Someone I know because they’re almost family for me, and are for my sister had a tragedy on 07/07/05, and nobody f###ing told me about it. The father in-law of this person died and I’m sure we met at the birthday party I went to this spring. This is f###ing gruesome. He lived on a farmette, and he was pulling an industries mower that rides to the side of the tractor. It may have been the type for farm mowing or the type that lawncare people use. He was found that day buy I don’t know who, likely his wife. They figure he fell of the tractor and then the side mower got pulled over him. He was decapitated and all chopped up, and NOBODY IN MY FAMILY F###ING TOLD ME! :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: I’m staying off this board for a while, I’m too upset to be posting. I say bad things when I’m upset. 
We just lost a friend of the family a couple weeks ago, and no one told us, either. My husband knew this guy as long as he knew his own parents (the elders all hung around together when they were young). He worked on our cars all the time and was a great guy. My BIL drove past his house and saw some women packing up a bunch of stuff and we looked in the local obits on line and sure enough, he was listed.
His death wasn’t quite as dramatic as your friend’s was. How awful!
I feel your pain. Not a death, but when I was in college, an HOUR away from my hometown my grandmother who I had lived with during high school had to have her legs amputated due to diabetes.
My mother told me this A DAY BEFORE THE OPERATION. I was the last person in my family to know. They say “We didn’t want to make you upset.”
…and they wonder why I prefer to not fly thousands of miles now to family reunions.
My father’s second wife carelessly omitted to inform his 4 daughters and 3 sons that he died in January 2001. I received a letter from her the following month.
I discovered where the cremation had taken place and the name of the officiating member of the clergy. He told me that when he asked her if my father had any children who should be notified of his death, she said ‘No’. I received a phone call from the second wife asking me what I was doing poking my nose into her funeral arrangements. I told her to fuck off.
I arranged a memorial service for him at the same crematorium with the same reverend. All the family attended except the second wife who was specifically excluded from the proceedings. My father’s corpse was conspicuous by its absence.
Jesus! That’s cold. Why did she have such a hard-on with you kids? Had you seen your dad much before his death?
Nitpick: that wasn’t a careless omission, it was a deliberate one. There are a few occasions in life where you overlook family politics for the sake of the person being honored. A funeral is definitely one of them. Shame on her.
I got an email once from my mom…“Hi, how are things, work’s fine, sis is doing well in school, your grandmother is out of the hospital and should be ok…” … :eek:!!!
Rush to the phone, get hold of my mom, and she tells me my 80 year old grandmother (my only one!) spent several days in the hospital with a severe allergic reaction to medication, some signs of kidney failure and that at one point, my mom and her sister had been approached to “start to make decisions about treatment if things turned for the worse”. By the time I got the email, they’d figured out what med caused the problem, and while she was weak, my grandmother was ok and was going home.
My mom told me that “she didn’t want to worry me” because I’m 800km away and there was nothing I could have done. Fuck that. I could have taken time off work, driven down to see my grandmother! I told her to NEVER, EVER do that to me again. Now she’s quite good about keeping me updated. How anyone could think it was better to find out after the fact that your grandmother nearly died… I would have emptied the back account to see her if it came to that!
A similar thing happened when my sister was sick. She had a severe pancreatitis, but I didn’t know she’d been admitted to hospital until about 3 days after she first started feeling ill, but a large part of that was they fact that they spent nearly 40 hours in the emergency room, not knowing what was happening. She went a full 3 days without food and with barely any water because she kept throwing it all back up. In all, she spent 10 days on nothing but IV fluids, and again, I was so far away and I couldn’t even see her. I couldn’t really take much time off work, because I’d already booked 3 weeks for my wedding just a month later… but again, had it turned really bad I would have taken a plane or train and gone. My family does always come first. Once she was in the hospital, I got daily or more frequent updates.
I’m glad I’m moving closer to home. I can be there for most of my family (now sis is in PEI). I can be there if my grandmother falls ill again. I can be there if my brother or aunt has another depression-related crisis, I can be there when my mom’s migraines won’t go away and I can bring her to a hospital. It’s so hard to always be on the outside of your own friends and family’s lives.
The step-mother/funeral story makes me think of what happened to a close friend of mine. Her father’s 2nd wife is a first class bitch, and has odd jealousy issues regarding his kids from his first marriage (my friend and her brother). The bitch has banned my friend from calling her dad’s house, and even threatens her whenever she’s visiting other family members in town. My friend has limited contact with her dad, and if she does need to call him, she calls him at work. I don’t know why this bitch has so much control over him - he used to be a decent man. Anyways, at my friend’s grandmother’s funeral (her dad’s mom), years ago, my friend went and the bitch was there. An aunt approached my friend to give her a ring that her grandmother had wanted her to have… and right there in front of the whole family, in front of the casket, the bitch tried to take the ring from my friend, because now SHE was part of the family and deserved it more! What the hell is wrong with some of these women that they think they are so important as to deliberately divide families like this? Crazy.
Anyways, I’m ranting now, so I’ll stop this post!
PunditLisa, my use of the word carelessly was intended to be ironic. I’m sorry for any confusion.
Kalhoun, I hadn’t seen my father for a while before his death. I had a long period of illness and travel was problematic. My sisters and brothers had seen him and maintained telephone contact with him.
To be candid, none of my family enjoyed the company of the second wife. She is a racist of the first water and she always caused me a problem with her world view whenever I saw her. To avoid argument, and to save my father embarrassment, I gritted my teeth and said very little in reply. Perhaps this was the wrong attitude on my part. If she hadn’t been married to my father I would have dealt with the matter with greater vigour. I believe my siblings worked on the same basis.
My guess is that because none of us ever agreed with her rancid opinions she saw us as the enemy. (I think she was also jealous that my father had a previous marriage and resented us because we were the issue of that marriage.) It’s not easy to cosy up to a racist and our lack of enthusiasm for her company must have been as clear as crystal. I don’t know how my father reacted to her in private but he said very little when I was present. I don’t think he held views similar to hers.
I get angry whenever I think about this. If ever I saw her again I think I’d punch her in the face and do the time. (I wouldn’t do this of course. It is however a satisfying fantasy).
Somebody else died yesterday morning. Good news is they brought her back. She asked her husband to get her something for indigestion… A while later she woke him up and said she needed to go to the hospital. She dropped dead giving the admissions clerk her name. The shocked her heart back to beating and medflighted her to Madison. She almost died again, but she survived, and had a couple shunts installed in her heart. I found this out an hour after the first.
They aren’t close friends. They’re both close friends of relatives, so I know them. I will meet their immediate family at get togethers. I really hate when you don’t know something like this and ask how the spouse is, or ask if they saw the accident where the man just died. The decapitation and shreading by mower still has me messed up though. That is so grusome that it really bothers me.
Wow… I really don’t know how to react to something like that. That kind of cruelty is beyond me. I think you did the right thing by arranging a memorial and allowing you and the sibs to remember him. If he suffered an illness/hospitalization before he died, well…I think her behavior would be unforgiveable.
The Christmas card I sent to my grandmother came back marked “Deceased.”
My wife and I had just had twins, and just before that, my mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. When I asked my father why he didn’t tell me his mother had died, he said “You were busy, and there wasn’t anything you could do about it.”
My sister sums up the family dynamics by saying “Better dysfunction than no function at all.”
A friend of mine found out her mom had died over a year later. Yeah. Totally fucked up.
Family bad blood- nothing quite like it.
I don’t know if my father is living or not, and really don’t care. The last straw was when he didn’t even have the decency to let me know his mother had died. Was he afraid I’d show up at the funeral or something? Asshole.
My grandpa was living with my aunt when he died. The aunt didn’t bother to tell my mother. They’re sisters. Grandpa was their dad. I’m not sure how long she waited to tell mom, long enough for the funeral to be over with.
Her rationale to mom was “You wouldn’t have been able to come to the funeral anyway.”
As for the OP, I dunno. If I’m close to the person who died, I’d want to know. I’m not so sure how I’d feel about in-laws of friends, if I didn’t know the in-law very well.
Don’t take it personally. The family had a lot to deal with, without worrying about who to notify, and your sister may have thought someone else told you.
I’ve had cousins get married and I find out a month or more later. My relative would ask why I didn’t come to their child’s wedding. I’d ask what wedding. They’d tell me that my mother got an invitation for all of us. I’d tell them after twenty years of being an adult, they should try sending an invitation to me and each of my siblings.
My grandmother died early last month. We were NOT able to tell my cousin until weeks after the funeral-but for a very good reason. He’s in the National Guard and he was over in Iraq at the time. My aunt and uncle, knowing he wouldn’t be permitted to come home, didn’t want to tell him for fear he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on his duties (he was a lieutenant, I believe), and he’d put himself or someone else in danger. So, they had to wait until he got home to tell him.
It was awful, and all of us felt really bad about it-but what could we do?
Um, you could have called the Red Cross. They would have located him and brought him in, where he could choose to stay where he was or come home on an emergency family leave.
We had the Red Cross find my brother during Ranger School and bring him home for my grandpa’s funeral, and they will find military folks wherever they are stationed. Good to keep in mind for future reference.
I believe they were told he would not be allowed to come home for the death of a grandparent. Parent, spouse, or child, that’s it. That and he was about two weeks away from the end of us his tour of duty. I don’t know all the whys and wherefores, but he was not going to be allowed to leave.
Two weeks early for a funeral and the answer was no? Jeez…
Granted, my brother was at a school at the time, rather than on a deployment. You’re probably right about the “immediate family only” thing.