How awful is it when you secretly think it would be a relief if they died!

[BeachBlondey]

You can’t say this out loud, can you? My dad is an alcoholic and has been for 40 years. He ruined much of my childhood. He’s also morbidly obese as he's addicted to food. He has been in and out of hospital now for a while. It’s exhausting. Every day is centred around what is happening with him and what he needs. I love him but would be secretly relieved if he died. How bad is that?!

I agree, I would not want to live for years enduring what my father has.

Unfortunately, even if euthanasia does come in, it will likely require you to be compus mentis when signing up for it, so that would potentially rule out dementia patients.

I'm not sure what the answer is really...with most dementia patients the early stages are not that bad and can be managed with help, it's just the later stages that are a complete shitshow.

Honestly, if I was diagnosed with dementia and in the early stages, I would happily sign a legal document stating that once I got to a certain stage of deterioration (and list the things that I could no longer do for myself) then I would like to be put to sleep with drugs.

I'm so sorry that this is your life. What age are you referring to.

I'm 60 and doing my best to be as healthy as I can as I never want to be a burden on my children!

It's normal and justified. I'm watching a wonderful friend having to deal with a husband with dementia and I'm half a world away and can't help. They are a wonderful couple, and I love her like a mother. They should be enjoying the retirement they planned for. I pray that he doesn't last long but he's only in his mid-70s and is an former Olympic athlete, who kept fit until he could no longer do so. He could live for years yet. I hate myself for wanting better for her and her kids.

I feel this about my friend who I support. He's in nursing home now. But getting him
The help he needed was a nightmare and incredibly stressful for me. Over a prolonged period of time. He refused help
And as he has capacity there was little I could do. It's sorted now. It killed any affection o felt for him.

I felt like this about my alcoholic father for a long long time, I once told a councillor I was riddled with guilt for thinking so often that I wished he would die to stop the constant worry, heartbreak and frustration, and was expecting her to be shocked and horrified by my admission but she just told me it was a totally normal feeling because of how difficult my life was made by him. But I did love him very very much, he wasn’t a bad man, he was just selfish and consumed by his addiction which made him at time not a very nice person.

He died from alcoholism last year and whilst is was so sad, and felt like such a waste of a life him dying so young, it was also a relief. And even now, I have thoughts of ‘oh, wasn’t it nice when he did that funny thing on holiday when I was a child’ but I also have thoughts of ‘oh, it’s his birthday coming up, I’m so happy I won’t have to endure his insistence on me going with him to the pub where he will embarrass me and then leave me worrying all night that he’ll get so drunk that when he gets home he’ll have a fall and die’ So even after his death I still have a relief that he is no longer here as well as the sadness associated with losing him.

I could have written this post myself about my own dad and the euthanasia bit!

From diagnosis of cancer to his death, it was 10 months. They had given him a year. He should have died years before that imho and had escaped death pn multiple occasions. Like a cat with 9 lives!

I so agree with you. So my elderly mother gets another 5 years of a poor quality of life. Meanwhile her daughter aged forties/fifties loses 5 years of her life.

That's a NIL gain people. In fact it's worse than that because someone in their forties/fifties should be more valuable than someone in their eighties (In terms of NHS resources)

So we aren't prolonging life. We're extending and then subtracting elsewhere = NIL.

Who here works for the NHS - what can we do about this?

It’s not wrong at all and I see it really often in patients’ relatives faces, particularly in those with dementia. I love my parents and it would be horrendous if their last few years were this decline to a shell of their former selves. They would definitely not want to be kept alive in those circumstances and we have started the process of writing advance directives.

on the flip side, I am sometimes shocked by the absolute abuse we get from relatives if we dare to bring up ‘do not attempt resuscitation’ orders for some incredibly frail, demented elderly patient who has very little quality of life. There is sometimes this idea that just because we can, we should rather than balancing it against quality of life.

I will definitely be signing a DNR when I get older!

Yes, my dad is in that situation. He's 95 and hasn't recognised anyone for the past 4 years or so; visits were so distressing for both him and me that I've let them slip, and that feels bad too. As PP have said, it's a shell, not him.

And the other thing that I can't say aloud to anyone is that the inheritance he'd planned to leave to his beloved grandchildren (fine to skip me, I'm doing OK) is being eaten away by care-home fees.

When my alcoholic mother died I thanked God

The patient doesn't have to accept the treatment offered to them though. If they don't consent then it won't be given.

People are free to refuse all treatment or to just receive pain relief, if that's what they want. I think most of us, when we're not ill, would say that we wouldn't want treatment if the diagnosis is terminal.
But when that diagnosis comes, people often feel differently then. Suddenly it's real. Few of us feel ready to die, so I guess we cling to whatever is offered to extend our lives for that little bit longer.

I wish my DM would die. End stage dementia, immobile, incontinent, barely eating or drinking, occasionally moaning or crying out but otherwise unable to communicate. Yet the body grimly hangs on, day after day, month after month. I really hope she's unaware of what's happening to her.

It’s comforting to read these comments and know that I am not alone. My DM is 96, still lives alone but with increasing comorbidities and questionable hygiene. I am not close with her and feel terrible guilt at wishing she’d passed away quickly when she was ill last year. But she pulled through and now it’s a thing that me and my siblings deal with. That sounds so selfish but I feel like my life is on hold (though it isn’t) until she passes away.
I fear this problem OP will become more and more common as we persist in keeping folk alive long past their sell by date to the detriment of younger people with their whole lives ahead of them. Euthanasia will be legalised eventually but sadly for economic reasons rather than compassionate ones.

I have a sibling who I have been able to cautiously share some of my complicated feelings with about our elderly alcoholic father. It helped to know my feelings were not unique.

It’s also not always difficult parents. My grandmother had Alzheimer’s. She was gone, but her body just kept going. It was awful. My mother was visibly relieved when she died. Yes she was sad, but overall it was a blessing. She just kept saying that her mother never would have wanted to live like that if she had been given a choice.

I think that feeling is far more common than people like to admit.

One of my grandparents was turned into a husk of the person they had been after a DNR was overridden following a brain aneurysm. They recovered enough to understand they were living the exact sort of life they signed the DNR to avoid and lived their remaining years bitterly angry.

I was glad for them when they did die, after almost a decade of torment.

My dad died a few months ago. He was an alcoholic and generally a crap father. For the last few years my sister and I would often say how it would be better if he was dead, and to be honest it is.

I feel nothing really and can only admit that to a few people. I have found it quite difficult to live up to others expectations of what a grieving daughter 'should' look like. It's such a personal journey and dependent on so many factors.

The generation in their 80’s and 90’s now are of an age where you just did “what the Dr said”. what anyone in authority said in fact.

My elderly has died now, but it was almost impossible to refuse treatment. It was only by getting quite cross that we stopped them having invasive treatment. And it was quite clear they were on the way out by this point.
This is despite family and patient all saying, no hospital, no extraordinary measures.
They were late 90’s but still with (most) of their marbles! But still I feel care home and paramedics frequently bullied, in the kindest possible way, them into hospital as its the quickest way of making it someone else’s problem!

DNR had been in place for, I don’t know, 15yrs probably. But antibiotics, hospital stays, which achieved little, except sending them home a week later exhausted from lack of sleep from a busy noisy hospital ward only prolonged the agony for everyone.

I don’t know what the answer is, but you’d be prosecuted for keeping an animal alive like it.

There's no way my elderly relatives would consider euthanasia. They are very determined to wring out every last moment available to them! It's me who's getting tired and losing the will to live!

Slightly diverging from the many OP but how is it Euthanasia laws are never passed here?

Who are the sadists that think it’s perfectly fine to prolong a persons suffering against their will?

We were literally waiting over a week for cancer to finally squeeze out every single last fucking drop of life my DM had, no hydration, having suction to remove secretions, on a driver unconscious with no possible chance of ever recovering. It was ghoulish and hideous to witness.

Surely there should be a system in place that says if you reach a stage of pending certain death you can be put to sleep.

I fear this problem OP will become more and more common as we persist in keeping folk alive long past their sell by date to the detriment of younger people with their whole lives ahead of them. It is clearly cruel to keep people alive when their life has become a torment to them, but I think it’s far from evident that any elderly person who has contributed to society for many years is inherently worth less than someone who has yet to contribute.

My Grandad passed last year alcoholic and abusive to my Nan - he was very poorly but took a good few years before he died. It was an odd sense of relief.

Seeing my Nan blossom after the freedom it gave her - she had been his carer for years. She sadly passed far too soon recently. But oddily again she had had a fall and as a result would have lost all her recent independence that she had finally achieved - she wouldn’t have had the life she so craved so again it was a sense of relief she passed. I feel dreadful for thinking that but I honestly think she would have been so unhappy in a care home or having carers.

There’s a tribe somewhere, can’t remember where exactly, but saw it on a David Attenborough type thing, who when they think an elder is becoming a bit of a pest, pack up camp and set off at a jog. If they can’t keep up, well, that’s it!
Must be some sort of middle ground, surely!😈

I think it is to do with the risk of abuse of such laws eg people 'forcing' elderly relatives to agree to euthanasia because they think they are an inconvenience or too much bother. For me, I don't think my dad would choose this route - partially because at this point he has not accepted that he will not get better. But for me absolutely I want to live until the point where I have no quality of life, and for me that would be when I become unable to care for myself, have significant pain and/or no prospect of anything that brings me joy.

I am sure it is possible to design laws that allow people who wish it the freedom to end their life at a time of their own choosing, while protecting those that for their own perfectly valid reasons want to continue to live. I am in Scotland and I believe that an Assisted dying bill will come back to the Scottish Parliament at some point and I for one will be wholly supportive of it.

Those who oppose such legislation are essentially saying that dogs are worth more than people, as a dog who could not move, was incontinent, in pain and with no prospect of improvement would be put to sleep in a humane way.

As another poster said, why is it that for humans we value life at all costs over the reality that for many it is simply an existence rather than life?