes...I do. I know.”
Then she passed out and never spoke again. It was one of the most powerfully emotional moments of my entire life. I almost felt that, as she was waiting to enter the next world, she came back into this world for that short ten second interval just to put me at ease.
She didn’t die that night. I went home at 7:00 AM after the sun came up, and the next day, my wife took me down to the South Shore of Massachusetts for lunch and some relief. It was a beautiful, gorgeous fall day, September 29th. We stumbled across a little bay, and got out of the car at about 11:00 to stretch our legs, and my phone rang. My mom had passed away.
I looked about me, and I was taken in by the beauty of the day. It just hit me like a train, how wonderful and beautiful it was. I thought that if one had to leave this world, you could not ask for a more beautiful day to begin your journey.
As it stands now, I have not spoken directly to my sister since then. Nobody has. I put together a video of my Mom that we played at the funeral, and I made a DVD for the other members of my family. My sister did not attend the wake or funeral.
For my sister, I made a special one that had an intro where I recorded myself, and I did my best to make my peace with her. I told her I understood that she did those things because she had the best interests of our mom at heart, and that I would be ready to see her at any time. It is in her court, and has been for around seven months now.
My other sister, who couldn’t even face my mom’s illness, finally found the strength in the last days of my mom’s life to face it, and the experience has cemented my two brothers, my sister and myself together. My youngest brother is bitter and alienated for his own reasons, and seems like there is an anger and enmity that boils within him. My sister lives in New Hampshire, and nobody knows.
This is long...I hope you will forgive me. It was a bit cathartic to write it down. The point is, don’t be angry and let your wife be angry at her siblings because they aren’t helping out in the way you might like them to. Just do the best you can and hope the chips fall well. If they contribute, great. If they don’t, try to find it in your heart to forgive them, because they will need that forgiveness. We are all weak in our own way, and that may be their weakness for whatever reasons they have. Good luck.
May the Lord sustain your wife and her sister as they care for their father. They will never regret having spent this Father’s Day with him.
He should be where he wants to be and his wishes should be honored. He should not be traveling anyway. Your wife is doing the best she can and making her dad’s last days comfortable and in a place he wants to be. Don’t look back on anything else. This moment is his at his request and she is doing everything she can to be there for him. God bless her dad and her for being such a wonderful daughter.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Rememver the phases of grief are
Denial — this really isn’t/hasn’t happened
Bargaining — I’ll do anything, God, just save my mom/husband
Anger — Self explanatory
Depression — Goes along with anger
Acceptance — Finally accepting that your husband, wife or whoever will, indeed, die. (Or has died, in some cases.)
Reaching out
These are all put forth by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her book, On Death and Dying.
I’ll put a link for a grief recovery weekend ministry done by peers in the next post.
I hold her hand.I just lost my Beautiful Sister.She is in my prayers for strength.Fatima
Oops
Remember
No amount of nurse training prepares anyone to care for a loved one. My prayers are with her.
Praying for your wife. What she’s doing for her father will help sustain her when he’s gone.
I understand completely what she’s going through, as I did the same for my dad. I took care of him the last two years of his life, and as hard as it was at times, I can’t imagine how I would have gotten through this last year if I hadn’t spent that time with him, giving back to him just a little of what he had given to me.
Your wife will grieve hard in the coming months and I’m praying that she’ll know in her heart that she did all she could possibly do.
May the Lord bless your wife for her selflessness and comfort her with peace that passes all understanding.
prayer bump
Prayers up...
Prayers for your wife, her father and your entire family.
Prayers for peace and courage.
Prayers!
Prayers for your wife, and her father, and all concerned.
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