Re: Losing a Parent
 

I lost my mum to cancer 5 years ago; she was just 52 years young. It broke my heart and I miss her dearly; she is in my thoughts everyday. She and my Dad had been married for 27 years and he was literally lost without her. Fortunately he has found someone else to share his life with but she will never compare to my mum.

My wife lost her mother when my wife was just 3 years old. She left behind my wife and two sisters, at the time, aged just 1 and 4. Like me she misses her mum terribly. The worst of it all is that neither of them really got a chance to see their granddaughter who, quite obviously to all of us, was a rock at the age 6, to my father when my mum passed. The closeness between both Grandfathers and Schnorbitz jnr can never be broken.

So that's my tuppence worth. :)

Re: Losing a Parent
 

I lost my dad to pneumonia in Feb 2004, he was 82 and had had a good life.
I lost my mum to cancer in Dec 2004, she was 72. I miss them both terribly and think about them everyday.

On Wednesday I was doing some tidying up and I found a postcard my mum had sent me in oct 2002. It said on the front "I miss you" and on the other side she said why she loved me, why she was proud of me, how she was so pleased with what I'd done with my life, and how thankful she was for her grandchildren. Boy, did I cry when I read that... making me well up now thinking about it.
I'll treasure it forever.

Re: Losing a Parent
 

The thought of losing someone close to you when you are thousands of miles away must be a worry for all of us. If we are living abroad permanently its not a case of "if" we get the dreaded phone call but "when". I don't think we will ever be ready for the "when".

My mum died 16 years ago at the young age of 43 whilst Paul and I were living in Germany. I never got the chance to say goodbye. The worst thing was having to leave my family behind when I had to go back, and having to deal with my grief without them.

Both my grandmothers have since died whilst we have lived in the US. Don't know how I will manage if my dad passes suddenly, I don't think I could cope with another parent dying before I could say goodbye.

I suppose as expats its one of the burdens we have to bear.

Re: Losing a Parent
 

My dad died Feb last year.I got home just in time ,he died 5 hours after I got to the hospital.Being so far away I feel that I have not been able to grieve like I would if I was at home. Felt it really bad last month.
My mum died when I was 18.I still find that hard she was only 43. Hard thing to deal with.

Re: Losing a Parent
 

My Dad died just over 8 years ago. It was in mid December and we had planned to go over for Christmas anyway. It was very sudden. He was 81 but in good health as far as we knew. He would not have wanted to hang on a long time with an illness. The funeral was on Christmas Eve. Worst Christmas I've ever spent. MIL went the next November. Hubby was in Sweden on a business trip and I had to call him and tell him. I tried to break it to him gently and he thought I was talking about my mother, so I had to be a bit more direct. The company was good and rearranged his flights so that he could go to the UK and then back here. I'm always expecting the next call as my mum is in her eighties but in reasonably good health, but you never know.

Re: Losing a Parent
 

I'm sorry for your loss unicorn. .... As it happens my father died just three short weeks ago. I was lucky enough to have spoken with him just two days earlier, on his birthday - he was 77. My parents had also visited us last October/ November.

It is unfortunate and frustrating that he never appreciated the seriousness of the heart condition he had. A routine valve replacement would have cured the problem, and he was healthy enought, I'm certain, to have lived another ten years. He hated going to the doctor, and always had. Depsite his heart condition he hadn't seen his GP for more than six months when he died. I spoke to him a year or so back, trying to persuade him to get proper treatment, but he'd have none of it, and assured me that he'd take more rest. He didn't understand, or didn't want to beleive that taking it easy doesn't help a faulty valve.

The condition is also commonly associated with rheumatic fever in childhood, and he had had rheumatic fever as a teenager. It is scary that a disease can be cured, but leave you with a conditon that kills you more than fifty years later!

Re: Losing a Parent
 

Yeah, something like that gets to you...when my brother died, it was a week after my birthday, and was a break from the work shops at uni when my mother told me, obviously I was a bit of a mess, mates were really good, as was uni about it, went home, then went to Austria for the funeral, was a couple weeks before I went back to uni, checked the mail, and had a package from my brother, was a birthday present, t-shirt...opening that up really messed me up for a couple days.

Re: Losing a Parent
 

You have my complete empathy.

I lost my mum at age 66 six years ago due to lung cancer caused by second hand smoke inhalation via her work...she was a care assistant at an old persons home and the place was worse than a working mens club for smoking.

She fought to the end and was braver than I ever could hope to be.

Re: Losing a Parent
 

What a really weird coincidence, as it is 4 years to the day that my dad died. It was long before we moved to the US so luckily I didn't have the added trauma of being far away. He'd been ill for quite a while, but it still came as a shock when he passed away, he was a good man.

Annette

Re: Losing a Parent
 

My grandfather died 16 years ago, 2 months after my new husband and I had moved to AZ. He was in his 60's but the healthiest looking person you had ever seen. My family knew that he had cancer but didn't tell me because they knew how far away I was and that I would want to come back home. I could have got home to see him if I had known. I was angry at the time for them not telling me but I do understand why they did it. I did make it back for the funeral but because I flew out the next day the plane ticket was so expensive it took forever to pay it off. I didn't care about the money though and I would have gone no matter what it cost. I am so glad that he was at my wedding and that I have some lovely photos of the occasion that I will have forever, I still miss him though :(

Re: Losing a Parent
 

My heart goes out to all of you that have lost loved ones, especially those that were taken too early. I'm shocked at how many of these passings involved cancer, I can't wait for a cure to be found. That will certainly be a day for rejoicing.

Ladyofthelake - your story of the postcard made me cry. I think it's because my Mum always sends me little notes & postcards like that.

Re: Losing a Parent
 

Aye, good to donate to the research, and I do my tiny sad bit with the UD agent as I have my puter on a lot, and set it up with where I volunteer - http://www.grid.org/home.htm

Bit like the Seti and internet thingy, but for cancer research.

Re: Losing a Parent
 

I'm sorry for your loss unicorn. I still have both my parents but one of my brothers died when i was 12 years old. I remember the day it happened as if it was yesterday. It is coming up to 14 years since he died. I miss not being able to walk to his grave and place some flowers there. After this tragedy my family became so close and it makes you look at life very differently. Time has helped me come to terms with it more but i still think about him everyday.

I actually agonised over coming to america because i felt guilty for leaving my family. crazy as it may sounds. I loved my now american husband more than anything but i didn't know if i could leave my family who i am so close to. the guilt was awful , i felt as though my parents felt like they were losing another child. I don't have children of my own yet so i don't know what it must feel like to have a child taken away, it was my parents first child, there were originally 4 of us. but i see the pain my mum and dad went through and i can't imagine how hard it must be for them.


two of my close friends from school lost their dads recently and i was able to help them deal with it.

Re: Losing a Parent
 

I had a weird promonition the last time I said goodbye to my dad that I would never see him alive again. We were living in Singapore at the time and I would take the children back to England on home leave every Summer when the schools broke up; they stayed with my parents and I stayed a mile away at my sister's house.

I knew he hadn't been well, but it had been a year since I'd seen him and was shocked at how his health had deteriated in that time - he was short of breath and could only walk a few 'baby' steps without having to stop to take a break. He had been a heavy smoker since he was a teenager, probably around 40 cigarettes a day I imagine. He had seen the doctor a couple of years before he'd died as he had had breathing difficulties and after leaving the surgery gave up smoking on the spot, so obviously whatever the doctor had said to him scared him into doing so. It also transpired that he had some sort of heart problem - related to smoking - and was on a number of tablets including what he called 'water tablets' (a diuretic) so was always checking where the toilets were whenever he went out as he often needed to go for a piddle.

At the time we were talking about the forthcoming Millenium and my dad said 'I won't be around to see in the Millenium' and of course I said he would be. At the end of the Summer hols I said goodbye to my dad at the doorstep before driving down to Heathrow. He had such a dull, dead look in his eyes and I had a weird feeling that I wouldn't see him again.

A week later the phone rang and it was my brother. Now I knew something was immediately wrong as he had never bothered to call me in Singapore before - and he gave me the news that my dad was dead. He was out with my mum in the city centre and she went to the loo. When she came out there was a bit of a commotion and a group of people crowded around obviously trying to help someone. It was my dad - he had collapsed and someone was giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. An ambulance arrived moments later and they tried to start his heart with those defillibrators, to no avail.

My mum says that she was so thankful that she wasn't on her own with him when it happened as she wouldn't have known what to do and the group of people were so kind and helpful, as were the ambulance and hospital staff.

I chose to go alone to the funeral as my children had just began their new academic year and had spent the whole Summer with their grandad anyway, so my husband cancelled his overseas regional business trips to remain in the country with them. The air ticket with Singapore airlines was terribly expensive but the company paid for it - as we were on an expat posting it was in the company's expat handbook that they will pay for flights to go to funerals etc. of close family members in the home base. (Anyone reading this and negotiating their contract should get this included).

I was dreadfully jetlagged when I arrived at my mum's aned I slept for the first time in donkey's years in my old bed. My mum was totally distressed - they had been married for over 40 years - and her wails and shrieks of grief after I had gone to bed were heart-wrenching.

My dad was right; he never did make it to the year 2000. He died on 31 August 1999, exactly two years to the day after Princess Diana. My dad had just celebrated his 61st birthday less than three weeks earlier.

Re: Losing a Parent
 

I guess i am coping pretty well.
It helped that Mum came back here with me and we helped each other through those first 3 months.
I had promised Dad that i would look after her and she wouldnt be on her own right away.
It was a terrible way for him to die. He was on morphin.But he didnt exactly slip away peacefully. Let out a kinda cry. That was hard to watch. But we just held him and told him how much we loved him and that it was ok to go now.
They had been married for 46 years and had been together for about 5 years before that.
Its hard.
I was hoping to get some response to this posting.
Its something we all face at some point.
I lost all my Grandparents by 1987.
And a father in law in 1993, 3 months to the day after we were married.I had known him for 7 years. He was young, just 44, had a major heart attack driving to work one saturday morning.(Dec 18th )
And my own Dad died Dec 20th 2004. We thought he was gonna go on Jims Anniversary.How weird is that.