Has anyone on SF sat with a dying friend or loved one?

I've never seen a person die in front of me, only cats. The dying people I knew waited to be alone for their final breaths. We left Grandma at the hospital, she passed soon after, alone. We left my father alone for 5 minutes at home and he took that time to die. My husband I found dead. It's like they wanted to spare us. I thank them for that. Seeing beloved cats die hard enough.

When I saw my mother after death (she died in Florida, we were in Massachusetts) I saw her in NY funeral home. I blurted out "Her Soul is Gone." I guess I meant her essence.
 
Magna-Carta said:
I was with my mother when she died.................................................

With my dad, who had the same cancer, it was a different experience.................................

It only seemed like less than 5 minutes later that a nurse came out to me to tell me my dad had passed away. I didn't say this out loud, but in my own mind I said, "Yes, I know". We all slowly went back into my dads room. I pulled a chair around to the right side of his bed and sat down beside my dad. I raised his right hand & held it tight in mine. I ‘felt’ that he was thanking me.
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Thanks for sharing your experiences with us. It sounds like they were hard experiences because of loss, but you found beauty in them nonetheless. Thank you.

Sometimes I think about what it will be like with my mom when she goes. Our relationship has always been difficult yet at the same time, I still call her every three or four days, just to see how she is doing, if she's okay. She lives in BC so I can't just drop in and knock on her door. Although to be honest, even when I did live in the same province, she was very self-isolating. We went to visit her last September and she insisted on meeting us in the parking lot of the local mall and having our 15 minute visit there. I'm not looking forward to the end at all, when it finally does come. I think I come from a very screwed up family.
 
I was with my dad but they pushed out of the emergency room when he coded. My mom passed just after I left her side to head home, she had been comatose for a few days. I also had to identify my oldest brother after he was killed, but wasn't there as he passed.

Several of us sat with my grandmother as she passed, which took hours. It was so upsetting for my mother she suffered a heart attack within a couple of hours and ended up missing grams funeral because she was in the hospitol.
 
In my family it is customary and expected for close relatives to sit with the seriously ill and especially the dying. I have done that a number of times. The most heart breaking was my beloved older sister, Audrey. She was in a department store with her husband shopping when she unexpectedly passed out. Thirteen days later she died of acute leukemia. I took off work and was at the hospital with her for all of that thirteen days.
When the end was near her doctors told her that they needed to put her on a respirator. Audrey told me she was afraid of being out of communication while entubated. I had a legal pad and ink pen with me so I suggested she could write me notes. For about fifteen minutes her notes were legible and sensible. Then they became less so. Eventually after about half an hour she would just scrawl totally meaningless lines on the page and hand it to me to read. Then she died. I never even considered keeping that page because I knew seeing it would make me terribly sad.
 
My son is a registered nurse, charge nurse, part time flight nurse and is currently working for the military. He has experienced quite a number of people passing during his care and has some really interesting stories regarding the time that people passed.
 
My father 22 years ago in a hospital ICU with several staff around him.....it was fairly impersonal and, I'm sorry to say, a 'good riddance' event.

My mother 5 years ago in a private room of a skilled nursing home where she'd been in hospice care for 56 days. The event was very personal and a sacred experience that I think I was privileged to experience. We were alone and I knew that it had to be her last day; she'd been in a pre-death coma for 2 days by then.......we'd said our last goodbye the evening of her last coherent day. She opened her eyes, coughed once and was gone. The light left her eyes......it was a clear transition from life to death.
I sat with the body she had just vacated for about 15 minutes and spoke to her consciousness, which it is my belief was still there, seeing and hearing me. I told her to be unafraid and to make the journey to the spiritual dimension and to meet with and cooperate with the ascended higher beings who would be greeting her.
 
Repondering said:
My father 22 years ago in a hospital ICU with several staff around him.....it was fairly impersonal and, I'm sorry to say, a 'good riddance' event.

My mother 5 years ago in a private room of a skilled nursing home where she'd been in hospice care for 56 days. The event was very personal and a sacred experience that I think I was privileged to experience. We were alone and I knew that it had to be her last day; she'd been in a pre-death coma for 2 days by then.......we'd said our last goodbye the evening of her last coherent day. She opened her eyes, coughed once and was gone. The light left her eyes......it was a clear transition from life to death.
I sat with the body she had just vacated for about 15 minutes and spoke to her consciousness, which it is my belief was still there, seeing and hearing me. I told her to be unafraid and to make the journey to the spiritual dimension and to meet with and cooperate with the ascended higher beings who would be greeting her.
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I love your 'moment' with your mom. From all that I've read, I think she was there while you were saying goodbye and I don't think she was afraid for a moment. In most of the testimonies I've ever read, the person who 'died' related how very soon after their passing if not immediately, they're surrounded and enveloped by a wonderful sense of peace and love and lightness. You're so blessed to be left with such a good memory of that moment.
 
Sometimes losing a friend is as hard (or harder) as losing a relative. You have my condolences on the loss of your friend. She was blessed to have a caring friend like you.



I sat with my grandmother when she was dying of pancreatic cancer. My cousin had come up from South Carolina and I went over when I got off from work. I finally asked the hospice nurse how long my grandmother had so I would know when to take a leave. She said two weeks, so I took off part of that time and was at her house most days until she passed. I had broke down and cried as my uncle and his wife were coming in the door and they thought she had died, but it just hurt me so bad to see her suffering like that. I cried so much during that time that I actually didn't shed a tear at her funeral.

When my husband was in the ICU, I was at the hospital between 12 and 14 hours a day. We had to take turns going in, 15 minutes each...all throughout the day. After two weeks of that, in the middle of the night I got a call from my step-daughter, then his doctor saying he probably wouldn't make it until daylight. I called an Uber (she was coming in from another town) and got there as soon as I could.

They were right..besides me, his youngest daughter, his sister, a couple of his sons and his younger brother were there when he took his last breath at 3:45 a.m. When first learning that his chances of surviving past two weeks were slim, I broke down and cried on my stepdaughter's shoulder. Like with my grandmother...I was all cried out by his funeral.
 
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