DH's mother made it clear early on that she wouldn't be 'that sort of grandmother' ie don't ask for childcare, which we wouldn't have done anyway. So throughout his life she's not had a whole lot of input aside from one 4-night stretch with him as a toddler, which she offered, and did a portion of (her husband and sister mainly looked after him I gather).
Things have dwindled to a couple of hours occasionally and certainly not overnight. He's 9 now. He has two other grandparents who have him for holidays and she's always seemed relieved by this, for reasons I couldn't fathom (did she mean 'phew I'm off the hook?').
The trouble is that she's a big one for grand gestures and making sure she's highly thought of. She wrings this out of one, if one isn't careful. Lately she's done so very little - over the past couple of years - with ds that I don't have to go along with her self-delusion about being a special person to him: he's been very offhand with her himself, and prefers to sit in a cupboard in her house with a computer watching Scooby Doo.
She has offered a few times to take him to visit her overnight (she lives fairly near and is in our neck of the woods once or twice a week on average, though she doesn't visit) but reneged at the last minute, the last two times pretending that this wasn't the arrangement at all. This is a barefaced lie.
Only now she's ill and needs hospital treatment, is rather down, and has got it into her head that ds will be devastated by her being in hospital and that she's sad they've grown apart. I know this stress will come my way eventually, but wtf do I say to someone who I can't be straight with, but who really, genuinely is the root of the problem? I'm sorry she's ill and I don't want her being stressed, but how on earth can I spin this to make it ok? It's not really ok.