Comment by prometheus76 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prometheus76 | Hacker News Reader

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My father-in-law lived with us for the last two years of his life (he just passed a few weeks ago). My wife is his only child, and he didn't have a lot of savings, so we were basically the only plan he had. It was difficult, especially as time went on (he had liver disease and later developed liver cancer). We both work full-time, so as soon as we would walk in the door, the requests (demands?) would begin.

At the beginning, he was mostly frustrated because he couldn't drive anymore (falling asleep too much) and so he was very bored. He took up some hobbies (mostly carving or drawing) but even then, he was restless and often wanted to make dramatic changes to the living arrangements. He thought he could work a part-time job, but because of his other physical issues (he was very weak and it was hard for him to go up stairs or walk or stand for any length of time) he didn't really have much he could do.

We got to know each other well, and my daughter was a saint in helping him a lot when we weren't there (especially during the summers). He cooked for us a lot, especially at the beginning, but towards the end, we had hospice care and he was essentially helpless.

I don't regret it for one second. It was difficult, but we were there to help him with the medical system (it's a zoo), insurance, and just helping him with his phone or his tablet really helped calm him down. We all got to know him really well, and he and my wife were able to reconcile a lot of old issues they had.

He died peacefully at home, surrounded by family, with a stomach of home-cooked food he loved, listening to his granddaughter play the violin. Again, I don't regret it for a second, even though it's emotionally very difficult.

Thank you for a beautiful gesture and thoughtful comment. Did you and your wife know when you took him in that he was terminal? (I wonder if that might reconcile OP’s anxiety with respect to an open-ended commitment with the resolve and satisfaction you describe.)

We knew he had liver disease, but they couldn't really (or wouldn't?) give us a timeframe or expectation. He didn't take very good care of himself physically, so we thought it would be less than five years (he was 71 when he moved in with us). As time went on, however, it was clear he wasn't getting better. He also had diabetes, so his mobility just kept getting worse.

He fell a few times, and just recently fell down the stairs and broke four of his vertebrae and three ribs. When they were x-raying his ribs, they found the cancer on his liver and on his lungs, so we immediately signed him up for hospice. As soon as he was able to get around with a back brace, we brought him home and he died just a couple of days after coming home.

We all learned patience, sacrifice, love, and devotion to someone you love, no matter how hard it is. That lesson alone for my daughter is worth any level of sacrifice it took for my wife and I. I think it's also very healthy for children/young people to confront death and mortality and to go through the grieving process while they are at home with their parents. It's much more difficult to face it alone as an adult.

I also am grateful we could provide a happy environment for him. His granddaughters and their spouses came over frequently for family meals (once or twice a week at least). He expressed how much he loved those times. And he was able to die at home peacefully and without struggle, surrounded by family. May we all be so blessed.

Just wanted to say thank you for writing this down and sharing, most importantly how it reflected on yourself and your family.

I have bookmarked your comment in my Uber-important-but-misc. folder. Thank you so much for sharing, especially the part about how your family’s demonstration of care relates to your daughter and her development.

That previous sentence wariness too clinical, I can’t do it justice, but thank you, seriously. It relates to my experience, and maybe future experience, and I think your perspective will stick with me. Be well.

>as we would walk in the door, the requests (demands?) would begin.

old age can be like wealth and power in that it magnifies character defects.

Many awful people are going to get old and I kinda wish they could be written off the same way they would in middle age, without the social pressure to be compassionate.

There is no innocence regained.

Brings out a lot of underlying personality/ cultural /freudian entitlement in people who barely enjoyed getting thru life but are afraid of death.

Some old people, it's like they can't wait to regress... (I did my part, I get to be the baby now!)

also, immigrant kids have a special hell

lots of cultural/ethnic and class differences that makes this burdensome, suffocating, manipulative, and "politically incorrect" to talk about in ways that feels lonely.

A lot of these kids never got to be kids, since immigrant parents become low-agency children in practice: can't speak english, can't fill out basic forms, often too poor to do basic stuff by the book (legal, banking, etc), don't know the area to have risk assessment or make decisions adults are supposed to make. The kids have to grow up fast without help, succeed in some way without financial or cultural capital, and then take care of their parents without help. They are often being criticized and their decisions undercut the whole way.

Offensive to say but real for many, some immigrant parents often just have god awful personalities: poverty and war and refugee trauma have misshaped them into people that can be hard and unpleasant. Depending on age, many are closed-off, unwelcoming by default, they feel too old to learn new things, racist and endlessly judgmental especially if they never moved out of the self-segregating enclave many start out in the host country. The next generation often feels embarrassed or ashamed of them while having to assimilate, can't bring friends or dates around. Growing up with two different sets of norms and expectations.

Leads to simmering resentment and anger covered with guilt and duty and never ending ethnic responsibilities of the religious, Confucian, and/or gendered type. (Women expected to be servant-nannies for their middle-aged in-laws makes me fume.)

A lot of immigrant kids who 'made it' despite their crummy families can't really share/talk about it with middle-class suburban Americans... I feel this loneliness and often rage myself and see hints of it just go unspoken in my 'scholarship kids' peer group (asian, indian, latino and post-soviet kids in city gifted programs) now that we're all grown up.

> old age can be like wealth and power in that it magnifies character defects

Eh, take even good natured people as they are now and add chronic pain, feeling useless, disrupted bodily systems, and have it go on for years and you'll get a lot of the same thing. End of life care is really really hard.

You're spot on with the particular niche of struggles that immigrant kids have there - seen it in a very real way with my mother and her parents. Thank you for mentioning it out loud, the first step to fixing things fairly for everyone is always that awareness.

While the substance of what you say may be true, I couldn't disagree more with the sentiment.

If all your parents did was give you the opportunity to grow up stateside as opposed to some communist hellhole or third-world slum, that itself is worth a lifetime of gratitude that you can never hope to pay back. As hard as first generation parents may be on their kids, they have almost certainly endured through far worse in their childhood. Second generation immigrant millennials would have parents who grew during or in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, Indo-Pakistani War - under dangerous third world conditions with a daily struggle for food.

Yes some of the crude comments they express may be excessively judgmental and even bigoted, but no more than their former compatriots back home. Had they never emigrated, our generation too would have grown up to adopt the same perspectives. It is precisely because they gave us the opportunity to grow up in the (relatively) liberal and free Western world that we can adopt a different (and hopefully better) value system.

I've yet to ever change anyone's mind via an online forum but it doesn't stop me from trying: let your parents know you recognize the sacrifices and suffering they endured to make it to the states, it would mean the world to them. It's far from easy to immigrate to the states today, and it was even harder a generation ago. They truly had to be exceptional in so many respects to make the extreme cutoff it took to beat out an entire country of peers competing for the opportunity to come to the states, and give their kids, you, a far better life.

> If all your parents did was give you the opportunity to grow up stateside as opposed to some communist hellhole or third-world slum, that itself is worth a lifetime of gratitude that you can never hope to pay back. As hard as first generation parents may be on their kids, they have almost certainly endured through far worse in their childhood.

You’re supposed to have a lifetime of gratitude towards somebody who willfully brought you into your self described hell?

…weird, yo.

I interpret 1lint's comment as saying the parents brought the kids out of the hellhole, so the kids should be thankful.

Yes, that is what he’s saying.

However, the kids did not ask to be brought into this life - which OP seems to describe as a hellhole overall. Why should the kids be grateful for anything after being forced into this world?

1lint is saying it would have been a lot worse without the move, so the kids should be thankful for the move.

Are you saying the kids wish their parents never brought them into the world? That seems more extreme than what I read in the comments.

If it's so bad, why not kill yourself? If you, however, choose to live on, then maybe it's not so bad after all, and some gratitude is warranted?

"Some gratitude" sounds very different from "a lifetime of gratitude".

> If all your parents did was give you the opportunity to grow up stateside as opposed to some communist hellhole or third-world slum, that itself is worth a lifetime of gratitude that you can never hope to pay back.

It's ok to not be ok with abuse and neglect, despite the sacrifices those who hurt you made for you.

My parents left primarily due to not being able to provide for us during a period of unpredictable instability which was largely due to privatization of many industries and international corporate meddling (after having voted in a Socialist government that was upended by Capitalist powers). They left because they felt deeply betrayed and were ill equipped for the transition. I remember the struggle for food- that struggle was still present in America. Personally, I know they themselves struggle with having left their family (and children, for some years) behind- my father has regrets he voiced after his mother passed away, that despite all his accomplishments and hard work he is still not valued as he deserves but on top of that (most importantly to him) he is a continent away from most of the people he grew up with and loves. They do put the weight of that decision on us to accomplish and validate their sacrifices (or "make their sacrifice worth it").

One can be grateful and also still struggle with generational trauma. You can love your parents unconditionally and still have a hard time with them refusing to get help, refusing to listen, refusing to take you seriously because "children listen to their parents and listening is a one-way street". I can be as clear and patient as humanly possible, present all the research patiently, beg them to take me seriously, but what I say still won't hold the same weight as anything their friends say, despite my ability to explain misinformation or bias. I can only imagine how they will be in their later years. I hope they will mellow out over time but, as the last few years have shown me, I find this increasingly unlikely. I'll still take care of them and love them, fully knowing they are unable/unwilling to accept me as a person (LGBTQ+ wise), but no I don't think they are judgemental "no more than their former compatriots" because people exist everywhere (and I know for a fact in our country of origin) who don't hold the bitterness and hostile defensiveness they do. I think perhaps being immigrants made them even harder as people, and I'm old enough to remember what life was like before they had to live with the resentment of leaving everything they knew to give us opportunities.

Also I completely disagree with the sentiment of holding "a lifetime of gratitude" that can never be paid back over someone's life. Surely there are ways of reciprocating that amount of love and care, ways that don't involve conforming to your parents ideas of who they want you to be, especially when their ideas make no room for who you actually are.

Not to say all immigrant parents are the same, but I do think it's incredibly common to have immigrant parents who genuinely have no interest in knowing/appreciating you as a person, who live with so many layers of trauma that they refuse to even acknowledge their toxic traits, that they don't endeavor to heal from because they wear their suffering like a badge of honor. Their sense of self-worth is embedded in their fight to make it and prove themselves, and they create hurdles so you have to fight to make yourself worth their time and fight to prove yourself worthy of their sacrifice. I don't believe this is necessary and I wish they would care enough to get out of that mindspace. I do love and appreciate them enough to understand them compassionately and empathetically despite them not extending the same- my parents fully know this and they expect it and take it for granted because "it's the least I can do", it does not mean the world for them because their pain has nothing to do with me and everything to do with their continuous grief for everything they lost along the way. I just wish they would take the time to consider that despite their adamant stance of "I put a roof over your head, food in your mouth, clothes on your back, and that's all you should want"- we, their children, are also people with valid things to say and our struggles also matter.

You're right, what I wrote, especially the part about never being able to pay back, was too extreme, along with the general tone of the comment. In my defense, I was typing a spontaneous, somewhat emotional response to the root comment, as one often does on an online forum. I generally agree with your points, and relate to aspects of the issues you express (it's hard to accurately quantize thoughts/sentiments into text especially on these subjects).

I would add that our parents generation faced far more extreme versions of the same challenges/tensions we faced in our childhood. For example, I certainly relate to the "listening is a one-way street" mentality, but for our parents generation growing up in their conservative, ultra-traditional societies, they would have been expected to abide by a far more obedient social norms. Likewise, they may be intolerant of minority races/orientations, but grew up in societies that were far harsher on their own quirks, or distinguishing features that put themselves in the minority (which can be as innocuous as being left-handed). I think it would be hard not to envelop one's self in "layers of trauma" growing up in such adverse conditions and societal upheaval, and to take pride in overcoming such adversity such that it became part of one's identity.

On a good day I try to see things from other side's perspective, and my very crude guess, based on my own family experience, is that these are just some of the sentiments first generation immigrant parents may feel: -my kid has no idea how good he has it, my childhood was a constant struggle. My children's generation can never comprehend how much better their life is than my own growing up -the chief beneficiary of my lifetime of struggle, sacrifices, hard-work is not myself but my kids (and posterity), who express little to no gratitude for my incredible contributions towards their well-being and success. -in return for everything I have done, my kid is trying to impose this alien (Western) ideology over dearly held cultural values/beliefs I have practiced for a lifetime -in addition, my kid is trying to impose practices/perspectives (i.e. LGBTQ+ marriage) that are anathema to my corely held religious beliefs/moral worldview These are crude extrapolations based on limited information that can be easily misinterpreted (social cues, obviously a lot is not said out loud) with a sample size of 1 - basically meaningless data that I nonetheless feel compelled to share because my gut feeling is that the themes are applicable to our cohort. When looking at things from this perspective, and imagining if my own kid was exhibiting this same mindset/attitude interacting with me in my own old age, I become much more empathetic for my parents feelings/positions when it comes to these subjects.

Again, I can't hope to understand your family situation in any depth via typed text over an online forum, but I can't help but feel the sentiment that your parents are really expressing through "I put a roof over your head, food in your mouth, clothes on your back, and that's all you should want" is that they are sorely in need of some degree of gratitude for everything they've done for you. I know you have expressed that gratitude before - but I think its something we should return to time and time again. That you recognize the challenges and struggles they overcame so that you all would have a much better life.

Thank you for this comment, it opened my eyes to a whole new aspect of people's lives I (as a non-immigrant) never thought of before.

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