AIBU to be absolutely livid with this palliative nurse?

I used to work in a hospice, many years ago. As many pps have said, it can be extremely difficult to predict when exactly someone might go.

My father, when he was dying, was unconscious with ragged breathing for days. (I think it was more distressing for my mother than if he had just slipped away quickly.) Some people actually seem to try to avoid dying when their family are there.

He will have known you were there and that he was surrounded by love. I'm so sorry you've lost your father: it will take a while to process. Please be kind to yourself.

Sorry for your loss. Yes it's misplaced grief.

Is it? I don’t think so.

Sorry for your loss. I have friends in this type of nursing and from what they say “final moments” can be up to several days. It’s very hard to predict and some people can “go on” for several days more than expected. I don’t think the nurse was out of line, your father could have lived a few more days under palliative care so she needed to give you the information.

A nurse who cannot handle a bereaved person's behaviour should indeed consider a different career.
OP was not angry towards the nurse; in her OP she said her feelings might be due to her bereavement.

This. My Grandma was hospitalised with pneumonia. My mum is one of six sisters who had been sat by her bedside in a shift type pattern. My Mum is the eldest and as it was getting late and she had a long drive him, my Grandma insisted she went home to get some sleep.
Minutes after she left, my Mums other sister received a call to explain my Grandma had passed away peacefully in her sleep.
We all truly believe it’s the way she wanted it ❤️

Hi, I don’t know if this helps at all but my Dad had Alzheimer’s. He was in a care home and the care staff rang us to go in after noticing Cheyne Stoke breathing. A few hours later his breathing evened out a bit but we were advised that his body was starting to shut down.
He became less alert, didn’t eat and by day 5 he was asleep. A week later we noticed the erratic breathing again, he started to become cold and eventually passed away peacefully.
The point I’m trying to make is that the nurses genuinely believed that it was imminent on that first day. I guess it’s about reading the signs but no one can be exactly sure.
Also, my Mum invited her vicar along to pray with Dad before he died. He told me, in his experience, that some people choose to die when their loved ones nip home or leave the room. He worded it as a ‘private moment between them and God’ and they try to spare their loved ones of the experience. I’m not overly religious and I’m certainly not pushing this on you but it might be comforting to know. I don’t know.
I am so very sorry to learn of your loss and I know only too well the huge gaping hole it leaves in your heart.
It is completely natural to feel angry when you lose someone and I understand why you might feel that way. As you say, the nurse was experienced which might indicate that it really is a grey area and each patient is different.
I wonder if it might help to speak to her in time. To maybe get some of your questions off your chest so that you can settle your mind and give yourself some closure over something that might continue to upset you.
Take each day at a time. Your emotions are going to be wild for a while so be as kind as you can to yourself xxx

YABU, even though it’s understandable. No one knows when it will happen.

My daughter died in her sleep so quietly I did not hear her die. The sound of the oxygen machine obscured her last breath, I imagine. I did feel guilty for a while, but she was peacefully asleep, which was the best possible way for her to go.

This is one of the reasons nurses are leaving the profession.

I agree, I think they sometimes hand on whilst we are there, then just when you step out they relax and step away.

I have to say I'm also not convinced they can hear you, in my dads last week you couldn't illicit any sort of response, he had by that stage had several strokes on top of dementia, I personally think his body was just about functioning to breath and inefficiently pump blood, and that was about it.

Sorry for your loss

Active dying, the process you had described to you can go on for weeks, in my dad's case it took 2 weeks.

It is nigh on impossible to predict.

Sadly, that last tiny breath is likely post mortem movement of air, noises persist after death for a while.

The important thing to remember is that your dad would have known you loved him, I wasn't with my dad when he passed, I'd nipped out to mow the lawn, came back and he'd gone.

Grief is a difficult process, it will get better.

I use to do a nursing role with end of life care. I agree with pp, it’s very difficult to predict. I would send those on bedside vigils home for food and showers with a promise to call if anything changed. I would warn them though that many people would go while their loved ones were away. Honestly if I had a pound for every time that happened I could have retired already. I always felt like patients knew and would think ‘I’ll just nip away now while no-one is watching’. You were there, on some level, he knew. Sorry for your loss 💐

I hope this thread has brought you some comfort, OP. It has me, I've always worried about a particular thing relating to my relative's death and it has been some comfort to me to see I didn't have control of it.

Thank you so much to everyone who has shared their very personal stories on this thread, it has helped me too.

I'm so sorry for your loss, grief is hard, being angry at somebody for something small and specific is often easier than grief.
You are focussing all of your big feelings on the anger and guilt of missing "the moment"
But you were there for him, you loved him and he knew that.

Dad died last week. Lewy body dementia. We have spent last 4 months driving over 4 hours round trips to urgently to be with him as staff thought he was close to dying on a number of occasions.
he died on his own last week…my sibling had been with him, thought he was going to fine (again) as breathing perfectly ok. Sibling got in house 2 hours later to be phoned to say dad had died “in his sleep”

it was a surprise- he was better than he had been in weeks 🤷🏼‍♀️. None of us were there, even though we all wanted to be.

everyone had warned us over last 6 months, including my own SIL who had done palliative nursing earlier in her career, that is is fairly normal people will die when relatives step out, and are no longer holding their hands or talking etc. goodness knows we’d done enough vigils at his bedside by then, to be in no doubt that he didn’t want to die when he had family about - even in his delusional state with LBD

sorry for your loss, please do look at grief pathway….it may help you a little just now to understand the anger etc. you are feeling. It’s perfectly natural to feel as you do, but please do read what others had said . Think about the times you were with her, and the things you were able to talk to her about. …

So sorry for your loss. When my dad died a few years ago the head consultant in the ICU took him off life support and said it would take around 30 mins for him to die. In fact it took seven seconds. There's no way of predicting the precise moment. I understand the misplaced grief, i wanted to strangle one of the hospital admins I had to deal with in the days after his death. On reflection she was just slightly tactless at worst. But I honestly thought she was a heinous cow at the time.

Noone knows the moment until it has happened - death can be quick or slow even with erratic breathing. It's unfortunate he died when you feel your attention was diverted with this nurse I can see that, and you trusted in her that it was just a facial grimace. But since a death occurs in seconds, it's likely that one's attention may be diverted/ may be asleep etc. sorry for the loss of your dad x

@Smallwhitebutterfly Death is such a mystery- People so often die when their loved one leaves the room- It's almost as if they want to slip away in private.

Our Dad had a dread of ''People mob handed, waiting around my deathbed'' - and when Dad did die , he died at night while we were all asleep in the same house {It was expected}.

Sorry for the loss of your Dad.

It's unscientific, But like to think we will be reunited on some level when we too die.

{Look out for small white butterflies, too!}

I believe my father 'waited' to be alone in hospital before dying. I take comfort from thinking he didn't want any of his children to find him at home.

My mother was 'any time now' for 10 days. This allowed time for friends and even far flung family to say goodbye and for each close family member to sit with her alone. She died with just my Dad and us 5 siblings all together with her. Again, I take comfort in thinking she chose that moment.

We never really know, but we have to make peace in time.
Disbelief, blame, anger...they're all very normal emotions.

I'm so sorry for your loss, OP. It sounds like you were very close to your Dad. That is something to treasure.

So sorry for your loss. My grandma did what you've described with your Dad, but for 16 days. It was horrendous. I'd say don't be angry with the nurse, she's probably seen so many situations with death taking vastly different amounts of time.
Be kind to yourself at this horribly sad time x

You’re grieving and anger is a part of the grieving process.
Please be kind to yourself and allow yourself to work through the process without acting impulsively as a reaction to it.

Also be thankful that you could be there, I didn’t know either of my parents were about to die so I couldn’t be there. One had the other and the other was alone.

Having been with many people as they die consciousness leaves well before the last breath not after, I hope you find this equally comforting. 😞

I don't tend to comment very much on threads, I tend to lurk in the background, but I feel compelled to comment here due to the nature of a previous career.

I just wanted to reassure you that you were there for your dad's last breath, the little gasp you describe, that was it, and you were right by his side. Also, a person's hearing is the last thing to go so he knew you were there and heard you tell him you loved him.

Please don't be angry with yourself for leaving briefly, as others have said, you could have been sitting there for days and it still happened when you popped out the room. But that's irrelevant now and the important thing you need to remember is this.......you were right there with him in that last moment and he knows you loved him.

So sorry for your loss.
Sadly it is a well known fact that patients often wait until their loved ones are out of the room before they take their last breath.

The palliative care nurse did her best to inform you, but dying is not a precise science.