This woman gave birth at 66, and is now dead at 69.
Those poor kids.
She said at the time she had a large family including young people, so here’s hoping those kids get a good home within the family and aren’t split up.
It is sad for the kids, but it is a lot easier to move on from losing a parent at 3 than at 10 or 12. Losing a parent is hard at any time, but this could have been a lot more traumatic for them.
I would think that if you give birth at age 66, by the third trimester your children would be full-grown adults.
Too bad she wasn’t American. I would like to see the reaction when the Medicare office gets the bill for the maternity stay.
Regards,
Shodan
People are so weird. I can’t imagine wanting to have babies at any age over about 40. I just wouldn’t have the flexibility and patience.
Yeah, this is completely false. I lost my Mother at 4 and it was incredibly traumatic, probably moreso than losing her at 10 would have been.
mswas, I don’t mean to minimize your loss, and in fact I tend to agree with you–but I don’t think anybody can ever know the truth on such an issue.
I would think being old enough to have memories would make it harder. By 10 or 12, you have strong memories of someone. You’re like an actual person. Three is still pretty young enough that they might recover.
Opening this up, I though that even though it’s a sad subject, some doper is going to manage to somehow put a humorous bent to this, yet remain unoffensive… and I was right.
I’m glad there were two kids so they’ll still have each other. If you want something else, thank goodness there were not eight.
mswas, I’m sorry for what you had to experience. These kids, though, were born in Dec. 2006, making them just over 2½. There’s a world of difference between 2½ and 4, including the ability to form long-term memories. I’m not trying to minimize the tragedy of children losing a mother, just making a point about children’s neurological development.
I’m sorry for the kids. And I find myself upset at the mother for being stupid enough to have children at an age where it was so likely her kids would lose her before adulthood. (Then there’s the question of the doctors and their lack of checking about her age.) I’m sure it’s hard to accept that you’re too old and won’t get to have children of your own,* but it was totally irresponsible and selfish of her to refuse to accept it. I hope her children are raised by more sensible people. Assuming she’d live another 30 years just because her mother died at 101 was stupid. She didn’t have to have children at that age, and if she hadn’t, they wouldn’t have been put in a position to suffer this kind of loss. As a parent I think you’re not supposed to do that.
*Of course she could have adopted decades earlier, but I guess that was insufficient.
Marley, I have similar feelings - my sister and her husband have two kids - but waited to have kids until he was nearly 50 (she was in her late 30s). His health isn’t good and I doubt there is more than a 30% chance he will live to see his kids graduate from high school. I hope he does, but its hope - not an expectation. It really doesn’t seem fair to the kids to have them knowing the chances you are going to be putting them through the death of a parent are much higher than normal.
Yeah, I can see that. My kids are little (2 & 5), and there is a lot of attachment at that age. Although it’s true that the 2 year old won’t have long-term memories, I think the initial separation would be truly horrible (you can’t explain very well to a 2 or 3 year old why mommy went away and didn’t come back for them).
What a sad story. 
Well true, we only have one Mother to lose, and losing her as a child is traumatic no matter what.
Drake You have a valid point about lasting memories, but you are dismissing the memories of 16 years of absence which is more critical. Either way it’s bad. If you are older at least you have memories to hold onto. When you are younger the handful of memories you have are little comfort next to the gaping chasm that is not having your Mother for the rest of the time. So it’s not so much about what you had and lost, but about an acute awareness of what you didn’t have.
I hadn’t thought about that, and it’s a really good point. I had just assumed that whoever took over the raising of the children would be in the “mother” slot from then on (this happened in my family, but the generation before me). I suppose it really dramatically depends on what happens next in their lives.
My step-Mother was pretty nuts, so my Mother filled in as an idealized fantasy of how things might have been better had she lived. One thing is certain I would be an accomplished musician now.
My issue with this isn’t that she died when her children were 2 or 3, but that she conceived knowing that she would be likely be dead when they were at most high school or early college age and just at the turning point when they are trying to get established in life.
I feel the same way about men who start families late in life, by the way.
I see it a bit differently. Life is a gift, we shouldn’t regret someone’s birth because of its circumstances. They lost their Mother, sure, but the alternative is never to have been born. We all suffer in our own way, is it better to not be born at all that we may avoid suffering?
Huh - doing a Cntl-F to look for the word “adopt” or “adoption” yielded no results. How odd - surely there must have been some reason she wasn’t allowed to adopt children instead of selling her house to have kids with similar chromosomes, right?
At her age, most adoption programs for infants would be closed to her. Social workers are no more interested in adopted kids losing their mothers than we are in watching it happen to bio kids - and with adoption, you have control over who gets children.