Letting the wider family know

[DrFoxtrot]

My elderly relative has just died after several weeks in hospital and I am next of kin. I am absolutely exhausted and the worst thing is feeling that I have to update everyone regularly. I'm probably over tired but I just want everyone to piss off and leave me alone.

In the middle of texting everyone the latest update, people are then phoning me straight after receiving the text, even though I have other people I'm in the middle of texting. It's lovely people want to check in but I'm completely done with being the family spokesperson. If I wanted a chat, I would call. These are not immediate family but people who do need to know, my friends/ work etc.

Any tips on how to tell people to back off nicely without me coming across as unhinged when I just want to scream at people to leave me alone?

Also you can probably make a rough guess as to hospital calling or not as hospital will usually be a landline.

Oh and did you know you can disable voicemail? Differs by provider unfortunately:/

I sympathise. When Mum died I knew my Dad (they divorced when I was extremely young) would make some tin-eared remark.
I just wasn't up for this so got my other half to ring him.

People are awful. After my dad died my cousins who I’d not seen other than once at a funeral for probably twenty years and also hadn’t seen my dad sent me frankly abusive messages that they not been told immediately and they’d been „in town“ and a non relative had told them. And then didn’t even come to the funeral. Bonkers.

Is there another family member you can ask to run the communications for the wider family? If so, spend 10 mins giving the list of everyone who needs to be updated and get them to send a message out to all saying that they are handling all comms on this topic and you will be going off line so you can focus on your remaining relative, regular updates will still be provided by this person and all questions should be directed to them. Then you temporarily block all the relies except this one. Once a day or so, you give the family member an update, and they handle everything else

Hospital isn’t necessarily a landline. DH is having a lot of medical attention atm, and most of thet calls are from mobiles. A damned nuisance because we have to pick up on all the spam calls in case it’s NHS

@DrFoxtrot I have been through this either a WhatsApp Group or an email list so you do one update for everyone. I have also acted as a go-between again using the group WhatsApp or email approach so people contacted me rather than the immediate family.

I am sorry for your loss.

Thank you, it seems to be settling down although I daren't speak too soon ❤️ I definitely think that the stress with my other ill relative hasn't helped. If I was dealing with one stressful thing at a time, it might have felt different.