You have my full sympathy and I’m sure you did the right thing.
Incidentally I couldn’t take the emotional stress of working in a care home, no matter how much you paid me. I’m just grateful that good people do work there.
Ludy, EmAnJ, I don’t feel comfortable posting on the boards where it is. I am not angry enough with her husband to even post their first names or even initials since it’s quite a small place. If you’d like to PM or email me with where you’re from, I’ll confirm for you. If it is, odds are pretty good that we’re related or you know her.
Hear! Hear!
I bet it’s not the same small town in Northern BC that I’m from, but I’m not sure this thread is the right place for us to discuss our small town Northern BCness. So I started this thread instead.
Sort of on topic: years ago, one of my neighbours became totally incapacitated, a very strong attack of Guillain-Barre left her bedridden and she was moved to a long-time care facility.
A few months later, I ran into her son at the store, and he blurted out that what everyone was saying about his dad wasn’t true, that he wasn’t the one who wanted the divorce, that his mother was divorcing her husband from her hospital bed! She said that she felt she had enough on her plate with coping with the disease, that she didn’t have the energy to keep propping up her husband, cheering him up, when he came to visit.
In a way, that was a kind thing to do. He was depressed for a while, but 2 years later, he met another woman.
Her daughter who lives in Montreal still visits her regularly. Her children who live in Toronto and Calgary come in the summer and over the Christmas holidays. I know they visit her, because they always give me news.
As an odd addendum, her husband contracted Guillain Barre last year, but his case was mild and he was able to recover almost completely.
End of thread drift: Ginger, the story of your cousin is a sad one. I don’t know how to respond to that. Life isn’t fair.
I don’t contest that. But given that anyone over 30 probably knows personally one complete asshole who doesn’t even care for his family, or beats them, or has abandoned them, it doesn’t seem like this is Pitworthy. The husband broke his marriage vows - a shameful, but common, act. The children don’t appreciate their mother - a shameful, but common, feeling.
If she cannot speak, how do we know how much she understands? If she is copis mentus–there must be a way to communicate with her. A letter board, nods and head shakes, hand squeezes, something. If she has her faculties, has she made herself DNR? Has he, if she has been deemed incapable? If she’s much like she ever was, but trapped in the shell of her body, there are ways the health care team can help her to communicate (see above).
I find it astonishing that they have not done so; in fact I know they must have at some time. More likely, she is NOT much like she always was. Multiple strokes can act like buckshot through the brain, leaving large areas permanently, obviously damaged, other areas subtly so.
Do I think it’s shitty that they haven’t visited in all that time? Yes. But I also doubt that truth of that. Never once–in 8 years? Ever? Then who is making the decisions for her?–that should be next of kin, which is her husband (I’m fairly sure that Canadian law is similar to American law in this area). How did she get to this long term place? Who is called if and when she needs to go into acute care for pneumonia or bed sores or whathaveyou?
The Dad never, ever let his kids visit their mother–not ever? I find that staggering. And now, in their 20s, they show no curiosity, no desire to see her at all–not even a prurient desire to see how bad off she may be? Something doesn’t add up here. :dubious:
You don’t know anything about this woman. Maybe she has become a horrible intolerable person. Your judgement from fifteen years and a few thousand miles away is worth nothing.
For the last 24 hours I’ve been trying to think of a way to post exactly this sentiment, thanks Diana.
This thread is bothering me. See, something similar happened in my family. Sort of.
My cousin married a woman, they had two children, and about the time the kids were…8, 10, maybe…she had a stroke. Among other things, it changed her personality. I guess he couldn’t live with it, and divorced her.
Him leaving her was considered a great shame and scandal in the family, though remarkably little talked of. The general opinion among the older generation however was that he ought to have stayed with her because of her brain injury, regardless of whether either of them were happy, or whether she was even the same person she had been before - that the oath was forever.
He married another woman who looked almost a carbon copy of his first wife. That marriage failed too.
Now, he’s come out as openly gay. Of course, he would always have been gay, and hiding it because of the religious strictness of his parents. Of course the family politely ignores his homosexuality - it’s just not the Done Thing and We Don’t Talk About it. But it helps me understand what happened with his first marriage, and surely also his second.
You think GingerOfTheNorth’s cousin’s husband is gay?
I disagree. Unfortunate as it may be, a marriage is often a temporary arrangement. The parent/child relationship is forever. Ignoring the duties of one relationship may be done for a variety of reasons, many of them as pedestrian as “I don’t really want to do this anymore.” Sundering a parent/child bond usual requires something more in the range of regular physical or emotional abuse.
Er. Well, I guess there’s something like a 1 in 10 chance of it, statistically speaking?
I will admit, when I started reading it, I thought for a moment that she was talking about my cousin and his wife: stroke, check. Kids the right age. Check. And it would not be beyond possibility that my cousin could also be her cousin…except that the location of the former wife is the wrong country.
A woman I know was living with a man who injured his back. She told me one day that she (paraphrased) “Didn’t sign up to be stuck with an invalid.” While that statement, put out there so boldly, startled me, I don’t think it’s unusual.
And yeah, my husband and I have had the “Move on!” conversation, too. Even before the Terri Schiavo case! 
While I can understand the attitude, it sounds awfully cavalier to me of a relationship that is supposed to be a very deep attachment. On the one hand, I get that the person you married isn’t really the same person if they have a serious, personality-altering illness, but on the other hand, I didn’t marry my husband for his ability to walk. (I don’t mean this as any kind of attack on you, jsgoddess - just discussing a point you have brought up.)
I agree with you, absolutely.
But I guess part of me knows that I don’t know. Y’know?
My husband is disabled, but bed-ridden? That’s a whole 'nother ball of fish. Then add an inability to speak and my entire marriage would be fundamentally altered. (The woman I mentioned was just kind of a twit, though.)
Yes, he’s a shit, and the same type of shit as a fellow I knew who walked out on his wife and kids when her cancer returned, because “he couldn’t deal with it”. Moving in with her girlfriend was merely a coincidence, ya see. hugs
I don’t know - they were obviously pretty young when it happened, and if all their mother can do is ‘vocalise’ without talking (what does this mean, anyway? That she makes random noises?) and doesn’t move, they could really be forgiven for thinking that she’s not actually ‘with it’ mentally.
Plus, who says they were close to her before that? People who weren’t actually part of that nuclear family? Aunts? Grandmothers? Like *they’d *know.
Too many assumptions being made here, really, and not enough solid …well, anything.
I don’t know, the “volunteered” part means a lot to me. Of course ideally the parent/child bond *should * be a strong one, and it usually is, but that takes a lot of work, and a lack of decade-long absences during childhood and adolescence. To me (who, for what it’s worth, is both a mother and a daughter, and unmarried), the idea that one is ethically less obliged to the person to whom one chose to swear “till death do us part”, than to the person whose vagina one happened to fall out of is… a little baffling.
My wife’s health deteriorated over several years before her Parkinson’s decided to make the final leap to dementia. During her last few months while she was under home hospice care an old friend of hers once commented on the fact that I had stayed with her, as many men would have left when things got bad. I never understood that…what part of “in sickness and in health” in the marriage vow didn’t they understand?