Having recently gone through this with my own elderly parents (I'm in your MIL / FIL generation) I can completely understand their focus on practical issues.
Tbh when someone is in hospital there is an immense amount of time-consuming activity, particularly when there is another elderly parent to be cared for. Between visiting, phone calls to keep everyone up to date, taking a load of washing home every night, ensuring that parents' bills are paid at home etc it is like taking on another full-time job - on top of whatever commitments they already have. All routine is blown apart. I ended up feeling that I was continually on the edge of forgetting something big, and yes in those times of immense stress thing do get reduced to a list of seemingly practical things.
Overlay that with the emotional impact of facing the potential death of your parent, and you can understand why things are stressed.
In the midst of that not all of us want a hug.
To the outside world I probably looked like your PIL - but it was in my private moments that I fell apart - much of very real awfulness of what is happening is so raw and intense that it's not something to share with anyone except your very, very closest (in my case my dsis and dh).
People were very kind, and asked how I was, and said I must look after myself, but really what I needed was someone who could have picked up his shitty pants and pjs, wash and iron them and return them, or someone who could tell me whether he would live or die.
And with my remaining parent, we knew that we were both going through the same thing, we both had the same unanswerable questions, we were both in deep grief at seeing someone we loved in pain and confusion. In those moments, a squeeze of the hand is all that is needed to share what you're both feeling, and to let them know that you care.
I'm sure your situation is different, but I thought I'd share my perspective.