To wonder if DINKs will be more lonely when older?

[Aintbaint]

Ok, so hear me out. This isn’t an US v Them thread …
I have a lot of Double Income No Kids friends - for various reasons, mostly choice.
So for most career has been their main focus, followed by their partner… Most have been very financially comfortable, travelled a lot, able to afford holiday homes, successful work wise etc basically all the benefits of no kids!

But now we’re all in our late 40s and 50s and slowed down a bit, retired early, separated or divorced, Quite a few just seem to to have lost focus, seem a bit depressed or unhappy, and don’t have the same focal point that having kids can bring.
I stupidly thought that kids would get older and we’d have our independence back but obvs kids are always there in someways - you never stop worrying or thinking about them or doing stuff with them. So still that focal point in many ways and Indaynthat as someone who does have a FT job they like and hobbies…

YABU - of course DINKs are just as happy and not lonely etc

YANBU - it’s harder as you get older when it’s just you or you+partner and work isn’t as important or you retire

So what were you actually trying to achieve with this thread?

Am I right that you didn’t expect women without kids to be on the thread, and your original aim was to discuss us with other parents?

I'm assuming that the original plan wasn’t to upset women who wanted to have children and couldn’t for whatever reason, or to urge women who chose not to have kids to go forth & procreate.

‘God this thread got morbid! I'm early 30s, I'll be amazed if I even make it to old age.’

Death is the only guarantee for any of us unfortunately. I think it’s actually more morbid to think you won’t make it to old age at all!

Because vast amounts of the content on mumsnet has nothing to do with parenting, and it’s a fairly unique site.

So what you are saying OP is that you thought everyone would agree with your daft post to make you feel better about whatever and now you have the hump.

Well obviously visited regularly by friends and family, and also regularly visiting others, but at the time of death, alone. I’m not sure why you’d assume that dying at home would mean unvisited? Or unsupported? That’s a bit of projection I feel….

Though most of my relatives have required little support outside of the usual garden / cleaner / odd job man to sort out things that they couldn’t, at a time convenient to them. All were active, mobile and capable of leaving the house by themselves. Some still drove well into their 80s, others switched to taxis a little earlier.

But they were always found same day or in the morning precisely because they were active until the end and so when a phone or door wasn’t answered the alarm was raised by a friend or neighbour or, occasionally, family. I can only think of two people in my family in the last 3 generations who did have a cause of death other than something that could be attributed to old age. Of those, one was leukemia, and the other, my husband, a heart attack. But both of them, at the moment of death, also died alone.

My husband died at home, collapsed on the bedroom floor after a heart attack, while I was downstairs. The nice ambulance men tried to resuscitate him but couldn’t, and then put him back to bed. I had an hour or so lying with him until the undertaker arrived, and that was the perfect way to say good bye. I felt no need to see him again after that, or to have a maudlin wake or period of mourning. We had a short funeral, and a long party afterwards, centred around a champagne afternoon tea. Seemed to me to be the perfect English way to me. You really have a narrow outlook on life, don’t you OP?

‘My husband died at home, collapsed on the bedroom floor after a heart attack, while I was downstairs. ‘

So sorry for your loss

In my culture we look after people at home if possible, and are very open about dying and death in general, holding wakes and the like. Funerals are a community thing, we go to the funerals of co-workers family members

Something about that sentence made me hear Jennifer Saunders say, "Christ!"

And whether people want it or not we are all fated to die alone. Having been with a couple of people as they died (one childfree but with loads of friends and family visiting in her final hours and the other my mum who had her dc with her) I was struck by the fact that this is one journey we all have to take alone. The not dying on their own thing is more important for the living than the dead.

Op, from this thread what comes across is your fear of what is a natural part of life and that you protect yourself from that fear by reassuring yourself that it will be great because you will have all your loved ones with you, but death is a mystery and none of us have any idea whatsoever if that will make any difference whatsoever.

The not dying on their own thing is more important for the living than the dead.

That's so true actually. Thank you, you've made me feel a lot better after a couple of posts earlier... didn't.

Considering the amount of elderly people I know through work, you wouldn’t even know a lot of them have children, they suddenly appear when the Will doesn’t go their way.

Having children is no guarantee of not being lonely.

Some children die before their parents, a grim but true fact but as their “child” was over 35 years they can hardly pop out another one to stave off the loneliness.

You sound jealous of people without children. Playing, the b1tchy you’ll be lonely card, which I always find really offensive as some of those couples who tell you they don’t want children are in fact lying, they actually can’t have children but don’t want to go through their personal misery with you or anyone else.

‘In my culture we look after people at home if possible, and are very open about dying and death in general, holding wakes and the like. Funerals are a community thing, we go to the funerals of co-workers family members

Something about that sentence made me hear Jennifer Saunders say, "Christ!"’

I understand that for many death is a hard thing to deal with openly. The temptation is to either cover it, hide it, say you’d rather die alone than ‘inconvenience’ anyone or joke about it. Some cultures are more open than others, and after years of living in England I realise that that in general, this isn’t an open culture when it comes to death, dying, funerals.

I get the feeling OP is conflicted - torn between envying her childfree acquaintances (given her attitude I won’t say friends) and being shit-scared of being alone at all, let alone at the end of her life. Worse, she’s massively judgmental of those who live differently and don’t share her attitudes.

OP, do you want some validation and appreciation? I am not saying this to be nasty; we all do at times. My DC are grown., and occasionally I want those days back when I was the centre of their world. There is no shame in it, I think.

Christ, what a thread this is on Mother’s Day. When my mum died, there were 3 of us at her bedside. For the last 24 hours or so, she didn’t know we were there. Honestly? I scrolled mumsnet, I played a lot of solitaire. We chatted a bit to each other, but not much There were no deep moments, not because I didn’t love my mum very, very much, but because what is there to say by that point? Essentially, we all die alone in a sense - we couldn’t help her, only the doctors could do that. We could see when she was in pain but we couldn’t take it away. We were there, but what use were we? The nurse even said (when mum seemed distressed), that us talking to her might not help because it would cause her stress to try and communicate.

OP, I hope you get the perfect end to yourself that you want. But for most of us, no matter what we do, it won’t be like that. Orsen Wells said ‘we’re born alone, we live alone and we die alone’. I think that’s true.

There's no guarantee that you won't die alone even if you have children!

OK OP you got me, I’m now extremely worried about dying alone. Unfortunately I’m infertile and this thread has taught me that the only way around dying alone is having kids.

What shall I do? I need your advice.

Something clearly troubles you about death, and you seem to believe that your way is better, and your family will protect and be there for you. By extension you are therefore assuming that death is hard for everyone to deal with, because they don’t do it your way.

In my experience though, the UK is much more matter of fact about death than some cultures. I think that’s because we are not particularly religious anymore and we have moved further than many cultures in escaping the clutches of organised religion or beliefs. We don’t need to feel guilty, and we understand that we will all die. We also understand that death is just death. There is nothing after it, and therefore nothing to fear. Religion and lack of eduction have a lot to answer for!

And as an adjunct to my previous post, I haven’t lost him. He died. You lose car keys and money, not people. I know you don’t like the blunt reality of it, but that’s the truth.

Euphemisms like “loss”, “passed away”, “no longer with us”, “departed” etc are just just words people who don’t want to face death use, not the words used in more educated cultures that understand that death is the end… ;)

First step is accepting how completely pointless our lives are @fitzwilliamdarcy. I'm not quite sure what we are meant to do once we have acknowledged that though...
Maybe we could set up a Not Dying Alone Club and agree to take it in turns to sit at each others death beds. Although that does rather prove the original point that childless and childfree people tend to have wider support circles in the first place.

I think people without kids are possibly more likely to maintain a social group and do hobbies etc. I have quite a few friends who I don't see very often since they had kids (which is understandable).

I think it's much easier for people with kids to suddenly reach 60 and realise once their kids have a separate life/own family that they've sacrificed a lot of their own life. Well, maybe 'sacrifice' isn't the right word as most people don't regret having kids but it certainly comes with an opportunity cost to your own life.

What about the SINKS? Aren't we all dying of depression and loneliness. My mother certainly thinks I am and then gets all surprised and put out when I'm too busy to see her.

We just have more time to put effort into our relationships and will seek out others like ourselves, who are also leading full lives. In fact, so full, that I need to book most of them in advance. So you are very wrong.

What's so terrible about dying alone anyway? If it's sudden and unexpected, then big deal. Two people I knew died alone recently, both at home, both presumably of heart attacks, one not long after he'd been chatting to friends on the phone. Sounds like a good way to go to me, rather than a drawn-out end surrounded by grieving relatives (or worse, faux-grieving). My only concern is that if I still have cats by the time I die, there should be someone to care for them.

My parents died alone and they had a child - me. My DM died suddenly within a half hour window in a rest home, my DF spent a week dying in hospital and while I spent most of the days with him I went home at night. He died before I got there one morning. Lots of people die alone, every day.

My cat is the only thing I worry about also.

I forgot to say, in the week my DF spent in hospital dying he had a lot of vistors - myself and one of my cousins were the only family members, the rest were friends and people from his church. He was 89 btw.