Should I care more that my grandfather is going to die soon?

I had a discussion with my mother the other night. She broke down crying because her father had called her the night before, and she said she could “hear something in his voice.” He has been ill and getting progressively worse for nearly a decade, and she thinks he really is going to die soon now. He’s 6-feet tall, but only wieghs 152 pounds. He has diabetes and heart disease, and an infection in his foot that is spreading.

Before anyone sends their sympathy, remember I called him “her father.” This man has shown virtually no affection to anyone his entire life. In fact as far as I can tell, my mother is the only person who really cares whether he lives or dies. She even told me of a time when she told him that if he didn’t change how he acted and treated people, he would die old and alone.
And now it has more or less come to pass. He has a great-grandchild (my sister’s daughter), whom he never has and probably never will see. My brother did not invite him to his wedding. My sister did so under duress, but would NOT let him walk her down the isle. (He didn’t show, anyway) I myself have not really spoken to or seen him in years, and feel that it is no great loss.

I guess my question is: should I care a little bit, just because he is family? Right now the only thing I’m feeling is a little apprehension over how his passing will affect my mother. I won’t want to see her so sad. But after that, I mostly feel bad for ME. I feel cheated out of the happy experience with their grandparents that so many of my peers seem to have, and I blame him for that. He was a mean, spiteful, selfish, racist, dishonest, corrupt man. About that best I can say about him is that I don’t think he was thoroughly evil. But he was no friend of mine.
Even so, do I owe him anything, simply because he is my grandfather?

This is obviously a personal decision, but the fact that you are asking other people’s opinions shows that you must have some shred of feelings for the man.

But if you truly don’t care, don’t beat yourself up about it. It sounds like this man wouldn’t have cared if you had died.

It is sad that you didn’t get the full grandparent experience. Of course, not all of those experiences are the same. I grew up with my parents and my mom’s mother under the same roof. And it was a lot of fun, but it was also a bit exasperating at times, especially for my mom, who never got the chance to be the “matriarch” as it were as she passed away before my grandmother.

But back to your situation, I would say don’t get too upset. A relationship built with some love and respect is far more important than genetics.

You pretty much just described my own grandfather, who just passed away a couple of weeks ago. I had just seen him a couple of weeks prior, which was the first time in 13 years. He knew he was dying and was trying to make ammends with family.

All I can say was that my grandfather was a completely different person, and all of the shit that had happened in the past just kind of vanished. None of that mattered anymore. When he died, I mourned, and I said goodbye.

I don’t know if your grandfather is or will try to make ammends, but people typically do when faced with profound circumstances, such as impending death. If he is in fact, trying to do this, I highly suggest taking steps with him. I’m immensely relieved I did.

If not, at the very least, be there for your mother. She’s going to need it.

Best of luck to you.

And I apoligize for my compulsive useage of “just” and comma’s in that last post. It’s a sickness, I know.

Lizard, IMHO, blood does not make us family. Love and caring does. There are many people on my father’s side of my family that I don’t know, and never really will, in all likelihood. When they die, I will get an email from someone about it, and will offer appropriate support for my father (and that’s a whole different can of beans), but I won’t feel any personal sense of loss.

On a more personal note, I will tell you that I felt some degree of relief when my mother died, then beat myself up for 6 months, feeling guilty that I had felt relieved. It wasn’t worth it.

Bottom line, you can’t help how you feel, only how you react. Your feelings are valid, but be empathetic with your mother, and be supportive of her.

My dad’s father, who died many years ago, was not mourned by anyone in the fam, on either side. What a way to end up, eh? He was mean and selfish his entire life and never once tried to make amends or any other gesture. It’s a shame, but he chose to be that way.
Everyone just sighed with relief when the end came. It doesn’t make us heartless. I’m with norinew: the fact that you may share DNA with someone does not necessarily mean that you will feel a bond with them.

I’m still relieved that my maternal grandfather died. (To be fair to him, he had Parkinson’s, and his last couple of years were Not Fun. Especially the last few months, which I thankfully didn’t see.)

I won’t get much into his history with my mother and sister and his wife, except to say that he was an incredibly domineering man. One thing he did that sticks out in my mind was that every time we visited when I was a small kid, he would push me to eat. I was not and am not a big eater, especially when traveling. The more he pushed, the less I ate, and the madder he got. This also infuriated my parents. (He had weird food issues, practically shoving oyster stew down my mother as a kid; to this day she loathes oysters. So do I, but she didn’t force me to eat them on multiple occasions on the pretext that I’d learn to like them.) The older I got, the more complaints I got about his behavior from my aunt and cousins, who live in that area.

On the up side, he and my grandma were married for nearly fifty years, but I don’t know how happy a marriage it really was.

I was highly relieved when the call from my mom came. At least his death was peaceful. His health had deteriorated to the point where it really was a good thing he finally died. He was in no shape, mentally, to make amends, and I honestly don’t know if he would have. He was Always Right, after all. I don’t feel bad. I miss him, but not like you’d think I’d miss a grandparent, after knowing what he did to my mother and aunt. Grandma has not done well since he died; suddenly she got old.

Be there for your mother, but don’t feel guilty, and don’t try to fake things you don’t feel.

To this day, BTW, the more food is pushed at me, the less I eat it. My appetite vanishes. Thanks, Granddad. I know you meant well, but do you know how silly I feel about it?

I would say it doesn’t make you a bad person for not caring more deeply, but I would advise you to prepare to have an emotional response when he dies, anyway.

I started life with three grandparents, since my Dad’s mother died a year before I was born. As it turned out, because of my dad’s father’s distance(emotional not miles), I knew my mother’s parent’s much better. They were Grampy and Grammy, and Dad’s father was just…dad’s father, or Grandfather <insert surname here>. Grammy died when I was seven, and I was convinced my grampy hung the moon. I lost him when I was eighteen.

At that point I felt that I was out of grandparents, since the only one living was a cold distant man who showed no interest in his children or grandchildren after he remarried (within a few months of his second wife’s death). I think I saw him a total of eight or nine times my entire life. I didn’t think that I’d feel anything at all when he died. But I was wrong.

He died a couple of years ago, and I took the day off from work to go with my parents to the funeral. I was going for my Dad’s sake, since he did love the man, even if he didn’t get much affection back.

The funeral was fine, not really sad, at least for me. Until I met a man who had been friends with this virtual stranger we were laying to rest. The man was around my Dad and Uncles’ age, and spoke of my grandfather with great fondness. That didn’t move me. Then he talked about his children, joyfully noting that my grandfather had been like a grandfather to them. Then I felt something, all right.

I smiled politely, and tried hard not to let my outrage show. He had over a dozen grandchildren and had never shown an interest in any of them, and here this friend was telling me about how much time he’d spent with his children, right up until my grandfather got very ill.

It took a while for me to get over being angry and hurt about this, but I did eventually, because I took comfort in knowing that my brother and I had had a loving grandfather, even if it wasn’t this one. And at least he was good to someone.

So bear in mind that you may not feel anything when he dies, but you won’t know for sure until it happens.

Don’t beat yourself up, Lizard. You can’t magically spin a real relationship from a vacuum. Your good sense has already zeroed in on the essential factor: you hurt because your mom is hurting. You don’t have to share or even agree with the source of her grief. It really is quite enough just to stand by her for her own sake.

As to the appropriate degree of “upset” otherwise…feh. Families can be so complicated it’s almost impossible to sort out what’s appropriate versus something that teeters perilously close to hypocrisy. (I’ll spare you anecdotes, but some of my kin sure weren’t peaches either. It made for some interesting funerals, though.) My guess is that you can’t go too far wrong settling for a vague “no man is an island” regret. It sounds like your mom’s father didn’t live his life all that well. That’s pretty sad right there. Sometimes that has to be enough.

Veb

I’m just going to chime in here to tell you that forgiveness does more for the “forgiver” than it does for the “forgiven.”

Hold that anger and it will eat you up inside. Your grandfather has done what he has done…and HE will have to live and die with it. YOU are alive and will have to deal with your feelings for him.

It doesn’t really matter that he was so wrong. What really matters is what you DO with it. Your anger may be and probably IS, justified. It is NOT, however, GOOD for you.

Just my thoughts.

It’s the “should”, I would think.

Human relationships are as incredibly complex as there are humans on the planet. Six billion at the moment, and worse than that.

So you did not like the man, and your mother loves him and is worried about his death. Don’t worry about what you “should” be feeling, and worry about what you are feeling.

Your mother is upset, you will need to comfort her, and you will need to deal with the distress her sadness causes you. This directly relates to you. I wouldn’t say anything about the “shoulds” of this situation. But you will have to deal with a whole lot of the actualities of it.

I think I had more to say when I started this, but I forgot. What I mean is that the feelings you will be experiencing are what you should be dealing with. Don’t worry about what you think you “should” be feeling. Deal directly with what actually happens.

You may be surprised about how you actually feel.

One of my greatest regrets in my life is that I never took the opportunity to explore my grandparents life and knowledge of the world. Naturally I was a teenager who knew the lot when they passed away and saw no real need to try and understand them- much less try and work out why they were like they were.

I would make an effort to contact your grandfather. Once they are gone there is no recourse.

As a little kid, I had to go to several funerals of older relatives whom I didn’t know at all. I’d met them once or twice (sometimes, only at other funerals) but had never had anything to do with them.

However, I still found myself upset by them while I was actually at the funeral, and I finally figured out the reason why: rather than mourning a person who had died, I was mourning the opportunity to get to know someone whom many of my relatives had obviously loved very much.

Agreed Crinklebat. As I hurtle towards the big 50 I just wish I had made far greater use of my grandparents. Not as a childs centre of affection; but to find out about their world as an adult.

Before my grandfather died at 85 I can recall him telling me that it was no longer his world and he was ready to die. I, stupidly, explored none of this.

I knew my mother’s parents. Hags, both of them.

They are incredibly bitter old people with major control issues. I haven’t talked to them since I was 18.

You can feel compassion when someone loses a loved one, but I can’t see how you can mourn someone when there is no bond.

Be there for your mom. She’s the important one.

From someone who has been in a similar situation, I’d say yes care just enough to show the family you care but when all backs are turned,spit in the casket and go “Nyah nyah nyah.”
Well…ok…that would be in bad taste but I can understand where you are coming from. When my grandmother died when I was 13, we found out about 2 weeks after the funeral that my grandfather had been stepping out with a Cambodian widow half his age. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d been stepping out with this particular widow woman for over a decade,while still married to my grandmother. One of the young ladie’s children is possibly my grandfather’s child. We can’t prove it…didn’t do any DNA tests BUT there is a photo (or there was last time I was there)of him holding the newborn child in his arms and grinning for all the world like a proud papa. To add insult to injury, there was circulated a rumor among some of the relatives that his girlfriend had actually planned the death of my grandmother(who was on life support due to cancer and illness) so that she could hurry up and marry my grandfather. On top of all that, to further fuel the rumor, she MARRIED my grandfather 3 months after my grandmother’s funeral and neither my sister,myself or my father were invited. We just happened to drop by on the wedding day and my grandfather paid my father to take us to a movie and dinner so we wouldn’t get in the way of his ceremony. Afterwards, the new wife would treat my sister and I like white trash and my grandfather never told her otherwise. We weren’t welcomed in their house and their daughter was a spoiled brat who would go out of her way to get my sister and I in trouble.Finally, when I was about 16,at Thanksgiving I told him he could take it and stick it where the sun don’t shine and never saw him again except for ONCE when CG and I were engaged.My mother would constantly badger me to call him,etc and I wouldn’t ever do it. I spoke briefly with him at my sister’s HS graduation and didn’t see him again till his funeral,which I only attended to make my mother happy. When my mother’s back was turned and the merry widow(who wasn’t crying at all but looked rather happy I thought)wasn’t looking,I spit in the coffin.He didn’t deserve my respect, I thought. I haven’t thought much of him since.
I hope you come to the right decision because I know how tough it can be.

IDBB

My grandfather is in the last stages of Alzheimers, the kind of stages where it’s arguable as to whether it’s him in there. Up until a few months ago, he would randomly have good days that would let him recognize my mother and actually talk to her, but I haven’t heard of one in a good while now.

Somehow the good DNA is keeping him alive. He’s 94, out of his mind, and not eating enough, but won’t have a heart attack or stroke. His wife went Sept. 13, 2001 from a stroke at age 83 (so that was GREAT week around our house, you can tell).

My point is that his death has been such a foregone coclusion for so long that I might not manage actual tears. It’s to the point now where I think even my mom is secretly wishing for the day, as he can’t be having any kind of real life, even mentally, and caring for him is now kind of a life-altering state.

My advice is not to feel guilty about it. Your feelings aren’t concious decisions. If your feelings are allowed to prompt you to hurt people or ignore things that need attention, then that’s something different.

I know what you mean about feeling cheated out of a happy grandparent experience. I never knew any of my grandparents. My grandmothers both died when my parents were young, and my grandfathers seem to have smoked themselves into early graves. Whenever people talk about stuff that they did with their grandpartents, I always feel kinda wierd because I can’t relate. I’d suggest that you try to call your grandfather, while you still have the chance.

Whoa, IDBB! Are you part Sicilian? I mean, geez.
There seems to be a clear consensus here that I needn’t feel too badly. Unfortunately, I still do. I feel like I will always wish I had talked to him more, and got to know him. But at the same time, I can’t bring myself to do those things NOW, while he is still alive.
I guess I feel like that opportunity was lost long ago, and whether he’s dead or alive now makes no difference.