Contents:
What decisions we have to make about parent care. Our tough choices and changed lives as a result.
Were we at peace with our parents before they became ill; if not, how we made peace with our parents before or after they died. What happens to family dysfunctional patterns if present during parent illness?
What coping skills and resources people called on when dealing with declining parents and their eventual deaths. How we who lost parents found support from friends in our grief, or did we?
Whether any emotions like guilt or anger, or any events interfered with or prolonged our grieving process. How could I ever prepare myself for how watching a loved parent suffer would affect me? Or how overwhelming and life-changing the loss of my parents would be? We are moved by what we love. Then caring for my declining parents moved me to write again, and to talk with others to explore their varied experiences in caring for their aging and dying parents.
I like to write about what is real. Those difficult feelings and experiences that are hard to talk about. Your books come out at times of my life when I need help the most. Anything I give to your father now would simply be prolonging his death. When it finally came, death was quite sudden, and absolutely unmistakable.
But those 10 days were hard. Death is foreign to us now; most of us do not know what it looks, sounds and smells like.
There has been no shortage of reports on the question. The reports all, in fact, conclude pretty much the same thing: Dying, death and bereavement need to be seen not as purely medical events, Chapman says: Everything else about our death, though, is uncertain. Have proper conversations, and make proper plans.
Helping parents' transition through aging, decline and death changes many adult childrens' lives forever. It shakes their very foundation. Caregivers often feel. Ten caregiver stories on how caring for aging parents in their final years and their eventual loss changes many adult children's lives forever.
In the meantime, though, a lot of people — about half the roughly , who die in Britain each year — still die in hospital. And as an organisation that has long focused on curing patients, the NHS does not always have a framework for caring for the dying, Chapman says. But in NHS hospitals too, much is changing.
People die in hospital essentially in five wards: Palliative care entails not just controlling symptoms, but looking after patients and their families and, often, difficult decisions: