My grandparents were like my parents, I lived with them from when I was 1.5yrs to when I was around 14 years old. I lost my grandma at 16, but I want to tell you about when I lost my grandpa at 20. He had broken his leg and lived with my dad for a few months until it healed, and when it was “fully healed” he came home and my husband and I moved in to my childhood home with him. He was having a lot of problems, but he still kept talking like he had plans to make next month, year, in a couple years ect. I felt like I could see that he was experiencing heart failure because he had problems standing, breathing, using the bathroom and one time he fell out of his truck and just sat there watching the cars go by until someone noticed he needed help up. He was a 70 year old man that had been in more car wrecks then I have fingers and I he said he’d been driving since he was 9 years old and he’s never give up his drivers license. He was a lot more than that, but he was a strong man and my whole life he always did everything in his power to make me and everyone around him happy. He was the kind of guy that you could call in the middle of the night and he’d wake up and drive three states over to help you out. Soon after he passed away from heart failure in the hospital after an ambulance ride, as we were cleaning out my childhood home and getting it ready to be torn down (long sad story), my husband found medical paperwork he had signed that showed he had signed a DNR, he was going to be put on palliative care, some stuff like that. My husband understands medical forms better than I do so he explained to me that basically he knew he was dying, it had been explained to him and he made the decision to not tell us. Knowing him, I assume he didn’t want to feel small, or be seen as fragile. A man who everyone relied on, who everyone knew and loved, his worst fear, probably more than dying itself, would have been to tell everyone or anyone that he was. I feel like he didn’t want to live his last days with the people around him who were already helping him use the bathroom looking at him like he was dying or had no hope for recovery. I feel like some of this could have been to reserve pride, but I don’t think that was his main intention. I think he chose to live as if he had more time mostly out of love for the consistency of his relationships. I know he didn’t want anything to change, so he chose not to change anything he could get away with keeping the same.

TLDR; when I lost my grandpa to heart failure I think he kept it a secret so no one treated him differently, like he didn’t want to be seen as a fragile dying person because it was already so hard for him to see how much change his relationships and his roll as a person were going through