Wing, among the stages of dying (and the stages of grief) is denial. Some of us are able to get beyond denial and move on past bargaining to acceptance. I've seen families who 'didn't want Granpa to know' he was dying, and Granpa is pretending that he doesn't know and nobody is making any progress at having meaningful conversations and saying goodbyes. I think most do know, whether told or whether they just sense it. The pulling away you mentioned is common.

Don't you think that leaving must be very hard? Sometimes it's just so painful we all pretend it isn't happening because it's easier not to talk about it. Some people will acknowledge that they know they are dying. I'm rambling here. I think my point is that we're all different and some of us want to say a bunch of goodbyes and some of us prefer to, as my mother used to say, "just pull up the covers and go on."
I think your Wing wanted to assure you that he still loved you, that leaving was hard for him, and that he was too tired to stay here.
Bless your heart.

Nell

thats exactly what happened with me, with my mother and son even though they were in deep coma's I know it sounds silly but I was still frightened to tell them exactly what I wanted to tell them just incase they didn't know. because they say the hearing is one of the last things to go.My father was different because he wasn't it such a deep coma and was stopping breathing and starting again for about 8 hrs I still found it difficult to say what I wanted to say which I deeply regret doing. But I talk to them all the time now and I still keep finding pennies, which makes me smile.

I firmly believe that on a certain level, the subconscious mind/soul certainly does know that their time here on earth is almost over. I have dealt with many, many, people who have lost loved ones who were not even sick before they left, and many of them have stories that confirm that belief.
There is so much that our minds can't even come close to conceiving and so much that we will never know and understand until our time is here. It is obvious though from so many stories that we do know to some degree that our time is almost up. We have intuition about other things in life, why not something as major as our life ending?
Lu

In my nursing career I have attended to many and YES - people have a sixth sense that tells them the time has come - they become calm and peaceful.

My husband asked to go to a Hospice to die and for the 12 days he was there he was happpier than he had been in many months. I think the pressure of keeping up a good front for everyone was removed, the fear of not knowing when his time would come because he had made the decision, all that was heavy on his shoulders. We lived there for those 12 days and neither of us had any other responsibilities, just to be together, I took care of him until the end.

Many people are naturally intuitive and may sense that something is going to happen. This happened to me about 6 or 8 months before my husband's sudden death in a car accident. I just "felt" that something bad was going to happen to one of us but didn't know which. I pulled away from him emotionally, so as to make it easier for the one who was left. I even went so far as to tell my sisters, 2 months before his death, that we'd all been lucky to have such a large family with nothing bad ever happening, but that things were going to change soon. And yet, when I recieved that call about the accident, I was still so shocked and couldn't believe this was happening! There's no real way to prepare for it, but sometimes you DO know.

I'm certain that my mother knew about 4 months before she died (just 3 weeks ago). She gave me her wedding ring and asked me to start wearing it in November. It made me cry and I protested but she insisted it was important to her so I did it.
She tried to give me her jewelry box and I refused to take it; it seemed too final for me and I just couldn't do it.
She 'loaned' some money to a grandchild and then hand-wrote on her will that any money loaned to grandchildren didn't have to be paid back.
She gave away clothes to the employees at the retirement home where she lived.
She definitely drew away from old friends and made them cancel trips to visit her over the holidays.
She sent back most of her Christmas presents with notes saying the gifts were lovely but she couldn't use them! We all shared a laugh about how rude she was, but now I feel terrible that we ignored this HUGE sign.
She talked eldlessly to my older brother about her finances and now he's feeling guilty because he didn't want to talk about it with her. She was so proud of the fact that she had everything ready and we should have been praising her for being so wise.
As we look back, it seems very clear that she knew. Absolutely KNEW. We were just too dumb to see it too. Or in denial. Nobody wanted to talk to her about death. But she did want to talk about it. I have felt terrible guilt about this over the past 3 weeks. We spent our lives trusting her and listening to her, but in this very important thing... we didn't.
All we saw was that she still seemed to be in good health for her age. But she knew.