Don’t want to be around bereaved MIL anymore

[turquoisepenguin]

This is probably going to make me sound like the worst person in the world but here goes.

FIL died eighteen months ago, it was quite sudden and he was relatively young (65).

MIL is now very depressed. I do feel very sorry for her because FIL was basically her whole world. She doesn’t have any other family, doesn’t have many friends, doesn’t drive, and is retired. She used to spend most of her time with FIL. So it is really sad.

She recently came to stay. This was actually my suggestion as I know she is bored and lonely and I thought it would cheer her up. Unfortunately it was a disaster. She was in a terrible mood with DH because he asked her to get the train (he used to pick her up and drive to ours but it’s a six hour round trip). So she barely spoke to him or me for the first 24 hours. She didn’t want to go out anywhere so she sat and watched daytime TV for six hours (this is not an exaggeration). She cried a lot of the time and turned most conversations round to FIL.

She is clearly depressed but won’t go to the doctor or have counselling. She is in a terrible place but she won’t accept any help and is very rude to DH. She refused to say goodbye to him, again because she was unhappy about having to get the train. At the end we were both completely exhausted and fed up and the kids were a bit confused by the whole thing.

I had suggested to DH that we should invite her to stay again in March but I’ve just said I think we should abandon that idea because I don’t think I can face it again. However, I also feel like a terrible person because she is obviously very sad. I don’t know what the answer is really. But I have my own issues with work, family illness, kids etc and I just don’t think I can face this on top.

So now she ‘needs a project’. She sounds to be still at the stage where even venturing over the doorstep is enough to bring on a panic attack. Yet you’re expecting her to engage with what in her view, will be a much harsher world now that her partner is no longer in it. YOU DON’T GET OVER THE LOSS OF A LOVED ONE, YOU LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT, AND A PROJECT WILL NOT MAGICALLY MAKE THINGS BETTER !!!

What you’re really saying is ‘let’s leave you to get on with it until you’re easier to deal with’.

@Lovelysausagedogscrumpy so what should they be doing?

Shouldn't the OP and her husband be entitled to think of his mental health? OP has said how hard it is for him to listen to her going over the events of his father's last few days, is he entitled to protect himself? How is it going to benefit anyone, even his mother, if she manages to pull him down into such a depression that he can't function? How about his timeline, this hasn't just happened to her.

By the way how do you know it is the worst experience of her life?

Does she need a project????

Utterly unbelivable the ignorance of the effects of grief.

@Lovelysausagedogscrumpy Not at all. My thoughts (as someone who has been widowed) are principally with the MIL, although her son has also lost his father and is grieving too. However, she is showing a lot of signs of being stuck in a depression that will only become more intractable without her having the help to cope with it. Persuading (not forcing) her to do so is to her benefit, because the world (including her immediate family) will move on to a place of greater acceptance of the loss however she feels. She can't stop that and has no right to.

No, there is no time limit and the family shouldn’t be expecting her to adhere to the expectation in their timeline. Yes, the OP’s husband has lost his dad. But he has a wife and family to comfort him. He’s not the one trying to come to terms with the loss of his whole way of life, and he’s not the one going home to an empty house. And if you think the loss of a parent is in any way comparable to the loss of your life partner, you’re in for a massive shock if it happens to you.

@Lovelysausagedogscrumpy

So it’s a get out of jail free card then because it’s “all encompassing”. No that’s just another way of saying you’re self obsessed and you haven’t got the capacity to think about anyone else but yourself. How long can it be “all encompassing” for?….5,10,15 years? At what point does that person take responsibility for their emotions and how they also think of others?

I am specifically talking about “normal bereavements” here. Losing a spouse is within the realms of normal. Losing a parent is also within the realms of normal. I am not referring to people who lose children because that’s not within the realm of normal. Kids shouldn’t go before you.

Certainly in “normal” bereavement circumstances then people can grieve for as long as they see fit but they should expect some consequences and boundaries if they try and drown everyone else around them with their own misery. It is quite possibly to be self aware even in the midst of grief but there are some “all encompassing” individuals who have no degree of self reflection or awareness on how their grief is actually affecting other people. At the core it can be incredibly selfish.

Yes like people who can't understand a son's grief for his father. Utterly unbelievable that people have so little sympathy.

So you are judging how this man should feel and cope while telling us people shouldn't do that about his mother?

Project

I've been through grief & I've helped other people through grief too

After time, people do need a project
Otherwise, the grief becomes all consuming !

If she has no friends or hobbies, she will need something. She cannot rely solely on her DS who lives 2 hours away.

On the face of it, nobody is going to respond to your post with "of course she should be allowed to be as rude and difficult as she likes" - but there are a couple of red flags in your post which make me think that things are not quite as one-sided as all that.

You say that she watched daytime TV for six hours - you make quite a big point out of that. Why is that such a big no-no for you? She's still quite recently bereaved, and depressed. Grief is exhausting. Was she hurting anbody by wanting to curl up in front of the telly rather than go out? Did you make your disapproval as obvious to her as you have in your OP? Because I found it rather sanctimonious and lacking in empathy.

You say that she spent a lot of the time crying. This indicates that not only is she depressed - hence the holing up in front of the TV and the low energy/lack of enthusiasm for wholesome pursuits - but that she is still very much in the raw early stages of grief. Any input from you/DH which comes across as trying to move her on before she is ready, or critical of the depth and pace of her grieving, is naturally going to be met with anger and hurt. You found her rude, uncooperative and negative. I wonder what she would say about you, if we could ask her.

It does also seem an odd time to have decided that she should travel by train, if she is used to being picked up. As a recently bereaved older person who, as you say, doesn't have much involvement with the world beyond the lifelong companion she has lost, this will have felt very daunting to her, and she was probably very hurt that her loved ones either couldnot see this, or did not consider it worth exercising a bit of patience and consideration over.

By the way how do you know it is the worst experience of her life?

Because I’ve been through it myself. Losing your life partner is not comparable to anything else. You not only lose the person, you lose your way of life, your shared memories, the protection and comfort of their love and the world becomes a much harsher place as a result. 18 months is a very short time to deal with everything that the loss of a life partner brings and the overwhelming sense I get from the OP is that they think MIL should be further forward than she is. Grief is a process, and everyone is different. How would you feel if you had to step out into a world that no longer contained the most important person in your life, and start all over again in trying to rebuild ?

@ancientgran Exactly. If no one has the monopoly on grief then why does her grief trump her sons?

If this woman actually had the capacity to be self aware she and her son could support one another. That’s what a lot of families do, they come together in their shared grief and support one another. One party doesn’t trump the other in terms who gets to be the “saddest”. That’s a fragmented approach and usually an entitled one.

My mother in law lost her 91 year old mother last year and believe you me. No one and I mean no one is allowed to express grief other than her. None of her siblings are allowed to grieve, none of the grandchildren and not her surviving aunt. She refuses help and support but then told all her family on Christmas Eve including her grandchildren that she was suicidal and ready to die. My husband gently encouraged a conversation about how she might think about being grateful she got to have her mother around for so long. He was met with hostility and rage. It’s all just allllllllll encompassing you see.

The whole family is now sick of her.

I lost my much loved mum last year!

I know my grief snd loss although acute are no where to be compared to my dads loss of a wife lover friend and daily companion since 1955!!!

To compare the sons loss of a parent to a loss of a partner is utterly ridiculous

Agree.

I have a co-worker who grew up with a terribly abusive father -- cruel, violent. It really sounds horrible. He never married and has one distant, alcoholic sister and as far as I can tell, one friend who is rather a mess.

He's a nice guy and can be witty but at age 66 EVERY single topic of chat somehow gets back around to "the time Dad pushed my face into my plate because I said I didn't want more gravy" or "the time Dad knocked mum over in the kitchen" or "we would have been shoved down the stairs if we'd asked Dad to take us on holiday."

He's had several years of therapy recently and seems a bit more at peace but cannot help himself from interjecting these traumatic events into the most benign conversations. "Quite a bit of rain we're having." Yes, Dad hated rain and used to get into a real temper when it did."

I often think if he had more of a life he wouldn't dwell so much. Have gently raised volunteer opportunities, part-time job opportunities (he's very kind and quiet and would make a great pet-sitter on Rover, for example; he loves animals, and could use the money), travel possibilities -- ANYTHING. He just goes to work, tends to his house (which he inherited from his parents; you'd think he'd want to live elsewhere instead of his childhood/teens years hellhole) and watches TV.

It's sad as I see people start to avoid him or drift away when he joins the conversation.

OP's MIL is going to end up like this if she doesn't look out.

@Lovelysausagedogscrumpy

A death of a spouse would certainly hit you hard but again it doesn’t necessarily get the monopoly on all other types of grief.

Personally I think losing a child is the unthinkable but that’s just my opinion.

Death touches us all at some point. Losing spouses and parents and siblings will affect us all at some point. We don’t all necessarily lose children before we die and I think that is the hardest.

This. When I lost my husband I found that watching TV was a comfort. I watched crap soaps and American sitcoms - they took me out of myself for a while and I didn’t have to think about my own situation. When I was ready, I watched less and less and moved slowly back into the real world. A pp was suggesting that MIL needed a project - no understanding at all that 18 months is a very short time in which to come to terms with such a life changing event. Unless you have been through it, you can’t possibly understand it.

Personally I think losing a child is the unthinkable but that’s just my opinion.

I was waiting for someone to say this. Typical MN.

A child dependant on you yes. An adult child that is not part of your day to day life no.

Personally I lost both parents, a grandmother, a beloved aunt and a close friend in a brief four-year span, while also finding out that my only sibling had advanced cancer (she was age 52 at the time.)

I actually contributed a chapter to a book that my workplace was producing, about 75 pages, in the three months after my mother died. I would not recognize that if I saw it, don't remember what I wrote and have zero desire to read it, but I fulfilled the commitment and apparently adequately so as it was published commercially with little editing. I did it because I didn't want to let the others down despite my immense grief.

I hold far more than an inkling about bereavement as do many others on this thread and quite frankly it is possible to grieve privately and quietly without insisting that others' lives also be dominated by it. It is quite possible to continue to be polite and considerate of others while deeply grieving.

Yet another example that you haven’t grasped it. She hasn’t the capacity to be self aware because she’s grieving the loss of her husband, and 18 months is nothing - a drop in the ocean - where that kind of grief is concerned. She’s not competing to see who’s the saddest, and she’s not ‘entitled’ - she’s grieving !! Your mother in law lost her mother last year - not very long -and yet you are castigating her for grieving. In the depths of my grief for the loss of my husband, if someone had suggested being grateful for having him around for so long I’d have hit them !!

You can't just expect people to give up their own lives indefinitely though. You just can't. The OP and the DH have been supportive. They've listened to MiL repeatedly, they've had her to stay, he's gone to pick her up. She can't just hand over her life to someone else to resolve.

They've been understanding and patient. MiL has refused to take any steps whatsoever to make her life better and to come to terms with her loss: counselling, medical support, seeking the support of other bereaved people. Nothing. No one is expecting the MiL to just get over it. But equally she can't expect everybody else to sacrifice themselves for her. The fact she quite easily has cut people out of her life suggests that she has always been someone for whom everything has to be on her terms or nothing.

And while I empathise with your loss, it doesn’t include that of a spouse. Entirely different animal.

There is a reason that many people die within 12 months of their partner dying.

A spouse dying that you have most of your adult life with is normal. It is also for many (although not all) people devastating. That is why your risk of dying within 12 months of your spouse dying soars.