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.

Why are we now making a competition out of which grief is the worst? This place baffles me!!!

@OutForBreakfast

Well most people are decent enough and have the awareness to know that losing your child is the unthinkable. Possibly quite a crude thing to say but if there ever was a grief hierarchy then he’s losing a child is at the top. For most normal, loving mothers anyway.

*yes

@Rosei

Because of the “grief is AlL eNcomPaSsiNg” types on here.

So many phrases used here that are so judgemental..... wallowing, pity party, refusing to take responsibility....

All translate in the mind of the bereaved to go and sort yourself out quietly and don't be a burden or you'll be left isolated and alone.

Fake it till you make it because it's not all about you..... be a trooper..... don't indulge mawkishness.... keep busy, get a project, volunteer.....

No wonder mental health in the bereaved is so medicalised.....

Isn't it time you sorted out the house? Why don't you take a weekend break? Come on now, it's been x amount of time, sort yourself out, it's a bit boring now....

And you're still looking at the world going WTAF just happened and trying to keep a roof over your head....

So then it's "You're doing so well, I don't know if I could be so strong..... "

Bereavement is riddled with idiocy.

Is there a hierarchy of child death? What's worse, a teenager, longer child, baby, (also miscarriage)? What good does it do to analyse this?

Every circumstance is difference. No idea why it was even brought into thread about a widow other than to undermine others feelings

@Rosei It is not a competition. But the kind of people IME who think someone should get over losing a spouse and get back to normal quickly, are also the ones who say their live would fall apart if their child died.
Every bereavement is different. You can not generalise as every situation and individual is unique.

@MissWings Nope. My father was much more devastated about my mother dying than he was by his son's death. Much more. I know this is not how everyone would feel though.

@OutForBreakfast fully agree with you, just not sure why this thread has now turned to comparing the grief of a child when it's nothing to do with a child.

Not saying it would or wouldn’t have worked for me - I was talking about the OP’s MIL who is at the stage where she’s still crying and wanting to sit in front of the TV. It’s unlikely a ‘project’ will help because before she can engage with that she needs to accept the permanence of what’s happened. 12-18 months is usually the point at which the realisation kicks in that your partner is really not coming back and that you have to accept that this is your life now, no matter how much you don’t want to. Acceptance is the hardest part, and from what the OP says, this is where her MIL is now. So until she’s through this part of the grieving process and ready to engage with appropriate counselling or whatever help she needs, lists of things to do to take her mind off things are useless. She neither wants nor needs to have her mind taken off things - she needs help to realise that this is her life now and she needs to accept it and move forward.

My husband died suddenly at 61 more than six years ago. Apart from being a different person, I was in full-time work and can drive, and I'll say both of those aspects of the MIL's life will not help, though hard to change.

The tiresome "which bereavement is worse" can fuck off.

What is true is that the MIL's bereavement, like mine, has a special name - traumatic bereavement. It is not worse, than any other, but has its own characteristics which need to be acknowledged by the bereaved and their supporters. Yes, the second year has its own trials.

This wonderful book was given to me by DonateLife was very helpful: concise, compassionate and unafraid to draw the line between what is normal, and where the bereaved need to seek help.

www.bookdepository.com/Coping-with-Grief-5th-Edition-Dianne-McKissock/9780733339578?redirected=true&selectCurrency=AUD&w=AF45AU9SS9RXNMA8YCCZ&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI0vCu_MLt_AIVZZzCCh1gbgKKEAYYAiABEgI0K_D_BwE

The crying, going over the what ifs are all normal. What isn't is the silent treatment of her son. Absolutely not on.

Unfortunately the MIL's rejection of most helps might very well drag her down in the long run, and I say this as one who was well aware of how my DH was the outgoing one, and how much we did together. I've had to go against my essential nature to make this good, and still find it easier to be on my own, the default option.

All said, 18 months is not a long time, so reiterating those lifelines might be taken up in time. One of the best, if hardest things a supporter can do is keeping offering the help.

Oh, and the tiresome "which bereavement is worse" can fuck off.

This thread turned into bereavement top trumps way before child death was brought into it.

No one has the right to determine how or for how long another person grieves.

But equally, the person grieving has no right to determine how much or how long other people support the way in which their grief is expressed.

So the MIL in this thread is perfectly entitled to grieve as she sees fit. Her son and his family and also perfectly entitled to say they don't want her to come and stay when she unable or unwilling to take anyone else wants and needs into account.

This sounds a bit like my mum.
She would cry a lot and just say there was no point to any suggestion I made regarding support groups.

She also turned the conversation to my dad and the way he died. There are also many inaccuracies to what she remembers.
Everything evolved around the memory of him.
To be honest I’ve found the aftermath more traumatic.
It was absolutely draining and sucked the life from us all.

In the end I had to literally be very honest with her
‘We want you to stay with us but you have to join in, come for the nice walk, have a nice lunch etc otherwise there is no point in coming, you can’t mope at our house when you are here for a change of scenery’
Made it clear we can talk about dad whenever we want but can’t pepper everything with dad not being here, we are all acutely aware of that.
Yes dad would have loved to see dd 50m swimming certificate but she wanted you to be happy for her not sob over her achievement.

I then made suggestions that she should get out a bit more - go to the library, a walk around town, go to the garden centre. Change the routine.

The conversation didn’t go down too well and she was cross with me but little by little it started to get a bit better and she goes to a book club at the library and the biggest shock joined the WI. Both things she did on her own.

We are 4 years in. It just takes time 😕

Having had time to look through more posts, this thread is an excellent example of why MNHQ should be more active in taking things off AIBU and into Bereavement.

Far too much sensitive stuff ends up in AIBU.

@echt sorry to hear about your bereavement. You are right traumatic bereavement does have different features.

Well I'm sympathetic OP.
Yes, the poor woman has had something shitty happen to her, but two wrongs don't make a right - she shouldn't be sulking at her son and upsetting her grandchild.
What to do? God knows. It's fairly clear why she doesn't have many friends eh?
Is there any sort of interaction with her that does go okay, at least, sort-of-okay?

I don't think OP said she doesn't have the right to grieve, just that she and her family are finding it difficult to deal with and that's perfectly valid.
It's also incredibly frustrating trying to help someone when they refuse all help and OP isn't wrong to feel frustrated doesn't make her a bad person, just human like the rest of us.

I think I started people off down that rabbit hole when I posted in response to someone saying that the grief of losing a child was worse than anything else. To be clear - I don’t think any kind of grief trumps any other. Grief is different things to different people

I think changing the routine is a good suggestion if someone is open to it - doesn’t need to be major, just little by little. There’s a school of thought that biologically speaking, grief at the loss of a loved one occurs because the brain develops a pattern based on our daily routine within the relationship. When you lose a loved one that pattern is taken away and the brain can’t cope, so it constantly looks for the original routine for comfort and when it can’t find it, the resulting distress manifests as grief, which in turn, can become deeply entrenched. Changing your routine slowly, as and when you feel able, teaches the brain a new pattern and once it gets used to it, that’s when the realisation hits that the change is permanent and you begin to accept the loss. The scientific explanation doesn’t offer any comfort to those who are grieving, but it offers a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel in that things will improve with time as and when the brain accepts a ‘new pattern.’

My mum became a widow in her late 60s. It was at least 5 years, maybe more, before she started actively pursuing a social life. She found it hard at first to always be the ‘spare’ socialising with a load of couples. It became easy as she met more widows, by her late 70s her social circle was entirely widows and they had a fine old time together!

Before dad died I would have said mum was a pretty strong and independent person. She’d worked FT in a demanding job and earned more than dad did. But after he died her anxieties just overwhelmed her. Things that seemed simple to me were just impossible to her and she would go on and on about them. Like returning a faulty item to a shop or ringing up to change an appointment. She was just consumed by the unfairness that she perceived in having to do everything for herself instead of having a partner there. I don’t know if grief created the anxiety or if it was always there but under the surface because dad would do all the things that she ‘couldn’t’.

DH and I have each had the experience of meeting someone who wanted to talk a lot about their parent who had passed away a few years earlier, tell you all the details about the illness and the funeral, cry freely about them, raise money for the illness they had etc. And then weeks/months into the friendship they ask about our parents for the first time - only to discover we had a parent who had died of the same illness but at a much younger age. When it happened to DH I asked him if he found it upsetting and he mostly just acknowledged that the person had a different way of grieving, though sometimes he found it hard. I worried that I was being perceived as shutting down their grief when I changed the subject, where I was just trying to spare DH’s feelings.

Does she acknowledge your husband's grief? Because when my Mum died in similar circumstances when I was 30 and my sister was 34 we were absolutely devastated as were my nephews. It seems this is all about her loss and not her son's. Is he OK? Does she even ask him?

Absolutely wouldn’t disagree with any of that but at what stage does her family call time ? I’ve said previously, any grief counsellor will tell you that the second year after the loss of a partner can be worse than the first, as you are trying to deal with the reality of your loss and with acceptance of it, which is the hardest part. And MIL’s behaviour seems to be consistent with this so it seems to me this is the wrong time to be withdrawing support.

Agree with all of this.

God, what an awful comment to make about people who have been bereaved and are only trying to express what their grief felt like to them.

In her 60s and not long after my dad had died, DM quietly decided to learn to swim and joined a class. She invited me over to visit her one evening, out of the blue (I lived 90 minutes away), and we went to the pool. That evening she swam 20 metres and was awarded a certificate. I was such a callow, shallow young woman that I was more concerned about the unflattering nature of her swimsuit than that she'd achieved one of her ambitions late in life.

It was only years later, after she'd died, that the significance of learning to swim hit me. Sink or swim. She swam. My lovely, quietly strong mum. I wish I'd appreciated her more.