Ever the optimist I am going to try again.
Please remember I am not trying to disuade you from your belief, only offer a different view.
This elderly man, who’s grown children may live many miles distant from him, has had a stroke and thrown a family into crisis. The breadth and depth of that crisis cannot possibly be known to you. There could be gut wrenching choices, sleep deprivation, brutal family conflict coupled with painful emotional cascades, tangled legal issues, crippling expenses and unbearable timetables.
Until you’ve walked in these shoes you’d be wise to withhold judgement on where exactly pets should get prioritized. Were they cranky and irritable, unwilling to share details of the life circumstances that brought them to where they are? I think I could find it in my heart to cut them some slack, not knowing the circumstances that may well have foced them to this choice. I’d like to think I could forgive them for being miserable, what with this possibly being one of the worst days of their lives and all.
Now I want to speak to you of strokes. I care for someone who suffered a stroke over five years ago, that left her entirely bedridden. Were you to visit you would leave quite certain that she is entirely on top of it all. You’d be wrong. Not a week goes by that she doesn’t ask me to help her get up out of bed. It’s been over five years.
She can’t keep this one detail in her head because it’s so very traumatic for her to accept. 95% of the time she is all there. Sometimes though, she thinks her dead husband was here to see her, that her son is still a boy etc.
Often she looks forward all week to her out of town daughter coming to visit. They visit for 4 hrs, she is sitting up chatting and on the ball the whole time. Once the visit ends she drifts off for her nap, when she wakes she will be upset that she missed her visit, and I will reassure her she did not. Again, her head won’t hold it because it was a big event for her.
Nursing homes are filled with people convinced they were robbed and left by their children against their will. You will discover that such is not the case though, many of these grown children explained to the parents and sought and received their consent for the life choices that were made. But it’s emotional and devastating and for stroke survivors those are often the things that fly away or get bent the most. So I would say to you, don’t be so sure they didn’t get the fellows consent to do what they did, or that they didn’t have a good bye session for him and Moses, all of which has since evaporated from his mind.
You can, of course, discount all I’ve said, with another simplistic, ‘I find it hard to believe…’ but I would remind you that just because you find it hard to believe, or you would never, or your father would never, is not really cause to judge someone else.