My husband's parents are not doing well. We've been doing our best to offer support and help out. But there are something that you can not avoid, help, or otherwise make go away. My father in law is actively dying of liver failure due to fatty liver disease. Now that I am aware that this runs in Beloved's side of the family, I can educate the kids about it. I'm probably going to wait until everything finishes unfolding for my father in law, to be honest.
So far, Beloved is doing ok handling complicated feelings about his father. I am doing my best to hold space for him and support him in whatever way that I can. I understand the complicated feelings that he's going through, having gone through them myself when my own father got a cancer diagnosis. (Dad's in remission thanks to an experimental treatment and will be declared cured if he doesn't have it come back by August.) It is rough to hurry up and wait for someone to die.
It doesn't matter how much you're angry with them, how much you hate them, or how you feel on any front. It's still unpleasant and difficult. You see the suffering of the people who love them and it gets to you. Or at least it gets to me. Grief isn't easy. Grieving someone as they're still technically alive is a paradoxical experience and painful.
Right now, my father in law is spending a lot of time sleeping and getting pain medicine. He fell last week and was in the hospital with respect to that when it was discovered that his liver enzymes were high. The old goat refused treatment after a few days because he was just sick of the side effects. Not long after that, he started spending a lot of time sleeping. The doctors think he has anything from a few days to a few weeks to go.
It's odd. The idea that it can be that uncertain is just strange to me. Then I think about acute liver failure and how it kills you in 24 to 48 hours. It's been a surreal week. I feel like I should have more empathy for the grieving that my sister in law is going through because she is close to her father. I don't, however. I kinda feel like a bad person for that.
I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about death and coming up with no good ideas on how to talk about it. The fish died on Tuesday. I haven't been able to clean out the tank yet because of all the stuff stacked around it right now. As the fish had been acting strangely for about two weeks and he was old, the kids were prepared for it to happen. There wasn't really any wailing and gnashing of teeth like the last time we had a fish die. The kids were disappointed and sad, but they accepted it as a natural part of life. They've agreed that death is not cool and that it's a sad thing. By letting them come to their own conclusions about the matter, I have done my best to keep my opinions out of it.
Looking back on the last week, I think that the death of the fish prepared the kids for the coming death of their grandfather. My only concerns about all of this is how to help my immediate family navigate this process. Beloved, as I said, has conflicting feelings about it all. He has a bad relationship with his father for much of the same reasons why I have a bad relationship with my parents. But we're standing behind the kids and doing our best to guide and support them through this, because they have a relatively good relationship with the man.
My mother in law is obviously distraught. It has driven her blood pressure up and she's had medication changes which have impacted her in various ways due to it. I suspect her doctor didn't fully consider her situation when he made the change and put her on a high dose rather than titrate her up to it. Hopefully as the medication is adjusted, she'll be doing better. But her cognition isn't the best right now for a number of reasons. This has kickstarted my anxiety again about myself developing dementia, because that's in my side of the family.
I try really hard not to think about it but watching my great grandmother H. lose her mental faculties scared the hell out of me. It was somewhat traumatic to watch from the side lines as a kid and it instilled in me a deep fear of losing my memories. Hence why I started journaling to begin with. My thinking was if I wrote everything down, I'd have reminders about the important things as my mind started to go.
Then bipolar happened to me. After living with the facts of how bipolar effects my cognition, I have come to recognize that my frantic urge to save as many memories as possible is futile. I still journal. It helps me to get a handle on my brain and sort through my feelings. But the anxiety about preserving everything just kinda got pushed aside in the light of how this last depressive episode really messed with my memory and stuff. And realizing that the next depressive episode will likely do the same.