Serious Illness: When Families Pull Together or Pull Apart

I had a powerful e-mail response to a recent essay I posted titled “The Key to Living a Better Life and Dying a Better Death.” The woman writing to me described a challenging and “crazy-making” family health situation that any one of us could face in the future or perhaps have already experienced.

I wanted to write about this because having advance awareness of how and why such emotionally charged situations occur may help us avoid being part of the problem, and instead becoming part of the solution. Her account also confirms and underscores the need for and the importance of healing our own issues around illness and death and dying.

What she described was being in the middle of an emotional mine field, with each participant feeding off the others and seeking to vent what seemed like a lifetime of angry, unexpressed emotions. The main characters in the drama were her seriously ill father-in-law, a widower who lived alone and was in denial about his health, and his four adult sons who reside in different states. They had come home with their wives to help their father through yet another in a long list of medical crises.

The situation between the family members deteriorated into a standoff, which means nothing positive could happen. The underlying issues included: the patient’s anger and humiliation over losing control of his life; the brothers’ anger at the patient because he refused to take better care of himself, or go into a facility, and all the stress this had caused the family; concern about what their responsibilities might be in the future, including financial, and who would have to bear the biggest burden; guilt over not having been a “better son”; renewed mourning for their deceased mother, which was mixed with guilt over their negative emotion around their father’s life situation; and, finally, facing their own mortality.

Unbeknownst to all the participants, the emotionalism was exacerbated by two situations: First, everyone concerned was being forced to come face to face with their own issues and fears around illness and death and dying, and second, the individual reactions were indicative of the way in which they normally responded to stressful situations.

This isn’t out of the ordinary. Some individuals facing a loved one’s serious illness, whether or not they have fully resolved their feelings about death and dying can take a calm, rational approach and decide what action to take. Some choose denial so they don’t have to do anything about the problem. Others let it all hang out in a torrent of anger, blame, fear, frustration, sadness and guilt or shame.

This is still part of the painful pulling apart that often comes before the desired pulling together toward helping a loved one get the help s/he needs to heal or to make a peaceful transition.

Take heart, because good does come from this. After releasing a lot of deep-seated and heated emotions, present and past, the brothers finally came together enough to get their resisting and angry parent to the hospital.

As the days progressed, the brothers were still dealing with their own internal issues, but they began to frame their comments to each other in the still edgy, but more acceptable sarcasm-tinged-with-humor they had honed as teenagers. In between chasing down hospital doctors to try to get the facts about their father’s condition, they found time to talk about their current lives, to recall their growing up years, their parents and, in essence, to renew family bonds.

After a week of medical testing and much-needed treatment, it was determined that the patient could be released to his home, if he agreed to be seen on a regular basis by other healthcare specialists.

The pulling apart was over. They were pulling together in a common cause. There was a new level of camaraderie, caring, pride and trust in each other as family members. This change had a positive effect on each brother and even the uncooperative patient, who now showed some interest in taking an active role in looking after his health.

Meanwhile, the wives cleaned their father-in-law’s house and stocked the cupboards and the refrigerator with healthful food. The brothers took turns standing vigil at the hospital and being outspoken advocates for their father. They also organized his business papers and gathered information that would help them help him assure his future care and well-being.

The moral of this story is that no matter what we have to go through to get there – to face and/or rise above our own issues – the goal is to be able to pull together to help a fellow human being through a challenging life passage. When we can do that, then no matter what eventually happens, we can know we did our best and there is nothing more we or anyone else can ask of us. And there’s not a better feeling than that.
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Copyright © 2009 Fern Stewart Welch

The author’s books are available at Amazon.com, other online booksellers, bookstore chains such as Barnes & Noble and Borders – and to the trade from Ingram Book Co., Baker & Taylor and other wholesalers.