How old were you when the first of your parents died? How did you deal with it?
I’m 33 and my mom is in the hospital indefinitely with terminal liver disease brought on by years of alcoholism. One doctor said she’d live 1 month, another said 3 months. I live 900 miles away and went to visit late last month. It was essentially a goodbye. My wife asked why I didn’t take a picture with her. Simple answer is she is as jaundiced as the day is long and I don’t want any memory of that.
She’s in decent spirits, hoping against hope that the doctors are wrong and she can somehow live without a liver. I’m glad about that, I want her to be delusional/optimistic and then die in her sleep.
Her dad only died 2 years ago at the age of 87. My mom is 56. Life’s a trip, que no?
Sorry for anyone who lost a parent as a kid, must have been brutal.
I had just turned 13 when my dad passed. He had a hereditary cancer. Memory always told me he’d been diagnosed when I was 10 or 11; I found records stating he’d been diagnosed when I was 12 and it was very fast moving. During that time I spent every weekend with my cousins in a neighboring state because my mother didn’t want me to be alone while she was at my dad’s bedside.
My biggest regret is that I really don’t remember much about him now. I did when I was younger, of course. We have a photo of him taken before the cancer took hold and it’s always been the way I remember him.
I remember my mother telling me around my birthday the doctors had given him 1-3 months to live. I went to bed that night praying that he wouldn’t die on my birthday nor on Thanksgiving nor Christmas. He passed between the latter two.
My mother passed in 2007 from complications related to her probable Alzheimer’s. The date of my dad’s death and her death are less than week apart. I still think that’s interesting, even more so if, when I leave this mortal coil, my day will be smack between both.
I was 41, my mom died from Alzheimer’s at 75. That’s a different sort of death, I suppose, “mom” had been gone for a couple of years. When her body finally foĺlowed, it was a bit of a relief.
My dad died last year at 84, I was 55.
He way out-lasted everyone’s expectations. His doctors thought he wouldn’t see 30, but medical advancements kept up with the progression of his chronic lung disease. He was pretty sharp right up to the end, unlike my mother, who is 84 also, and in good health, but has dementia.
I was in my 30s when my father died, after a protracted battle with cancer. At the time, I had been estranged from him for a little under a year (my mom and my sister had both been estranged from him for years before that). My main regret was that we weren’t able to reconcile before it happened, but I don’t think there’s anything else I could have done.
Mom, thankfully, is still alive and well at 76, and is likely to stick around into her 90s.
I ignored my mom throughout my 20’s. She was the drunk emotional person and I was the drunk unemployed drifter that left the family in Oklahoma to move to Minnesota.
The past few years I have been a better son though, answering calls, saying “Happy Mother’s Day, Happy Birthday,” etc…
I think I was 34 when mom died. We were a single parent family. She’d been ill for a very long time so it wasn’t quite as devastating. I cried and missed her and for a while I really wanted to call her up and hear her voice and have her just listen. She was the only person in my life I could just call up have listen to whatever, for however long. I still miss that, though it’s been 18 years I think. When she died she took a few secrets with her I regret not having gotten out of her before it was too late.
My parents and step parents are all still alive and range in age from 77 to 83.
My former father in law is 84 and will be dead in the next few days. Dementia took him a few years ago so it’ll be a relief. I’m very close still with my ex and her family so it will effectively be like the loss of a parent to me. As I said though, we really lost him a couple of years back.
I’m 52 so that’s a ripe old age for a first loss like this.
I was 32, but I’d known Dad was going to die relatively young since I was 17. We had to prepare our family tree for History class, and there was a suspicious streak of “cancer at 65”… “cancer at 65”… for men in his family the main options were cancer at 65 and old age above 90, with the occasional “sudden encounter with a bullet during some war or other” thrown in. And the men had two facial types, very distinct, which correlated to CoD. Dad was definitely in the “cancer at 65” camp.
It turned out to be a bit younger than that (he was 63), but then his lookalike older brother managed to hold on until 67, bringing the average back to normal.
He’d been sick for three years and he’d been conscious and accepting of the fact that it was likely to be terminal for quite a while; I’d gone back home to help care for him. My mother and brothers were in complete denial and crashed down completely. During the funeral Dad’s sister remarked on my “serenity” and I managed to avoid blurting out “someone has to keep the fires burning*, dammit, and it sure won’t be these ones!”
It’s been 16 years and I still can’t see the cold cut that was one of the few things he could keep down for much of his illness without choking a little. But it’s also a very different situation from a sudden death. And I’ve never… I’m not sure how to put this, ever since I was little (maybe because Dad’s Dad died when I was 3, and the responses I saw were more sad and accepting than denial and anger) I’ve seen death as something that’s going to happen no matter what, I don’t really have a problem with it per se like so many other people do. Death’s like gravity: since it don’t give a shit about your opinion, it’s much better to work with than against it.
Are there things I wish he would have been able to see? Oh yes. He would have looooooved cellphones, and of course meeting his grandkids. I’m glad he got to see my brother Ed married, sad he won’t get to attend Jay’s wedding. But that’s life.
What Dad’s paternal grandmother answered when someone asked her how come she was the only adult or almost adult in her family who wasn’t enlisting, last time the family went to dodge bullets (three of her children were old enough to enlist but with paternal permission).
My dad died when I was a teenager, and I just now realized that means that he’s been dead for more of my life than he was alive. I’m only a few years out from his age at death and I have three young kids.
His early death really made me more interested in diet and exercise to make it to my kid’s 20s, but longevity ain’t in my family tree.
I was 32 when my father died suddenly at age 63. Probable victim of tobacco. I was not exactly close to him, but we were on good terms. I got over it. My mother died when I was 54 and it was a relief. She was in an advanced state of Parkinson’s with concominant dementia. She had been a demanding PITA even before she got sick.
My father died when I was in my early 30’s. He was gay. I ended up on the phone with a number of his old boyfriends reassuring then that he died of a heart attack (not AIDS). He left a substantial sum to one of his old (I presume) boyfriends. My aunt, the executor, was very upset. She thought the man should have refused it. She either didn’t have a clue or was trying to spare my feeling.
On the other hand my aunt didn’t really know what to make of the bas relief of naked Greek soldiers riding bareback, or the pictures of naked men in bed from his vacation photos.
However, in his house was an abstract table top ceramic that looked an awful lot like a ginormous symbolic dick. I often wondered what happened when they cleaned out the house in the big garage sale. Did someone buy it? Did it go to the dump?
My mother is in the process of going into the final stages of Alzheimers. She still knows my name but I’ve had some days where I think she’s forgotten it. I had to call the long term care insurance company to get all the paperwork together for when we make the transition to nursing home.
I just move through things like an engineer. Solve one problem, move to the next. Then one day everything’s finished and you can start to mourn.
