Is this part of the "normal grieving process"?

My father-in-law lost his wife of 52 years in January. I understand that the grieving process can take a very long time but I'm trying to find out what is "normal"? He will go to the cemetery 2-3 times a day to "visit", he's become more depressed and withdrawn, and he makes comments that he wants "her to wait for him". He flat out refuses to speak with a counselor or therapist to help him cope with the loss.  I know that the grieving process is different for every person, but is this something that we should be worried about?

There have been known cases where grieving for a spouse can even lead to the remaining spouse's death through heartache. To me, it seems like a 52 year love would be impossible to get over. Just let him cope with it however he wants as long as he isn't physically hurting himself. It's not your place to tell him how to grieve.

Original Post by jackattack07:

There have been known cases where grieving for a spouse can even lead to the remaining spouse's death through heartache. To me, it seems like a 52 year love would be impossible to get over. Just let him cope with it however he wants as long as he isn't physically hurting himself. It's not your place to tell him how to grieve.

 When my grandmother died, my grandfather lasted another 2 months and followed. He was devastated, I can still hear him calling her throughout the funeral. :(

There is no set time to grieve. It's all on ones own timing. And she just passed so recently, as my grandmother just passed a year ago, I can relate with your father-in-law. Let grief take it's time and course, there is no need to see a therapist at this point. It's all still fresh, like it just happened yesterday. This is normal

Edit: And 52 years is a long time, I can't even imagine. I think all you can do is be there and support him and be understanding.

Thanks everyone for your replies. I can't even begin to imagine the depth of my father-in-laws sadness. We do our best to support him and be there for him. My family and I recently moved in with him to help take care of his house and keep him from being so lonely. I guess we just need to give him some time to adjust to all the changes-since they are huge. I was just concerned that we'd soon be dealing with another loss, like crazydiamondchrysalis stated. Thanks again all for your input.

Here is what WebMD has to say: http://www.webmd.com/balance/tc/grief-and-gri eving-topic-overview You can try going to some other sites on grief, too.  They will tell you the stages of grief, and at what point intervention is necessary.

My grandparents had been married 58 years when my grandfather died in December.  My nana was upset/depressed/melancholy about it for awhile.  She wasn't eating right, either.  But after a few months she told my mom she had a realization that "Jack may have died, but I didn't."  Then she basically put her life back together; she stopped dwelling on his death and, instead, focused on things she liked to do -- crossword puzzles, going to bingo, visiting with her sister, etc.

The grieving process takes time, for sure.  Not sure how healthy or active your father-in-law is, but I believe it would help if he had socialization or activities or responsibilities that he could focus on.  If you asked him to pick up one of the kids from school or if one of his grandkids asked him to come to one of his school events or sports games, that would give him something to focus on and make him feel useful. Knowing that other people not only appreciate you but are counting on you to help them out gives you a purpose in life.  Also, maybe he could go to bingo or church events or join a senior center.  Having some fun may be just what he needs!

You guys are amazingly supportive.  This is why I love this site.

Sad as this sounds it sounds like he is waiting to be with her! but other than offering details of where he can go get professional help and offering a shoulder to lean on there really isn't much you can do.

Perhaps try taking him for days out to interesting places, if there are kids around try and get him to get involved with them, take them to the park etc.

I don't know it's very difficult.

I don't understand how anyone can let anything become their reason for living.... work, relationship, whatever.... yea, being sad is fine, but those people who die after their partner is just an example of crazy o.O

Original Post by crazydiamondchrysalis:

Original Post by jackattack07:

There have been known cases where grieving for a spouse can even lead to the remaining spouse's death through heartache. To me, it seems like a 52 year love would be impossible to get over. Just let him cope with it however he wants as long as he isn't physically hurting himself. It's not your place to tell him how to grieve.

 When my grandmother died, my grandfather lasted another 2 months and followed. He was devastated, I can still hear him calling her throughout the funeral. :(

 My grandfather died last year after an accident. He was in the hospital a week before he died. One night, my mom & I ran into some people on the way out and they said that my grandmother was old too so she won't be around for much longer after he dies. I was like "thanks for the comforting thought?"

Thank you ALL for your posts!  We involve my F-I-L as much as we can.  I cook the meals for the family and we go out to eat on occasion and he comes with us.  We think he may be suffering from Traumatic Grief (after following the link from puh8suwruz- thanks!)  He exhibits the signs and has stated that he has no motivation or desire to do things anymore.  He isolates himself from the rest of our family much of the time by remaining in his office or bedroom for hours at a time.  He talks about future events and then adds "if I'm still around."  It's sad and kind of disturbing.  Why would someone choose to live this way when there is plenty to live for?

Things are so hard when you lose someone who has been so close, for so long.  It's worse than losing an arm or a leg.  And he may actually NEED that time to himself.  He may not so much be *choosing* to think this way, it is just where his thoughts are.  Losing a spouse is a direct hit on your own mortality, after all, and if you beleive in an afterlife, there is a great pull to "be with" your spouse. 

My grandmother threw herself on my granfather's body and kissed him when we left the funeral home.  She was terribly broken up.  I just knew she wouldn't live much longer.  But you know, she had a daughter and her family in town, they saw each other almost every day, and she lived for another 13 years.

I don't know how possible it is to get him to a doctor for depression, but a little medication might help him get through this (you mentioned he refused to see a therapist - very typical of this age group).  Maybe go with him for a physical, then mention your concerns to the doctor - don't know if this would fly with him or not. 

You are definitely doing the right thing in invoving him in your family life.  It might help if you could somehow show him how necessary he is in your life, all the things he needs to teach your children, etc.  Somehow make him feel that his life is not over.

Hi puh8suwrux- As far as getting him to a docotr, that could be tricky.  He doesn't have a family doctor.  Also, I don't think he trusts them anymore- my mother-in-law had a quack of a doctor (not to offend those in the profession) so he has little faith in the medical field. My husband did tell him today that we are there for him if he needs us for anything, to talk or otherwise.

It's funny you should mention getting him involved in teaching our children- my oldest is turning 8 on Friday and my F-I-L had told her that when we moved in he would take her fishing.  So we are buying her her first fishing pole so "Grandpa" can take her fishing.  I hope he can come to realize that he still has a lot to offer to those of us around him.

Original Post by jrzgirl76:

My father-in-law lost his wife of 52 years in January. I understand that the grieving process can take a very long time but I'm trying to find out what is "normal"? He will go to the cemetery 2-3 times a day to "visit", he's become more depressed and withdrawn, and he makes comments that he wants "her to wait for him". He flat out refuses to speak with a counselor or therapist to help him cope with the loss.  I know that the grieving process is different for every person, but is this something that we should be worried about?

jrzgirl76- Hey, I just went through losing my father last November and my mother is just like that.  You need to be there to comfort him when he needs you.  Just leave him alone and don't take him to any counselor or therapist.  He will feel insulated by that gesture.  Just reassure him that you will be there when he is ready to talks etc..

Let me tell you, counselor or therapist doesn't know how much he misses his wife.  Only time will heals and you will know when the time is right.

Hope this helps!

Vie

vievien- they there!  The last thing we want to do is force him to do something he doesn't want/need to do. I know he needs time but it seems that he's getting worse with time instead of better. It's hard to just stand by and watch.  I suppose we'll have to play the passive role and see how things work out. Thanks Vie. 

Original Post by jrzgirl76:

vievien- they there!  The last thing we want to do is force him to do something he doesn't want/need to do. I know he needs time but it seems that he's getting worse with time instead of better. It's hard to just stand by and watch.  I suppose we'll have to play the passive role and see how things work out. Thanks Vie. 

I know it is hard but 52 years is a very long time.  Asked your father-in-law if he needs anything.  Does he have any grandchildren that visit him?  Make him feel that he is needed here also.  My mother and I still grieves the lost of my father even today. Some days and months brings back memories of him and we would cry together. 

Hang in there! 

Vie

I think that you have to give him the time, space, and love to grieve.  If you don't, then with the next loss it may come back more severely.

Perhaps the family could help organize a memorial for her.  Or a charity event for her favorite cause?  Something that he could get involved in a positive way but would involve memories of her or doing something in her honor.

We're conditioned to think in the terms of weird and normal. Right/Wrong. Etc. In all honesty it's different for everyone. It will mark two years next week that my father has been gone. Everyone says: " Ooh. The first year is the hardest it gets easier." I still struggle to accept the fact he's gone in truth. It's a struggle that comes and goes. It's something I struggle to make peace with at my own pace. It's easy to say "See a therapist/counselor." Or:"Come to our church." The truth is that he may not be ready for that yet. When my father passed away everyone offered suggestions/invites. I wasn't ready to talk/listen to someone about it yet. People that contributed/caused my fathers death kept contacting me. I wasn't ready to talk to any of them. Or: Even grieve with them knowing that they needed closure. I consider myself a generally good person, but I could not pat their backs. I could not accept apologies or ask questions to ease their minds.  All I was capable of was crying with/infront of others. The most considerate/loving/best thing was that my husband just let me cry. Each time I broke down making arrangements, etc. Even months later... Or: randomly now. He's understanding and just take over. He lets me grieve at my own pace, on my own terms, and in my own way. We take comfort in my fathers urn and memorial. This may sound odd but I talk to my fathers urn. It's something that brings me solace. He doesn't talk back or anything insane. :) I just tell him about my life, my daughter, my successes, problems,sisters, and mother etc.  Monday: I visited my fathers memorial with my sister and mother. My father's wishes were to be cremated. In addition I arranged for a memorial by my grandparents graves. That way my little sister/mother/relatives/friends had a common place to go/grieve/pay respects. He isn't there he's actually with me still yet. I haven't been able to do something with his ashes yet. I feel like if I do I'll fall apart so I'm waiting. It's something I broke down one day and had to confess to tell my family. They were pressing me on where/when we were going to do something with the ashes. The truth is: I take such comfort in having him with me it probably sounds crazy to others. I know that. I'm just not ready to let that go just yet. That's something that some people just don't understand. I've been told I'm going to hell for keeping the urn. My response was this:" I'm sure people have gone to hell for a lot worse." I was in WA state 2000+ miles away so unable to see the memorial till recently. I made all the arrangements for it though so I knew exactly what it would look like. ... but it was different in person. ( I was in charge of all of the arrangements. )

Somehow: Being there at that memorial reading my fathers stone... Somehow made things feel  real to me in a whole new way. My baby sister and mother go there all the time which may sound crazy. It helps them deal with the pain of losing my father. I had actually thought it was quite silly. The memorial itself. I wanted them to have it because I knew they needed it though. In honesty I thought " He's not there though. How silly is this.... " I didn't even ever want/plan to go in all actuality.  However: Once there... It's like a weight came crashing down on me... and lifted a little. The truth is I needed it too. I just didn't know it yet.

"It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone." -Rose Kennedy

That memorial/urn for my father each work as a tiny bit of extra scar tissue for us. My sister said: " That's why I have to come here so often. It makes it more real for me so I can deal. It comforts me too. " It honestly does so don't tell him he's going there too often. It may be the very thing that's keeping him sane in all actuality. Just be supportive and give him more time to build new scar tissue.

Original Post by loriklorik:

I don't understand how anyone can let anything become their reason for living.... work, relationship, whatever.... yea, being sad is fine, but those people who die after their partner is just an example of crazy o.O

It is not abnormal.  Grieving is stressful.  Stress can cause death (ie:  heart attacks, etc). 

My brother died in December, and my mother has had acute angina pain for a while now. 

Original Post by wasalisa:

Original Post by loriklorik:

I don't understand how anyone can let anything become their reason for living.... work, relationship, whatever.... yea, being sad is fine, but those people who die after their partner is just an example of crazy o.O

It is not abnormal.  Grieving is stressful.  Stress can cause death (ie:  heart attacks, etc). 

My brother died in December, and my mother has had acute angina pain for a while now. 

Article: Can you die from a broken heart?

Source: By JEROME BURNE, Daily Mail

Last updated at 11:01 25 July 2006

Research reveals grief and marital strife could be as much a cause of heart trouble as obesity and cholesterol.

New research reveals grief and marital strife could be as much a cause of heart trouble as obesity and cholesterol. So should doctors be 'treating' our feelings?

Muscular and tanned, Ken had just jogged 15 miles to see his cardiologist. His diet was perfect - low-fat, vegetarian, plenty of fish oils and some supplements.

His cholesterol levels, blood pressure and other key factors of heart disease were all low. Ken looked the least likely candidate for a heart attack.

Yet, he suffered from pains in his chest and the evidence from chest scans was irrefutable: a substantial blockage in two coronary arteries. The only mainstream medical treatment on offer was surgery, but Ken had refused, wanting instead to try dietary and lifestyle changes first.

A hint that something else might be going on came from a coiled tension in his chest; his breathing was also very shallow. For all his apparent fitness, Ken was gripped by extreme stress.

Ken was dying from a broken heart. His only son, born late to him and his wife after years of fertility treatment, had been hit by a car and killed at the age of eight. Ken's way of dealing with the trauma was to exercise obsessively.

His cardiologist helped him learn how to control his stress. And Ken and his wife, who'd been driven apart by their grief, had counseling. All this didn't instantly clear his arteries, but recent research suggests it has greatly reduced his risk of having a heart attack.

The idea that stress can damage your health is well-known, but fear, grief or hostility are almost completely ignored when it comes to preventing or treating heart disease.

The treatments you may receive if your heart begins to fail are hailed as triumphs of science. Doctors use scans to see into your heart, prescribe drugs to lower risk factors in blood, insert metal stents to open blocked arteries and operate to by-pass problems.

But by concentrating on the plumbing of heart disease, some experts claim we are ignoring the powerful abilities of love and other positive emotions to protect us and the negative ones that do us harm.

While poets have written of the heart's link with our feelings, modern cardiology has shied away from it. However, it seems possible that phrases such as 'broken-hearted' may contain a literal truth as well as a metaphorical one.

In a study published in The Lancet two years ago, stress and other psychological factors were found to add more to the risk of heart disease than diabetes or having a family history of heart attacks. There is also a recognized medical condition - stress cardiomyopathy - in which the heart can be damaged with no signs of plaque or clots in the blood vessels. Brought on by intense stress, it is also known as broken heart syndrome; sufferers can have levels of the stress hormone adrenaline 30 times higher than normal.

Cardiomyopathy may explain the striking rise in deaths from heart attacks that researchers have recorded immediately after major disasters such as the Los Angeles earthquake in 1994.

A plea for a recognition of the central role emotions play in heart disease - what has been called psychocardiology - has just been published in a book by leading US cardiologist Dr Mimi Guarneri.

"We feel with our hearts, we love with our hearts, we can die of a broken heart," she writes. "The most difficult job for a cardiologist is not picking the right medication but instilling in someone a passion for their life."

Dr Guarneri describes her transformation from a "tough, lean, clinical machine" who performed 700 angioplasty and stent procedures a year, and was emotionally distant from her patients, into a physician who encouraged patients to talk about their feelings about heart disease.

The shift was driven partly by the fact that patients whose arteries had been surgically cleared kept coming back for treatment, and partly by her patients' views about healing techniques such as meditation and acupuncture.

Dr Guarneri changed her way of working, and found that cases which had seemed hopeless were transformed once the underlying emotion was recognised.

She told one patient, a woman whose arteries were too damaged for a by-pass, to buy a dog. Being able to love the pet improved the woman's physiological state enough to make surgery possible.

Such an approach is rare in the UK. One patient who has benefited from it here, however, is Charles, a middle-aged academic.

"I'd been having these pains in my chest and when my doctor checked me out he found I had raised blood pressure and cholesterol," he says.

Charles was given drugs to lower both, but the pains persisted. He went to see Gloucestershire GP David Beales, who specializes in behavioral medicine. Dr Beales asked Charles about his life.

"Things had been getting pretty bad at home," Charles says. "My wife and I had been having lots of fights." He was also feeling under pressure at work and was becoming irritable and snappy.

Dr Beales decided to turn conventional treatment on its head. "The important thing was to show Charles how to handle the stress he was under," he says.

"It was the stress that was raising his blood pressure and cholesterol, making him anxious and depressed.

"It was also making him breathe less deeply in his chest, straining his muscles and causing pain."

The Lancet study showing that stress harms the heart also found that heart attack patients were significantly more stressed due to work, family or money problems than the healthy controls. Such factors were estimated to account for 30 per cent of heart attack risk.

How connected we feel to others also affects our hearts. This month, a report found that living alone doubled the risk of heart disease. And earlier this year, a study found that hostile women are more likely to have hardened arteries.

Such findings rarely guide the way patients are treated. If they did, they would open up new avenues of treatment. The way Dr Beales treated Charles shows what can be done.

'Toxic emotion'

"It's vital to look at the behavioral dimension in patients with heart disease," he says.

"The toxic emotion is hostility. Long term, it raises adrenaline levels, which increases cholesterol and makes it very hard to relax."

High levels of hostility significantly increase your chance of dying if you are under 60 or younger. According to a study in the journal Health Psychology, it might be a better predictor of risk of heart disease than traditional factors such as high cholesterol, smoking or excess weight.

Dr Beales shows his patients how negative emotions can alter the heart's rhythm with a device that monitors blood flow and connects to a computer with software that shows changes in heart rate variability (HRV).

"Patients can see on the screen the way their HRV changes as their emotions change," he says.

When you have negative emotions, your HRV shows up as jagged and disorganized.

But once you start focusing on positive emotions, the pattern becomes more coherent, lowering the levels of harmful inflammatory chemicals in the blood that raise the risk of heart attacks.

Seeing these changes on a screen makes it much easier for Dr Beales to teach patients how to use warm loving emotions to influence their hearts in a positive way.

Other studies have also found that being optimistic can protect the heart. Out of 1,000 men and women studied for nine years, those who rated themselves as 'highly optimistic' were 23 per cent less likely to die of heart disease, regardless of their blood pressure or whether they smoked.

Dr Guarneri also believes in two old-fashioned remedies - gratitude and forgiveness. "Forgiveness, gratitude, optimism (are) topics that would have been dismissed as irrelevant when I was in medical school, but now (there is) evidence they are as much part of the disease equation as cholesterol."

Research also shows that emotions can change the composition of your blood. Being depressed makes your blood stickier and more likely to clot, doubling your chances of having a heart attack. Positive emotions make blood composition healthy.

Happy people also have lower levels of the inflammatory stress hormone cortisol, which raises blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol levels.

Even so, the British Heart Foundation refuses to accept the weight of such findings. "There is insufficient evidence to say stress, depression or isolation are main risk factors for heart disease," says spokeswoman Judy O'Sullivan.

However, to people at risk of, or already suffering from, the disease, the connection might appear to be common sense. So, why has the research apparently made little impact on treatment?

"Part of the reason is that cardiologists are reluctant to examine the evidence," says Christine Bundy, a lecturer in psychological medicine at Manchester University.

Another reason might be that it is not just the patient's approach that needs to change. Psychocardiology demands that doctors, too, bring emotions into the consulting room, but many may feel more comfortable ignoring their feelings.

The Heart Speaks: A Cardiologist Reveals The Secret Language Of Healing, by Dr Mimi Guarneri (Fusion Press, £10.99). Dr David Beales's e-mail address is: d.beales@heartsandminds.fsnet.co.uk.