I’ve always kept things from my family, especially after moving abroad, and certainly if they are problems. After all, what can they do, being so far away? Telling them will only add to their worries — we have enough stress already in modern life as it is. A number of friends I've spoken to about this subject in the past say they feel the same way.
An 82-year-old student’s daughter has moved to another part of the world and is trying to get her dogs out there to join her. The papers are all in place but she’s having trouble getting the approval of the authorities at the other end.
My student mentioned this yesterday, more than once, so it’s obviously playing on her mind.
It is true that a lot of old people tend to repeat things, often because they forget that they’ve said it, but probably also because old people usually have a smaller input of external experience: no work-related matters because they’re now retired; they don’t go out that much; a lot of their friends are no longer around; so they end up dwelling on a narrower (and usually more immediate, time-wise) range of matters.
Dog-lovers (/ owners of cats, parrots, any pet animals) might protest at this, as pets are mostly seen as family, but I personally don’t think that having trouble re-locating one’s pets is important enough to add to an old person’s stress levels.
Old people have unavoidable health issues that are related to growing old to plague them: diabetes, thus restricting their range of food; high blood pressure, ditto; cholesterol, ditto; arthritis; poor eyesight; etc. Why add to their list of woes?
This is only an idle personal opinion expressing how I see things on the scale of levels of importance. I’m not downplaying the importance and value of animals as living beings. It’s definitely not a criticism at all of my student’s daughter to tell her mother about the hassle with the dogs. I know that families and friends do often share the most trivial of details about their lives, because they need to talk.
My father started to pass out blood in his urine or stool (can’t remember which) back in 1978, aged 61.
He thought it might’ve been because of an internal injury from a fall while pruning the fig tree a while back, for which he’d taken some Chinese herbal concoction, so he wasn't terribly concerned, but went to get it checked out all the same.
It turned out to be cancer of the liver, which the family decided not to tell him about.
On the last day of his time at the hospital, he went round the ward, cheering up everyone else, feeling sorry for them that they were stuck there while he was going home.
So, my father died not having the worry and stress of knowing he had cancer of the liver.
My last landlord in Highbury died of a heart attack just three months after being diagnosed with cancer of the liver. I was/am glad for him that he died a quick death and didn’t have to continue to suffer the horrible side effects of his chemo and radio therapy — or, worse, the more stressful mental anguish of worrying about his cancer.
I personally think that, being the hypochondriac his wife had said he was, he’d scared himself to death, worrying about his cancer.
Stress is a much bigger killer than actual physical ailments, I feel.
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