Vent your painful memories

[herbavore]

Xork, I'm going to double post because I want a separate post for to respond to your description of what is going on with your family. It is heartbreaking, the worst thing I can think of--the slow painful disintegration that is hell on everyone.

I have seen many couples develop the dynamic you are talking about--where the caregiver who loved his or her partner so much loses all patience and begins to resent the victim of disease. I have known one other couple that dealt with ALS and many more where one person develops dementia and the other must go along trying to be patient, often for years. I really wish that we had a different attitude to death. How sad it is to see beautiful partnerships ravaged like that and yet, how understandable in the reality of the cumulative stress, not to mention the grief and the loss.

I wonder if talking to your mom about it would help? If you began by compassionately relating to her situation, but then admit that you feel that when she loses patience it is crushing for your Dad--and that it is so hard for you to watch. Maybe even bring up that you want to protect her from having to have this way of being together be her lasting memories, and no doubt a source of guilt, rather than the beautiful partnership they always had.

I am so sorry for your Dad and for your whole family. What a terrible disease ALS is.

 

[MrRoot]

One thing from my peacekeeping days come to my mind as we had just few days ago visited a village escorting humanitarian aid group to give vaccines children and tend the elderly.

Few days later I was doinf a patrol on find out that there are fire in the village.

As soon as we get there we found out that all the elderly, children and women were placed in pyres and lit a fire.

I still can’t forget the smell off burning human flesh...

 

[Runningfox]

One thing from my peacekeeping days come to my mind as we had just few days ago visited a village escorting humanitarian aid group to give vaccines children and tend the elderly.

Few days later I was doinf a patrol on find out that there are fire in the village.

As soon as we get there we found out that all the elderly, children and women were placed in pyres and lit a fire.

I still can’t forget the smell off burning human flesh...

How horrible for you; how heartbreaking for those victimized in this way. It's so hard to comprehend what utter Cruelty human beings are capable of.
I can imagine the helpless / powerlessness guilt n loss..... well perhaps I CANNOT; I can sympathize and pray for peace.

 

[Tubbs]

It is truly terrifying seeing the kind of monsters people can be or become.

 

[herbavore]

One thing from my peacekeeping days come to my mind as we had just few days ago visited a village escorting humanitarian aid group to give vaccines children and tend the elderly.

Few days later I was doinf a patrol on find out that there are fire in the village.

As soon as we get there we found out that all the elderly, children and women were placed in pyres and lit a fire.

I still can’t forget the smell off burning human flesh...

I have lived in a country at war. It remains one of my deepest fears that I will have to again. There is simply no going back from seeing human beings become monsters that either inflict pain casually or with gusto. Once you have seen that you live in a different world. I have always respected you, Mr Root, but knowing that you have to carry this burden increases my respect for your strength. Not only did you not lose your compassion, you doubled down on it.

 

[BehindtheShadow]

Seeing my dad die in front of me, he had suffered a massive heart attack and I performed CPR on him and did so for over an hour waiting for an ambulance to arrive. They worked on him for over two hours to stabilise him and transport him only for him to die on the way to hospital. It actually broke me, I blamed myself said maybe I should have worked harder, forced him to go to the doctor etc

My childhood and some very personal things that happened to me still haunts me to this day.

My good friend moved to Germany without telling me only to receive a letter some 2 years later telling me she had run because she had been raped and she felt all alone and didn't know who to talk to or what to do. I felt like such a bad friend that she felt she couldn't speak to me but I was too caught up in my own drama that I didn't even see her pain.

Those are the few that stick with me....

 

[herbavore]

BehindtheShadow, I can imagine how traumatic that was with your Dad. One thing that I thought about after my son died and I would beat myself up continually with all the ways I failed to prevent that, was that these guilt trips were actually a distraction I was giving myself in order not to have to go through the most intense pain of all: the pain of missing him, the acceptance of that pain in my life. Later I went to a therapist that said the same thing in a different way. He said, "All these thoughts that you have about mistakes you made, things you should have done, things you should not have done, those are just you believing that you could have had control of something uncontrollable and it helps you temporarily by distracting you from the one true thing: your feelings of loss." Once I started to let that loss overwhelm me and then pass on, knowing it will come again, but also pass on again, I got better about the guilt.