My cousin has died and his wife has forbidden our family to attend funeral

[Wildwillow]

Unbelievable though this sounds the wife of my first cousin has expressly stated that none of his blood family will be welcome at his funeral. He died earlier this week after a three year short battle with cancer, he was 57.

We have not been close in recent years, and I guess she somehow feels resentful that we did not move to Norfolk to support them, but being divorced with 3 kids put rather a claim on my time. She has never enjoyed a close relationship with my aunt (her MIL) for which I would put blame on both parties. However to now try and forbid my aunt to attend the funeral of her own son seems pretty diabolical. My parents and my brother have all said that we would like to attend, this is for one of the closest relations that we grew up with. But neither do I want to create a scene like something from a soap opera. What on earth do we do? I can live without going for my own part (although I would like to) but it seems quite inhuman to try to refuse a mother a place at her childs funeral. What do we do??

nothing more or less than the sadly typical MIL / DIL conflict. DIL was a rather privileged only child of two doting parents, she lost her own father a few years into her marriage and must have felt his loss very unfair. My aunt (the MIL) and the DIL are both strong characters quite capable of saying more than is prudent in moments of conflict,

So, new wife, mourning the loss of her dad, she has no siblings, acidic mother in law and conflicts, the now deceased son and his wife moved far far away from his family. Good on him! We see so many threads here with men of no backbone who cant stand up to their mums. Now, this man could, and moved his wife away from a bad situation.

Family let them go, nobody was in contact, not even when he was dying. And these people now wants to impose themselves on grieving family?

Fuck sake.

Not everyone is driven mad by grief. When you've had three years to come to terms with the death of a loved one, as this woman has, you get a lot of things in order including who you would like to see at the funeral and who you would not.

I had two years. I was still beside myself when my mother died. It's horrendous to somehow suggest her grief is less because she knew it was coming

That's not what I am suggesting Auser. I believe it's a fallacy that all or most bereaved people behave irrationally, although it is a time of heightened emotions.

I had a long time to come to terms with the death of one person and a relatively short time with another. I loved them both deeply but I know that I behaved entirely logically when both of them died. I think most people do and I'd be profoundly insulted if people thought I wasn't thinking straight or should have my wishes gently overridden as some people on this thread have suggested. There is no reason to believe that this woman is any different.

We have no way of knowing who is 'at fault' here, if indeed, there is any. There are assumptions that the widow is wicked, that the aunt and wider family are uncaring, but we don't know any of that for sure. When my dad was diagnosed with cancer, his wife was insistent that my siblings and I should not visit him until she gave the OK. She said he has asked her to tell us that he needed time to process the news and wanted us to wait until he was home from hospital. For enough, we sadly agreed as we believed these were his wishes. We then found out she was telling people that we had refused to visit him - she even told him that. Despite the prognosis of several months, the illness progressed much faster and within a few weeks he had deteriorated severely. All this time she told us he didn't want us to visit him yet. We begged hero ask him to change his mind, but each time the answer came back -not yet. Until the day one of his friends contacted us to tell us that Dad had asked for us to visit as he was wondering why we hadn't gone to see him. We left straight away and arrived at the hospital to be told we were 'just in time'. He died early the next day. Had his friend not intervened, we would have believed dad didn't want to see us and worse, he would have died believing we didn't care. There had been no problem in our relationship at all and no reason for us to disbelieve his wife. I cannot forgive her for what she did and no longer have anything to do with her.

In the op situation, we don't know that the aunt hasn't been told similar or had attempts at contact rebuked by the wife. Without evidence of truly awful behaviour, l do think that banning family from a funeral seems very cold.

people who have been bereaved often lash out because they are angry that they have lost someone who means so much to them. They look for anything they class as inappropriate or off that someone has done to them over the last few years, and channel their grief and anger into that. There is probably some back story to this, where some resentment has been simmering for a while but has now exploded into some huge issue which is why she is now behaving this way.

Does this thread have an end result? Op what did you decide and have you spoken to the widow?