They may not feel that she’s in any sense in the cemetery. Or they may want to remember her alive in their houses or in hers, not dead being lowered into the grave.
I know that some people feel it’s important to go to the grave. I fully accept that it’s important to them. I don’t understand this insistence that other people ought to.
I totally agree. I haven’t been to my dad’s grave once since the headstone unveiling in 2018 even though I have been within a few miles of it a number of times. OK, Dad was a dick but I have very rarely visited my sister’s grave and it’s just a few miles away. She died in 2014 and we were very close.
I have explicitly said that I don’t want to be buried. My body goes to science and it can go in the dumpster when they are done with it as far as I am concerned.
My dad died at 72 in 2019 after 15 years with COPD. He tried to put on a smile and a brave face, but he was in pain and miserable, embarrassed because he had to miss family events, out of character cranky and impatient, and when I finally got the call that he had had a heart attack (he never regained consciousness and died in the hospital), I was so relieved for him that he had managed to escape the horrible end stages of COPD that I said aloud, “Oh! Good for you, Dad!” I miss him all the time, but I feel better now than I did for the last years of his life.
My young (70) athletic dad passed instantly from a freak heart attack while out on a walk a month ago. When you figure it out let me know…
I was very fond of several dead relatives. I don’t visit their graves. My mom had my father’s corpse cremated, and we did the same for her.
First, my condolences to the OP and their family.
My stepfather died a couple of years ago. We were all devastated. He was a well-loved family patriarch and a pillar of the community, and the world is a worse place with him gone. We are all moving on as best we can, and my mother, Og love her, has embraced being a widow and has joined a widow’s traveling group and is headed to New Orleans any minute now.
My father died last year. He was a … complicated man, and my sister’s and my relationships with him were equally complicated. Truth be told, I think we both felt relief when he died. He was an intractible drug addict who lived in a crumbling dump of a house, went without food because he’d rather spend his money on pills, etc.
Following this thread because I expect to be dealing with all this soon. It’s been a hell of a couple of years for Dad. First my stepmother, his wife of 30-plus years, died of COVID in the very beginning (April 2020); he dropped her off at the door of the ER and never saw her again. Then the toll that the pandemic took on all of us. In January 2022, Dad had a hip replacement, and was looking forward to being more mobile again. He was doing well in rehab initially; he has always taken good care of himself and remained as active as feasible, and most people wouldn’t have guessed that he was 81. (One of his pandemic issues was that he couldn’t go to the gym, which he had done almost daily since retiring at 70. So I suggested that he buy a recumbent stationary bike, which he did and used it faithfully. Didn’t smoke, barely drank, eats his vegetables, etc.)
Until May 2022; after complaining of fatigue and shortness of breath (which the doctors brushed off, responding “you’re in your 80s and you are asthmatic and just had a hip replacement!”) he finally talked them into an abdominal CT, which revealed…A 20-POUND MALIGNANT TUMOR.
He was given the choice of going home and being made comfortable or having it removed in a surgery that would have been extremely aggressive for someone half his age, and opted for the latter. The surgery went as well as could have been expected (although they did have to remove a kidney as well because it was almost completely surrounded by tumor), but he has had a litany of complications - Stage 4 pressure ulcer, sepsis, several other infections, etc. As far as anyone knows, he has remained cancer-free since (the tumor was a type that is not treated with chemo or radiation, but because of its size and position, it was hard to be sure they got it all). But the whole experience took a lot out of him,not surprisingly.
Finally, a few weeks ago the facility where he was (which is primarily a hospice, but he was there for their top-rated wound care program) suggested that there wasn’t really anything more they could do for him medically, and he decided to go home under hospice care. I just got back from visiting him for the 5th time since last May, and he is sleeping a lot and not eating much. He has some days that are better, but hasn’t been out of bed in months and nobody thinks it will be much longer. He was more lucid on Friday afternoon right before I left for the airport (my aunt came with some people to move his exercise bike to her house in NJ so she can sell it for him), and he asked me whether I care whether he is cremated (I don’t, not that it’s my decision to make anyway), and expressed a fair bit of anger at the main surgeon, who never really explained to him that this outcome was among the possibilities. I can’t say that I blame him.
My relationship with Dad has been complicated, for reasons that are too long to go into here. The hospice social worker came by last week and asked whether either of us felt like we had unfinished business. He’s not an evil person, but I don’t have unfinished business more because I am not interested in replaying Groundhog Day than because I believe that I have no reason to hold a grudge. He’s an imperfect human being and he knows it, and he has acknowledged many times over the past months that he wishes there are things he had done differently in our relationship and that he was surprised I have been willing to spend so much time and energy on being with him over the past year.
So I don’t know how I am going to deal with it when it happens. I suspect I will be OK in the immediate aftermath, and it will take years to come out. In the near term, I can take some solace in my discovery that my mother, who is living on almost no money, will be eligible for his entire Social Security benefit as a divorced spouse, which should be close to the max possible benefit and is more money than she’s ever had in her life. And she both needs and deserves it, and it will take a load of stress off of me, because Lord knows my sister isn’t going to be in a position to help Mom financially if she needs it.
Adulting, as the Millennials say. It’s not for the faint of heart.
My mom and dad died in 2002 and 2004, respectively and I have never visited the gravesite and have no intention of ever doing so, even though it would in no way be difficult or inconvenient.
This seems rather judgemental. Maybe they just don’t want to. And why is that a bad thing?
Yes. And when I didn’t immediately burst into tears when my father died and got “grief” for that (we were all in the hospital room at the time), it screwed up my mourning, and I think it left me feeling more irritated than grieving. I never really got that process “right.” He was only 59 (lung cancer due to heavy smoking plus smoking-related heart disease and emphysema), so it should have been sad.
My mom was in assisted living and had a fall on Christmas Eve. The fall started a bleed in her brain, and she was in surgery by the time the rest of the family got to the hospital (her assisted living facility was close to my older sister). It was a case of a successful surgery, but the patient never recovered. She was in a non-responsive coma for several months. She was 83. It was weird, because it was really like she’d died on Christmas morning, but we still had a “living” body to visit. That also messed with the greiving process.
I think I’ll probably have a stronger reaction when one of my siblings dies.
Best wishes. Losing a parent is hard.
I see there are a lot of people here that don’t visit graves. I find nothing wrong with that, but I do visit. When my grandpa died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 59, my grandma was devastated. They were soulmates. I was 5 yo at the time and had always been close to that set of grandparents. I was very close to my grandma and stayed overnight all the time (there was a short path that connected our yards). I went with her to the cemetery to visit my grandpa’s grave EVERY week. We’d say a prayer and she’d leave flowers. She also planted a cemetery basket every summer that we would water on our visits. I think it was a way to honor him and still show love to him. She is now buried next to him, my husband’s dad and grandparents are buried only about 10 feet away, my sister’s preemie son is buried at the foot of our grandparent’s graves, my dad is buried in the next section over.
Because it was so important to my grandma, I plant a cemetery basket every summer for their graves. I also plant one for my husband’s dad and his step-dad. My sister has one for her baby and my mom does my dad’s. I stop a few times during the summer and make sure they’re all watered and say prayers. It’s a peaceful place and a good place to reflect.
It will be very hard for a while and it will get better, but it will never get completely better.
I was numb for a couple months, didn’t even listen to music in the car. Finally I had to justify to myself that my mom wouldn’t want me wasting my life. We only have so much time on Earth so might as well try to enjoy it and help those around you. I bought a motorcycle, started kayaking, got out and experienced life more. I wasn’t trying to get hurt and took all reasonable steps to be safe but I accepted that getting hurt or dying was a possibility. But sometimes taking some risks makes you feel more alive.
I still miss her but death is inevitable for all of us, so enjoy the time you have with your loved ones and with your own consciousness.
After my mom died my father decided to spread mom’s ashes in a pretty spot near where they retired. After he died I decided to spread his ashes at the same spot. It’s far away from where I live and I have only been back once since I put him there 12 years ago. I am thinking of making another visit, maybe this summer.
However, I still think about them both and I don’t feel I need to be at their final resting place to have a mental visit with them. I can do that whenever I have solitude in a similar pretty spot.
I don’t have to explain myself to you. My siblings are being assholes, nothing more, nothing less.
Honestly, having lost DesertWife before my parents, I was sad but not devastated. I still think about all three, but it’s my parents from time to time, DW several times a week.
Losing a beloved spouse is tough. The only thing I can imagine worse is losing a child. Her parents went through that twice, having lost another daughter in her 30s to leukemia.
True enough and I apologize if I came out as hypocritically judgmental myself. I have three non-asshole siblings who my parents carefully and effectively played off each other, so we are effectively only children.
My parents went first and then much more recently my (then first and only) wife.
But yes, there is a world of difference between losing people who were your life as a kid and subsequently your good friends in adulthood vs. losing the person who was your life through most of your extended adulthood to date.
One can, and I have, remarried. It’s much harder to get another set of parents.
My new wife in no way substitutes for or competes with my prior wife. They are two different people and I’m living two different chapters with each in turn. There is space in my head for both. It’s a different space used very differently.
I wish I could have done that but that was not my path. About a year after she died a friend who had known us both and I were conversing. I said the pain did not seem to be lessening and wondered if I had put her on a pedestal. He said, “I have seen many marries couples, and many happy married married couples. Between you two though was a bond deeper than any I’ve seen before.”
Mercedes Lackey has in her Valdemar books the concept of ‘lifemate.’ It is relatively rare – everyone gets married but there are only a handful of lifemate couples. Talia, the heroine of her early novels, was not among them. One of the minor characters was despairing to a lifemated friend that he would never find one of his own. The friend bluntly told him, “It would not work out for you – you’re not suited for it. It is not romance, not in the way the bards sing of it and both a blessing and a curse.”
Mine has been a blessing and a curse but even had I known then what I know now, I would not forsake the blessing to avoid the curse.
Anyway, enough about me. My condolences to the OP. It still sux.
I agree. We visit mostly because it’s a tradition that our family has always had. In my grandma’s generation and generations before, visiting graves was seen as honoring the dead. I think of my loved ones that have died all of the time, I don’t have to go to the cemetery for that.