wrong decision? :(

[Guest guest]

Hi everyone.

Feels like everythings happening at once around here. My uncle had

been ill with cancer for a couple of years and died this week,

Wednesday. My dad (who has LDB) knew his brother was ill, and kept

asking about him. I wondered for a while, before my uncle died, what

I was going to do about telling dad when he did die. I decided I

should tell dad. It's his brother, he has a right to know. He

remembers enough to ask about my uncle, and he's still enough part of

the family for it to be awkward (though not impossible) to conceal the

death from him.

So the sad news came, and I went to tell dad. I warned the nh staff

that I need to break bad news and dad might be upset. I took dad to

his room. I reminded him, just in case he'd forgot, that had

been ill, and said that he'd died. Dad amazed me .... very calm and

lucid, said that he knew that we'd been expecting it, and death was

part of life, but it was awful that his baby brother had gone first.

We looked at some family photos, talked about the last time dad had

seen etc. And dad seemed OK, and went off to sit in the lounge.

I booked day off work to take dad to funeral and talked to cousin

about possible problems with him being there, and we agreed that it

was dad's brother as much as her father, and dad should be there, and

we'd all cope between us. So far so good.

That was Thursday evening. But these last couple of days dad has been

as bad as I've ever seen him. Aggressive, paranoid, stipping in the

public parts of the NH (he's done that before but not for weeks and

not since he moved to this new nh just over 4 weeks ago), taking his

incontinence pad (do you call them Depends?) out, sh***ting all over.

NH blame me for having told him about the bereavement, say I

shouldn't have.

Aaaarrrrrghhhhhhh! I was really trying to do what I thought was best,

and still treated dad with respect and as part of the family. I

thought I'd made a carefully balanced, well intentioned decision, but

now it all seems to be going horribly wrong.

Any other experiences of managing things like this?

Áine