Lost My Mom in 2022, and Now My Dad in 2025

Hi Everyone -

I recently started looking for some grief support groups because I don't want to be a burden to my friends. They are very kind and understanding, and listen to me when I need to talk, but I don't want to be a downer with them all the time.

I lost my mom on May 22, 2022. Her name is AnnEliza Byrne She suffered from end-stage renal failure and dementia. She went through so much before she passed, starting in 2019. She began falling a lot and hit her head really hard a few times but refused to go to the doctor. Unfortunately, this caused her to have two brain bleeds, and she needed to have an emergency burr hole procedure to take the pressure off her brain. She was in the ICU for two weeks, having seizures, memory loss, the whole nine, I thought we would lose her then, but she miraculously pulled through. She wasn't quite the same after that though and began exhibiting signs of dementia. Ultimately, she became obstinate about her care for kidney disease, and her health quickly went downhill. he continued falling and spent a lot of time in and out of the hospital and in rehabilitation centers to try to gain strength back in order to be independent again. It got to a point where she needed dialysis, and she was not a candidate for a kidney transplant because of her age and smoking status. After going through dialysis for a few months, she decided she didn't want to live that way and chose to come home on hospice care.

Her doctors all told me choosing to go on hospice after stopping dialysis is such a peaceful death, "she'll just go to sleep" they said. "It will happen quickly" was something else they said to me. Here's the truth, my mother, the most stubborn woman I ever met lasted for 62 days on hospice care before she passed. 62 days! Additionally, her death was anything but peaceful. She lost her appetite and could only stomach a few bites of very select food, she became bedridden and needed constant care, she was in constant pain. My dad and I were her primary caregivers, feeding her, bathing her, changing her clothes, moving her legs around. While it was one of the hardest things I'd ever done, there was nowhere I'd rather be. She began having hallucinations and experiencing sundowner's which was terrible to watch. Eventually, toward the end, she lost her ability to speak, and she just watched us all with big, curious eyes. She passed in the middle of the night on May 22, 2022, a day before my dad's birthday.

I lost my dad on August 26, 2025. His name is Robert Dean. He was exceptionally unhappy after my mom passed, and he made that no secret. For a number of years, he had started to lose weight. He went to all the doctors like he was supposed to, and all of his bloodwork and tests were always normal. He was a 60-year smoker, with COPD and emphysema, but other than that, he was getting along. Last spring he started having trouble getting food down. At first it was only certain food like bread, chicken, or steak, so he often just avoided those foods for something easier to swallow. Eventually, over the course of the summer, he was finding it difficult to get any food down but refused to go to the doctor about it. He had developed a mass on his lymph node which he did actually see his general practitioner about, and his doctor's response was "if we're going to see what this is, we're going to go all the way." My dad agreed to get a CAT scan to see more what the mass was about. Before he got the results, I had to take him to the hospital because he could not eat or drink anything without choking, and I was afraid he would starve to death and/or die of thirst.

While in the hospital, we discovered that the mass on his lymph node was indeed a type of cancer, but the doctors weren't sure which kind or how advanced it was. Additionally, they found a mass on the base of his tongue which in combination with the mass on his lymph node was pushing on his windpipe and throat, hence not being able to get food and drink down. They hooked him up with a feeding tube, he bounced right back to life after getting some nutrients. His color came back, and he was jovial. The next step was performing a throat scope / biopsy to find out what kind of cancer he was dealing with. During that procedure when they were performing the biopsy, he began to bleed heavily into his airway, and they needed to perform an emergency tracheostomy to preserve his airway. Again, I was sitting in the ICU with another parent, praying and hoping. His cancer turned out to be oropharyngeal cancer, but optimistically treatable.

My dad was quickly learning how to speak again with the trach tube in place, he could even speak pretty well without the speaking valve in place. He was tough, and also stubborn like my mother. All things aside, he was getting better, he was rapidly gaining weight, and he was willing to go through some radiation to treat his cancer. However, he had contracted sepsis from pulling out his trach tube and began exhibiting signs of it that were ignored by the rehabilitation hospital that he was in. I began to question his symptoms because they were abnormal to me. For instance, his oxygen level was low, his blood pressure was high (which is never was throughout his entire life), he was experiencing some delirium, and most telling, he began coughing up blood which he had not done since he was admitted into the hospital. These symptoms were all ignored until he was at a point where he was in grave condition. He needed to be transported to another hospital to get another CAT scan to see where he was bleeding from, while in the hospital, his EMT drivers told the nurses there that based on his vitals, he needed to be admitted because they were dropping fast. They would not admit him, and EMT took him to another nearby hospital after he had lost consciousness, and they were trying to revive him. They worked on him for two hours and they could not raise his vitals, and he continued to lose an excessive amount of blood through his trach and his stomach feeding tube. The hospital called me to tell me that there was nothing they could do and asked if I wanted to keep him on life support. Naturally, now that he was stationary, I rushed over the hospital to be with him. My dad was never conscious while I was there with him, but I sat there and held his hand and talked to him and cried. He passed quietly on his own at 6:28AM, not even needing to removed from life support.

I mention all this because I wanted to share their stories. I felt as though both were very traumatic for me. Watching my strong, sassy, independent mother shrivel and lose herself was heartbreaking. Losing her left a hole in our lives. Seeing my strong, stubborn daddy dying on a hospital gurney was heart-wrenching, and I'm having a hard time trying to accept that fact that I'm a child with no parents. Granted, I was 38 when my mom passed and freshly 42 when my dad passed, but I'm not anyone's daughter anymore. I'm a mom without a mom, and a dad. I realized I needed to do something different because my grief is weighing very heavy on me. I am extremely depressed and have lost interest in the things I typically enjoy doing, I don't want to be social, I'm trying to find happiness in the small things, but it quickly goes away. I find myself dwelling on what happened to my dad because it all felt so sudden and it felt like it shouldn't have happened at all. I think about it every day, and I'm not sure how to turn those thoughts off. I know I have to get out of my depression for my son's sake, he is 12, and very understanding and empathetic, but he was noticed how sad I am, and I don't want him to look at me that way. I'm hoping to be able to connect with people who have also lost a parent, or both of their parents that have maybe felt the same to get some help moving forward.

If you've read all this, I appreciate it. Looking forward to connecting.