Medicine has given human and pets much longer life spans.
I wonder though if it hurts more losing somebody thats lived a long time? My dad was healthy and active right up to age 84. He’d just come back from an out of state trip a few weeks earlier. He’d been out in the woods clearing brush around his tree stand three days before he died. Two days of very bad nausea and he was gone. The blood supply supply to his intestines had got cut off. Death is within hours after that happens.
The hardest thing to deal with even 3 years later is him not being around. I was approaching 50 when he died. Thats a significant chunk of my life. It’s so strange. I still catch myself listening for him when I visit mom. I hear noise outside and catch myself looking for him. Mom is 81 now and yes I’ll be facing the same thing again in a few years. Even worse because I’ll have to empty the house and close forever that chapter of my life.
Would it have been easier to deal with in my early twenties? I was so much more self absorbed back then. Starting a career and a family. Life was a whirlwind. I took a day off work for my grandparent’s funerals. I never really sat down and dealt with the grief. Too busy. Too many irons in the fire. Go, Go, Go. Run Run chasing that dream.
Geez I was stupid back then. But much of my grief now is that long, long period I’ve spent knowing and caring about my parents. So many memories.
Are longer life spans making death harder?
Not that we want to turn the clock back. No one wants to see a return to 45 year average life spans. My grandparents seemed so old at 60. They were old compared to people today at that age. Modern medicine has done wonders.
I think if anything, longer life spans are making it easier to accept death, since it becomes more expected as people get older, and there’s a sense that they’ve had enough time to live the life they wanted to live.
I think in your particular case, it’s the suddenness of the death that makes it harder to accept. My parents often discussed the fact that they lost their fathers in different ways - my mother’s after a long, slow, painful decline, and my father’s very suddenly, like yours. While they both agreed that it’s better for the dying person to go quickly, they felt that for the survivors, the longer period at least allows a chance to say goodbye and come to grips with what is happening.
Since it sounds like you really had no chance to prepare for your father’s death, you’re going through the whole mental process of letting him go now. It’s also harder to deal with death the older we get, as it makes us more acutely aware of our own mortality.
I’m curious to hear other peoples experiences. Someone that lost a parent early will have a much different perspective.
Death is such a personal journey. I look at my mom differently now. Losing dad was a wake up call to cherish the time I have with my mom.
The anger stage lasted awhile for me. He’s gone? He shouldn’t be gone dammit. It’s deer season. He *always *hunts every year. <sigh> I eventually got past it.
ISTM that longer life spans have taken most of the unpredictability of death out of the equation. Most people expect and are expected to survive until 70 or so, after that you just realize in the back of your mind it could happen tomorrow or in 20 years. So we’ve managed to make death more or less predictable due to medicine, narrowing it to a window of age 70-90 for the vast majority of people. People still die young, but it isn’t ‘that’ common. The vast majority of people survive to 65 now.
I’m at both ends of the spectrum. We lost our parents when I was 6, (I’m the oldest of four) and we were raised by our maternal grandparents who were already retired, or close to it. My sibs don’t remember our parents at all, and the fact that the same grandparents babysat us a lot means the transition was pretty grief-free aside from me.
Our family is long-lived, so our grandfather passed when we were all in our late 30s, my grandmother when we were in mid-40s, at 95 and 104 respectively. They were both active and mentally sharp until the end, and I’ve got to say that while we were all sad it was a sort of mellow grieving. I had aunts and uncles in their 70s and 80s by then, and the grandparents had been old pretty much my entire life, so everyone was pretty much at “acceptance” immediately.
In comparison, my parents were in their 30s, and family was upset about their deaths even 20 years later. I think in part it was all the time missed with them, in part seeing us grow up to resemble them strongly.
It is extra tough when people look like their dads. I have two cousins that look just like their dad did thirty years ago. He was my uncle and recently died after a long illness.
That family had three sons. All looked like their dad when they reached middle age. One died last winter and his widow gets upset whenever she gets around his brothers. She can’t handle being reminded of him.
Upon reading the title, I thought the OP was going to go in a different direction–one focused on people facing death, as opposed to one’s left behind.
I imagine it will be harder to accept death as life spans increase. My father often talks about how because he has outlived his father and grandfather, he feels blessed. I don’t think he welcomes death. But I don’t think he feels particularly entitled to live all that much longer than he has.
However, I imagine that he’d feel differently if his father was still alive, and if his grandfather had died late in life. What you see is what you come to expect. If everyone around you seems to be living well into their 80s and 90s, and you receive a death sentence in yours 60s and 70s, you’re gonna feel ripped off in a way you wouldn’t otherwise feel.
I lost my 57 year-old father suddenly when I was 24. My world was upside down and inside out for a very, very long time. I’m 49 now and in some ways I still feel like I never recovered.
My Mom’s 75 and we’re very close. She’s in good health and still going strong (knock wood). I’m pretty sure I’ll never get over losing her when I do.
My 98 year-old grandmother died a week ago. I miss her so much. People tell me that they’re sorry, but I was lucky to have had her for so long. I was, but GO TO HELL! Like I’m not allowed to be sad about losing her!
Dopers, please don’t EVER say that to someone who has lost a very elderly relative. Sheesh.
Everyone’s personal death is, at one level, incomprehensible. That is why we make up stories about what happens when we die. But the death of another? That is a different matter. If I had lost my father (lost… misplaced… come on, he died) when I was in my 20s as opposed to my 40s, I would have handled it very differently. I spoke a eulogy at his funeral and spread his ashes on my property here. If his death had happened when I was in my mid 20s, I would have been an emotional wreck. In my case, as opposed to aceplace57’s father’s unfortunate rapid demise, my mother and wife and brother and I had time to deal with his gradual slide into dissolution.
Sudden death is something I haven’t had to deal with yet. That would probably be significantly different.
I realized I didn’t answer the original question, whoops, little emotional right now. In the case of losing someone at a very old age, my grandmother and I got much closer the last few years of her life, which has made losing her much more difficult for me than it would’ve five years ago (not that I’d change anything).
As for how I see my own death…I have a lot of longevity in my genes. My father died young, but his death was directly attributed to smoking, which I don’t. His parents lived into their eighties. My Mom’s parents both lived into their nineties. The thing is, I don’t have children, and after everyone I love is gone, I’m pretty sure my life will suck. So I’m ok with going any time after that. I just want to be around and able to take care of whoever needs it.
The way they die may be more important than when they die. My Dad died at 94. He went to a Seder, went to bed, and died one day later. I was sorry to see him go, but it was his time. My Mom died at 70, and that was too soon. I wish she had been able to see how well her grandchildren grew up, though she got to see one, at least. It was quick also.
My father-in-law is 98 in February, still trading stocks and even giving lectures. It will be sad when he dies, but not like if he was 60. Living longer gives more time to get things in order, and that is good.
This is all kind of close to the surface for me. My mom died last week at 68, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that when I was a kid and a 68 year old person died no one gasped and said “so young? My goodness.” The fact that more and more people are living into their 80s and 90s makes her death seem even crueler to me.
When I was my son’s age it seems to me that peers losing their grandparents aged in their late 60s and early 70s wasn’t particularly shocking.
When my husband died (in November) the first thing my father said to me was “People are going to say stupid stuff to you.” He was not wrong. Talking about it with another friend he suggested that whatever someone says I should try and hear it as “I really want not to add to your pain.”
My mother died at age 62 last year. It felt like she was gone too soon. My grandmother, her mother, is 93, and until recently she was very lively and active. She’s declining rapidly, and my sibs and I are worried she won’t be around much longer. Even though she lived a long and full life, and even though she and I rarely got along until recently, I will still be sad when she passes. She’s my last surviving grandparent, and that’s something significant to me.
And not just longer life spans, but medical advances. It doesn’t seem right (for lack of a better word) that relatively young people are still dying from complications of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, treatable cancers, and other conditions where there’s been so much medical progress.
It’s a source of anxiety for me. I was born to older parents. Mom was 38, Dad was 45 when I came along.
Dad is 72 now, with serious arthritis and smoking hasn’t helped either. But when he goes, I’ll grieve but I won’t fall apart.
But the kicker for me is Mom. She’s not in the best of health. Her mother died when she was 77 years old. That’s 12 more years for my mom. I’ll be 39. I can’t imagine losing her. I don’t have any of those people you’re supposed to get when you leave your parents. I’m 27, no partner, no kids, and I don’t see either happening. I don’t have those anchors that are supposed to support you when you lose a parent. Mom is my anchor. She had a coworker who lived with her mother most of her life and then the mother died. The coworker copes with pouring all her time into her niece and the niece’s kids, but who’s to say my brother and his family will want me so close?