I can share one personally, not from my own family but from research we did on caregivers who had a relative in long-term care who they hadn't been able to visit. We heard from a designated care person who was allowed to go in how difficult it was to not be able to have the full family support there. They recognized that their relative was at the end of life. That's already a difficult experience, with the grief and with preparing for that stage in life, but to be limited to doing it with only the staff there and maybe one additional person who was able to access the long-term care facility, for example, while the other family members either tried to be at the window or were just at a distance.... It's that lack of presence and that lack of humanness as well. That's what they were sharing with us. They said, “We knew mom was going to die and it's not that it was a surprise; it's the fact that she did it with only me and my sister there and that the others were just not being part of it.”
This caregiver said, “I actually feel privileged that I was the one to be there, because that's part of my grieving process”, but the other family members who weren't able to be there are living a very different grieving process, and it makes it very, very difficult.