Dear friends and family, your endless deathbed visits RUINED my precious final moments with my husband: In an excoriating open letter that'll bitterly divide opinion, an anguished widow says the unsayable...

Many of those who have nursed a dying husband or wife will know the value of the precious last months spent with a loved one. But it’s also a time when friends and relatives feel compelled to visit. So should they intrude at a time of such intense sorrow and trauma? Michele Christie, 51, widowed in August when her husband Dick Mason died of cancer, believes not. Her provocative and heartfelt open letter will provoke a strong reaction...  

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Michele Christie, 51, was widowed in August when her husband Dick Mason died of cancer, and believes those who came to visit were intruding

Dear family, friends and acquaintances,

You will all know by now that in the early hours of August 22, my beloved husband Dick finally died. You will not be surprised by this because during the final precious months of his life, as he suffered the unspeakable pain and awful indignities of terminal cancer, you visited him at our home in your droves.

I counted the days between his diagnosis and his death. There were 150 of them. I wish I could say I’m grateful for your prolonged and constant visits to Dick as he was dying. But actually I’m not. On the contrary, I feel compelled to tell you now, as I wrestle with the raw grief of losing him, I feel only deep and abiding anger.

I’m angry because you robbed us of our final days together. You stole from us five irretrievable months we had hoped to savour together, just the two of us. We had wanted to sit, to soothe each other, to talk, sometimes to cuddle. Instead we endured an invasion. More than 100 of you called and your visits were an intrusion.

You may by now be feeling indignant. Doubtless you’ve convinced yourselves that your visits were prompted by a selfless desire to cheer up a desperately ill man. After all, you’d given up time from your busy schedules to sit with him and entertain him with stories of your own happy and fulfilled lives.

And of course I know you grieve for him. I’m certain you feel his absence acutely. But I also believe that by monopolising him and draining him of the last dregs of his energy you were being insensitive and self-serving. You were encroaching on time that should have been ours alone — and for that I am finding it hard to forgive you.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2779966/Dear-friends-family-endless-deathbed-visits-RUINED-precious-final-moments-husband.html