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What are your tips for staying independent at your own home?
Aging Well | Last Active: Mar 13 3:19pm | Replies (160)Comment receiving replies
I don't have my husband, @rca. He died April 10th of this year. And it is hard, and it is awful, and it is a struggle. It tore me apart. I couldn't move for weeks. I was stunned and beyond reason. He died of vascular dementia. We would have been married for 45 years this August 29th. He died from a horrible disease, vascular dementia.
And yes, things won't ever be the same for me, you, or anyone who goes through this. It can't be undone, but we can make it easier by looking at different ways to make a lousy situation better.
I am a patient at Mass General. While caring for my husband, I had to spend a week in MA having radiation. I often had to talk to people whose first language wasn't English. But they could communicate if given a chance. I bet that they felt out of place and at a loss for control as I did, lying under a giant machine shooting photon rays at my two lesions that were close to my heart.
A reaction to my husband's death was also impatience, but when I could see how hurt I made other people by being impatient, I stopped.
I have also felt very put out, but that will pass. I think that it's more a lack of control than it is an inconvenience. At least, it is for me.
Merry
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Thanks for sharing this bit of your life Merry ❤️🩹
I was with a partner around a year or so into our relationship (having known each other for some time prior), where he wasn’t well for two days and I (being in the health industry) was madly calling in favours from the cardiologist and pulmonologist friends I had to get him seen because I knew something wasn’t right - it was a Saturday - and he was booked for extensive tests on Monday (these docs did everything to help get him in with them asap), but sadly he had a massive heart attack on Sunday mid morning...I did my best, but I just could not save him, and consequently blamed myself for years - it took that long to internalise that in fact the event was so anatomically catastrophic that there was nothing that could have been done to save him…I felt like the life had been slapped right out of me, feeling stunned and frozen inside.
What was worse was his friends and family bailed me up in a corner at the funeral and fired a barrage of accusatory statements and harsh questions as to why he wasn’t alive, I should’ve done more😔
I still feel that pain these years later, however I’m learning more and more that the emotional prison isn’t a place where I need to exist. Not saying that’s what’s happening for you - I just thought I’d share this back and kindly say that in a way, I understand.
A little off topic for this thread, but as you’ve said, here on Connect is where we are amongst people who can relate and understand 🌺