Hi,
I just need to get this off my chest.
Some backstory first: About eight years ago, when I was 19, I lost my grandfather to cancer. He was one of my greatest role models, one of my best friends in this world. It was so painful to watch how he just got worse and worse over the course of a year and a half, and I still feel like an important part of me is missing.
Now, sadly, the exact same thing is happening to my husband's grandfather. A little while back, the treatments stopped working, and we don't know how long it's going to be.
As we live a couple of hours away, our opportunities to visit are limited. My husband has said he'd like to go as many weekends as possible, which is something I fully agree to.
However, I'm really struggling to keep myself together. The situation is bringing up all the pain from my grandfather's death, and mixing it with the new pain, if that makes any sense. I'm also fighting these instincts that tell me to just stay away (defense mechanism, I guess) - but I think I got that part mostly under control.
The main issue is that I feel like I'm thinking too much about how I feel in this situation. After all, it's not my grandfather this time. It's my husband's, and I need to be there for him. I just don't know exactly what to do, how to act. It takes so little for me to tear up, and I don't want him or his family to feel like they have to take care of me in a situation where they suffer just as much or even more. I also don't want to say the wrong things and make it even worse. That's why I've decided not tell my husband about these feelings I'm having, at least for now (he didn't know me back then, so he never witnessed how it was). His grandfather is a wonderful person who I care very much about, and I do realize that it's normal for me to feel sad about it, and that i need to consider my own feelings too. I guess I'm just trying to find a way to be supportive and not self-centered, but also deal with all the emotions.
I'm sorry if this post is a mess, I'm just not very good at putting my feelings into words in a well-organized way.