I couldn’t get over my brother’s death
nautil.us
nautil.us
The emotional devastation for my mother has been the hardest thing and my steady presence and support is something I’m proud of. My principal emotional response was extraordinary anger. I’d had multiple conversations with my brother about the dangers of his path that were ignored. I’m angry that he could be so thoughtless about our mother. I hate to say it but after my initial grief, “good riddance” was my response.
Eleven years later the grief is still raw for my mother. She is a vibrant and intelligent woman who was handed a raw deal in life. I’m trying my best to make up for that. I support her and manage her affairs. When I reflect on it my anger at my brother deepens. I don’t let it consume me. I can’t. I’m the sole surviving male in my family.
I have a brother; it's really hard for me to try to imagine being in your same situation. I have serious doubts that I would be able to properly support the remaining part of my family.
Kudos to you for looking out for your mother. I'm the sole person who can look after my own and I only hope I have the strength to support her when the time comes.
It sounds like both of you could benefit from grief counseling, even this long after the fact.
I lost someone young in my family to Covid last year. The chilling words "We have lost him" came on Whatsapp as the entire country was in lockdown and we were in a different city. I cannot forget it and keep going over it, over and over again.
I am sharing this to let you know that this happens to a lot of us. This grief will not go away. I just relive it everyday for some time. I am also a workaholic so it helps that I dont have much time to think. Yes, lots of people talk about therapy, meditation and a lot of things but I have never found anyone who is suffering to have gotten help from these.
Just live with it, what cannot be cured must be endured.
I know nothing about your life and I also find the "endure it" school of thought very appealing - not sure why. That put, you shouldn't discard those options you list without trying them yourself - if you haven't yet. What works or doesn't work for other people shouldn't matter to you, give it a try, being happy is worth it.
Grieving my father took 2 years or so to overcome. Grieving my brother took about 4 years. They were different situations and relationships, so I can’t ascribe the difference solely to therapy.
I will just say that for me, the only way to get the grief to go away is to feel it. Journaling, music, solo hikes, therapy, whatever it takes. The nice thing about therapy is that it holds you accountable. You have to think about it for an hour a week. Now, you can bullshit your way through therapy and stick to surface stuff, but then what’s the point. If you really crack open the shell and let the anger, despair, confusion pour out, it will eventually get better.
Either way (therapy or no), it is like a deep cut. There will be a scar. It will never go back to how it was before. But I hope you find some peace.
At first, the pain is blinding. All you feel is the pain.
If you can get the bleeding stopped, eventually the pain subsides, but things aren't ever really "normal" again. You find a new normal. You even learn how to do almost everything in your daily life with one arm. You adapt, and you may even thrive.
But every so often, something happens and you're genuinely stumped how you'll handle it with one arm. It reminds you of the loss, and in that moment, the frustration and the loss and even the pain comes back.
You'll cope with it, like you coped with learning everything else you needed to learn right after you lost your arm, but it never goes all the way away. You just get better at living with it.
What is your arm but a series of sensations and connections in your brain? Your arm is a physical thing; but to the extent that it exists to you, it exists in your brain.
So I think the loss of an arm is probably very similar in an actual not just a metaphorical sense. Although I would easily choose losing my arm over losing one of my loved ones.
I would have used the word accepted instead of endured but I think you are trying to say the same thing. Enduring involves fighting or some sort of friction at least - whereas if you can accept that the pain is going to be there you will maybe create some space for yourself and some relief. Hopefully.
I'm sorry you have to go through this but never give up trying to be at ease.
When my sister died, my doctor wanted to put me on an antidepressant immediately. I told her I wasn't depressed. I was having an appropriate grief response to the sudden loss of my sister.
But a year later, when I still couldn't bring myself to care about anything, including whether my life continued or stopped, I decided it was time for a small boost. Raise the baseline again. Don't try to push the grief out, but maybe get me just high enough that I want to get out of bed, that I want to go outside, that I want anything again.
A year after I started taking meds, things were still hard, and I still missed my sister profoundly, but my future wasn't blank anymore. I could start to imagine forms happiness might take. And I tapered back off the medication.
It's not the right answer for everyone, all the time, but it might be the right answer for you, now or soon, for awhile.
Unfortunately, I don’t know how you can regain interest - maybe do what you did with your dad with your kids? What about his presence made life worth living?
You said you have a wife and kids, let them in and let them support you. I went through the death of my parents alone. I would have done anything to have someone then.
Slightly over a week ago, a car ran a red light and hit my dad. He was severely injured and suffered a severe TBI. Doctors were giving an unfavorable prognosis. He was in a deep coma, with a GCS of ~5. My whole family was in a complete state of shock. We couldn't really feel anything. My mom somehow kept repeating to herself that he's going to get well, she just couldn't face the fact that she could lose him. As for myself, after researching every tidbit of information I could find about brain injuries, DAI, cases, treatments, I simply couldn't keep my optimism. I was very concerned about the very brief information we were getting from the doctors. I was perplexed as to why they're not actively monitoring his ICP, when his case and most protocols would suggest that that was the right thing to do (i'm not even sure if they did, they definitely didn't use an invasive technique). I was asking left and right about the medication he was on, whether he was being given things like amantadine, which research seemed to suggest was extremely helpful. I was left in the dark. He was given cerebrolysin, OTOH.
I started feeling a huge pain in my chest, and looking forward I just couldn't see myself functioning without him. He was and still is probably the most important person in my life. I was looking back and imagining that him getting well again would simply be the happiest, most positive life I could ever imagine. The life I used to have before seemed like heaven even though I wasn't perceiving it as such at the time.
Our days simply revolved around the visiting period of about an hour when we are allowed to visit him in the ICU. They still do, but the tension in the air is clearly a lot less intense. My dad somehow made great progress. He's mostly lucid now, he still can't talk, but we communicate a lot through glances, hand holding. He's still intubated, although he can breath on his own for hours. And his CTs show a great reduction in most of his brain lesion. We're definitely not out of the woods yet, but his progress/change is like night and day.
I am (probably) extremely lucky. But our lives will never be the same again.
I have a friend whose stepfather just got T-boned a few weeks ago in #Floriduh by a guy who ran a stop sign "because I was running late for work and there usually isn't any cross-traffic at that intersection"... Until there is. "How to not take bad risks" is something I wish was taught in school, because people do not seem to understand how to evaluate risk (especially repeated low risk but with very bad outcome if it hits). Now my friend's father is still in the hospital as well, weeks later.
Sorry for venting. I'm really sorry you're going through this, I just wish we were already at the point of preventing these dumb errors by people.
Don’t be afraid to talk to a counselor. They can get you talking about it and more at easy with what has happened. Take care of yourself.
I wrote this specifically for HN at the 10 year anniversary. The link died the day I posted it, but if you go down in the comments makeramen posted the full text. I don't know if this is helpful at all. But I figured I'd share in case it might be. And it's helpful to me to share it.
He was a very troubled boy. His parents were both killed on impact by a drunk driver when he was 3. He was sent to live with his paternal grandmother (one of our neighbors) but she was elderly, retired, and resented him and, unbeknownst to me (but not to my parents, I learned later on in life that they were trying to adopt him), she was abusing him.
There were hushed whispers amongst the parents in the neighborhood that she may have actually killed him but, as far as I know, it was never officially investigated. She died less than a year later, anyway.
I remember the last time that I saw him. We often spent our entire weekends together, he practically lived at our house from Fridays after school until Sunday evening. I remember the week that followed his death. Every detail. And then my life gets hazy for a couple of years.
But I came out of it around the 7th grade and was doing well academically and in sports.
Then it happened again in the 8th grade.
My friend and his girlfriend were sexually active and thought (incorrectly) that she was pregnant. He couldn't handle the response he got from his parents when he delivered the news and so he stayed home from school on a Monday and shot himself.
I stopped giving a shit about academics at that point but I kept up the sports, mostly in honor of my friend because we were on the same teams, both ran in the 4x400, etc. The sports forced me to keep my GPA above a 2.5 or whatever. That connection to my friend through athletics is probably the only reason I graduated.
In retrospect, I was deeply depressed. Around 14/15, I turned to alcohol and drugs to self medicate. It took me a long time to recover mentally.
My parents tried to get me into therapy but it didn't work for me.
I've never really felt any closure with these events and, while they don't haunt me, they do remain with me 3 decades later.
I've experienced tragedy to close family members as well. For everyone the grieving process will be different, but I can't believe someone expected it to last 1 year. Thats whats so upsetting to me is peoples expectations of how someone will handle loss, especially of a human.
It never fades, it compounds with the loss yet to come. We learn to live with the living ghosts and daily reminders of everyone and everything we've ever loved.
Loss and grief is not the same as death, Vonnegut's "So it goes" speaks to the sheer overwhelming mass of death constantly happening. But grief and loss is deeply personal that it can feel isolating.
It feels like only those who have experienced it can really understand it... But even then, it is such an individual experience that even knowing someone who lives with loss doesn't mean it's a relatable thing.
It's such a hard thing that the only thing I've learned is to be kind. As we age, everyone we know is carrying loss.
I have memories of friends and family dying going back a half century, but the death of one of my baby chickens a year ago still has a profound effect on me. A decade ago I would have been pretty surprised by the depth of my grief.
In fact when I talk or write about her death, it sounds seems faintly ridiculous. But inside it still exerts a powerful weight on my soul.
I don't even know my brother's grief, even though we lost the same sister, because I can't ever know his relationship with her from the inside.
Among the most toxic phrases to use with anyone who's grieving is, "I know how you feel."
No. You do not. You CANNOT. It is profoundly insulting and diminishing to claim you do.
But if you do know great big grief up close, and how to make space for it to do what it needs to do by showing up, sitting awkwardly in the silence, and just. not. leaving, you can really touch someone's soul.
I find this perspective arrogant, rude, and counterproductive. Other people have experienced profound grief as well. They are communicating, possibly inelegantly, it’s possible to get through the grief (what better gift can someone offer than hope?) and they are making themselves available if you need support. And ultimately, they are expressing condolences and sympathy.
Grief should be shared. Grief does not make you special. Confronting grief alone is a recipe for depression and madness.
What you do not know and cannot possibly know is how another person is feeling, how they're experiencing their own grief.
I post this for all the well-meaning people who are out there insulting and hurting people they love because they don't actually know any better.
Stop saying you know how they feel. It's one of the most hurtful things you can say, and it's outright false.
No, you've decided to take it as an insult. You demand grace from them and give none in return. It's more a reflection on you than it is on them.
I hope you never encounter the blinding pain of sudden, devastating grief, and you never have to find out just how impossible it is to try to rise above anything in that moment, to choose anything in that moment.
You're not even sure your heart is going to remember how to beat because the world as you thought you understood it has just come to a screeching halt. The prospect that the next moment has the audacity to happen, and the one after that--that there's still a world at all now that this person isn't in it--doesn't even make sense.
And somebody on the internet is still going to tell you they know how you feel and you shouldn't choose to take their ignorant platitudes as insensitive.
It tells me everything I need to know that you still think it might be the right course to say this to someone anyway.
But you know what that somebody on the internet has and has not felt, right?
I can't explain it to you.
But yes. There is a profound difference between people who know and people who don't, and it's only people who don't who think the difference might be missable.
I can't say what someone has felt, but I can be absolutely certain what someone hasn't.
There may be somebody on the internet who knows then.
I respect that is how you feel, yet at the same time I cal tell you that when I experienced great loss I found comfort in the same sort of words. Your mileage may vary.
Personally, I would rather focus on the intention of the person than in their exact choice of words. They are telling me, in their own way, that they feel for me and that they are right besides me trying to bring me a speck of comfort in what they know are very trying times.
That is what matters to me and I'm not going to start splitting hairs over how they express it.
Or maybe instead assume that someone is trying to comfort and empathize with you by relating? Not everyone says the perfect thing at the perfect time, so cut people some slack who are genuinely trying to help.
I'm commenting on an internet forum, devoid of any direct, personal grief being expressed, for the sake of telling people that this thing they want to say because they think it will help actually has the opposite effect.
If you actually love a grieving person AT ALL, don't say this to them. Don't.
It's up there with "All things happen for a reason," or, "God always has a plan," on the list of things that, in the abstract, sound like they should make someone feel better, but in the actual moment, make the grieving person want to strangle you and tell you to get your insensitive self the heck away from them.
If you want to make yourself feel better by spouting off some meaningless throw-pillow platitude, fine. Admit that that's what you're doing, but then question whether this is actually the right time and place and person to take care of your needs.
But if you ACTUALLY want to help the grieving person, just strike this empty garbage from your plans.
You get to breathe. Usually. If you remind yourself, or someone reminds you.
You do not get to be magnanimous about the insensitivity of people who can't even bear looking at your pain and think there's something they can say that will make it go away.
The reverse is also true. Don't assume so casually that your experience is the only valid one.
Nobody else knows the things about her that made me laugh, the little memories I have, the things about her that only I ever experienced in the way I experienced them. We shared things no one else can ever know.
I know for a fact that other people have experienced gigantic, devastating loss. Other people do know grief. Some of them know grief even more severe than mine. I encourage them to say so to grieving people, because it is important that people know they aren't alone.
But not one person who has ever lived or can ever live has lost my relationship with my sister but me. Saying otherwise reduces her to just "a person who died," not this person who had this life and this relationship, who has now died.
And that's what's so radically insulting about it. Don't do that to a grieving person. If people matter individually at all, then the grief of the people who loved them is fundamentally unknowable by anybody else.
I think anyone who has entered into the depths of their own grief knows this.
I don't expect to be able to convince the whole internet.
> this culture’s structure of feeling could also be called balkanized. Gender therapy and speciation were both parts of the longevity project, and the combination of the three created a new structure of feeling that is often characterized as fractured, compartmentalized, bulkheaded, firewalled. Usually longevity itself is identified as the primary force driving this; until now, no one has had to integrate a personality in its second century (or more), and often it is experienced as an existential crisis. The super-elderly have had so many experiences, gone through so many phases, lost so many companions to death or simply time that they have grown distanced from other people. Spacers, mobile over huge distances, especially bold in trying all the augmented abilities, often live as isolatoes, in a solipsistic narrative or performance of their own (495)
> She liked her work; she liked her play; she liked her art, the play that was work. So it was something else. Really the question became quite philosophical; how to be? What to care about? And how to become a little less solitary?
> . . . .
> Maybe nothing. There was a pruning of life by death. Parts died before the whole. When the people you loved died, part of you died. Some people by the time they went were like certain junipers she had seen, one live strip on a dead trunk. There was no way to counter that. (619–620)
> “Marriage,” Swan repeated, marveling at the word. To her it was a concept from the Middle Ages, from old Earth—an idea with a strong whiff of patriarchy and property. Not meant for space, not meant for longevity. One moved through one’s life in epochs, each a stage in one’s history, lasting some few or several years, and then circumstances changed and you were in a new life, with new associates. That could not be altered, not if you were out there riding the great merry-go-round; and so to deform one’s life in the attempt to make a relation last longer than its natural term was to risk wrecking its end, such that it splintered back along its whole length and left a bitter wound and a sense that it had all been a lie, where really there should only be a passing on, in one of the little death-and-transfigurations of one’s epochs. That’s just the way it was.
> At least so it seemed to her, and to many others she knew. It was the current structure of feeling in her culture and time. Spacers were free humans, free at last and human at last. So they all felt, and encouraged each other to feel, and she had always believed it, always agreed it was right. But structures of feeling were cultural, historical; they changed over time like people did; the structures themselves went through their own reincarnations. So if cultures changed over time, and an individual lived on through a change in that culture, then… didn’t the individual change too? Could they? Could she? (621–622)
Executive Mansion, Washington, December 23, 1862.
Dear Fanny
It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before.
Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.
Your sincere friend,
A. Lincoln
I certainly will not tell you, how you are supposed to handle loss - that is entirely up to you. But are you aware of the concept of self fulfilling prophecy?
Meaning if you are so sure of the future, that you will never get over it, than you are cementing this future.
I only know about the now, how I grief or rejoice today. It certainly feels sometimes, that this will be forever. But nothing is. It is your right to hold onto the grief, but personally I did better with not cementing my future.
I did get over the loss of my brother this way, despite having a way closer relationship to him, than other people who did not deal well with it (in my eyes), by accepting the grief and the reality of it. And then life went on. The grief is not over, maybe never will be. But it is not holding me to the past.
I don't think this is true in terms of grief. Most will get over it, even if they don't believe it is possible. Some will never get over it, even when they thought it will be fine or actively tried to "got over it".
People dont control whether they get over grief or not. Believing it will happen or not is not determining the outcome.
Words are powerful. So sure most people will get over grief, despite them saying they never will. But in my experience, those words make it harder for them.
Forcing them to lie about their real feeling at that moment won't help them overcome anything. It will only make them and anyone who is watching not to trust you with their feelings.
First, I am not forcing anyone. Secondly, there are thoughts and there are feelings.
You can feel deep sorrow, but thinking that this sorrow will last forever is a different thing.
And applying the scientific method suggests, nothing lasts forever.
That insight makes the sorrow nothing less intense. But it helped me, processing it, instead of letting the grief screw up my life, too.
I know a bit about psychology and spiritualism. Mantras and autosuggestion. They can make your life better, or worse. So I simply share my experience of my success with it and my observation of how it worked out for others. And if anyone feels forced to do anything, simply by me sharing my experience, than I don't see anything I can do about that, except feel sorry for them.
That is not scientific claim. That is not understanding the human communication and context.
You are free to use any autosuggestion, you think is helpful. I simply shared mine. Good luck with yours.
Learning to live with grief, integrating it as part of yourself, and eventually even living a thriving life, is in NO way "getting over grief."
Grief becomes part of who you are. It doesn't go away. You don't get over it. It becomes part of you, and you integrate it, and it stops being as disruptive as it was immediately after the loss, but trying to "get over it" or believing most people do is almost dangerously naive.
There's nothing unhealthy about recognizing that. Grief isn't a thing to be "gotten over." It evolves and it changes, and you eventually will evolve and change along with it, but recognizing you won't ever get over it is an important step on the path to healing.
If I could choose I’d like to have something similar happen to me some day. You go in the span of a few minutes surrounded by the ones who love you most.
Nevertheless it is still very hard to say goodbye. I hope you still have lots more time with your cats.
I watched my mom slowly lose all faculty as she was reduced to a muttering, unintelligible, bed ridden shell. Over the course of a month she lost the ability to move all of her limbs except her left hand. She quite abruptly began having trouble finding and forming the right words and I never got to have the final conversations I wanted to, I was going to interview her about her life but one day I came back and it was already too late. She lied in that bed for weeks, stuck in the now permanent reality that she was going to die, slowly, as everything was ripped away from her one by one. The cancer took over the rest of her body. Nobody knew it was going to happen, we all thought she'd come home and be okay but she never walked again. It was distressing in a way I cannot communicate.
She deserved the warm dark, and it had been far too long by the time it finally came for her. One needle prick is nothing compared to the potential suffering at the end of life afforded by our current medical advancements.
The dog is gone. We miss him. When the doorbell rings, no one barks. When we come home late, there is no one waiting for us. We still find his white hairs here and there around the house and on our clothes. We pick them up. We should throw them away. But they are all we have left of him. We don’t throw them away. We have a wild hope--if only we collect enough of them, we will be able to put the dog back together again.
Davis, Lydia. Can't and Won't: Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition. 2014.
I worry people will think it silly to go to pieces over the death of a dog, but I am right there with you, it is a massive loss.
Thus far my choice has been to live vicariously through other dog owners, i.e. visiting dog parks with my partner and playing with other peoples' dogs. I tell myself that, this way, I get to have all the upside of having a dog, with none of the downside. This feels like a complete and utter copout to me, and I have no defense against that argument except to say that I am emotionally fragile and don't have the inner fortitude it takes to let a dog into my life.
It took a lot of therapy to make me realize, I was being selfish. My brother was human being with difficulties and life experiences I could never understand.
I like to think I understand it a bit better the difference boys face growing up, now that I have a son. Watching his struggles, has been really tough. Seeing the deep lack of compassion they face. I don't why it never occurred to me that boys have such a different childhood experience, I often feel guilty I was not the greatest sister. All I can do is try to not repeat the same mistakes over again.
-David Foster Wallace
I don't really see what is wrong with that, it slowly fades, sure, but it does not go away and I am o.k. with that.
There is supposedly a Jewish saying "Someone is only really gone when nobody talks about them anymore".
Here, I did it again.
May his memory be a blessing.
Lois Tonkin described a model that grief doesn’t shrink - what seems to be a common thought, and also mine - but that your life around that grief grows to become larger. So, handling loss is less about “moving on” and more “moving with”.
Versus going to a church service, then getting drunk at the wake and going home, it’s a far more emotionally intelligent way to allow grief to take its course.
I think it is. But it has to be the right person and the right time. Some are fine opening up to the whole internet, I certainly would not (and did not).
Edit: Can't believe how difficult it was to find this [1]:
1. Identify the individual experiencing an acute stress reaction.
2. Connect with the individual by speaking their name, making eye contact, and holding their arm.
3. Offer commitment by letting them know they are not alone.
4. Verify facts with two to three simple questions to get their thinking kickstarted (“Who is your commander?” and “What unit are you in?”).
5. Establish an order of events to ground them in the present moment by stating what happened, what is happening, and what needs to happen in three simple sentences.
6. Request action of the individual to restore them to purposeful behavior.
It doesn't seem useful for civilians, especially those living alone.
[1]: https://health.mil/Military-Health-Topics/Centers-of-Excelle...
And then you get hit by the cold hard reality of mortality. Grandparents are supposed to die, they look and dress old, but you grow up with parents and siblings and friends. You go through your youth with the illusion of invincibility and unlimited time. They are fixtures in that illusion.
When they die, the illusion of youth permanence, deep in the subconscious, is shattered.
But life is about moving forward.
My nephew in law/brother (we're roughly same age, grow up together as kids) killed himself one night (self inflicted gunshot). Again so weird, I was talking to him on snapchat, no indication of anything being wrong. Never told me he was having problems.
Anwyay it's weird when someone is suddenly just gone. Not sure if I should digitally purge them from my sights to not be reminded of them or what.
Keep them somewhere you can look at them when you want to, but it's OK to take action not to have to have your guard up against waves of grief that could surprise you at any moment.
Random things will surprise you anyway. It's not foolproof. But minimizing your surprise surface can be helpful for awhile.
I have to nest the images and put them so they don't show in the folder preview.
It is interesting the fallout when you suddenly disappear. All your accounts/things you used to manage.
I am 50. I have experienced a normal, I think, number of deaths among friends and family. At least once a month I will be reminded of a birthday for someone who has passed away. I am not always happy to be reminded at that moment. I don't think there is a straightforward way for me to tell the address book that this person is no longer alive. I also don't want to remove that data from the person's entry.
As we get more of these digital agents in our lives, they will have to be designed with a little more thoughtfulness.
I would say yes, you need to remove their photos from most places. The happiest people live in the present. The brain rehearses negative thoughts because it tries to understand how it could have done better, but you have to repeat yourself that you had no control over others’ lives and let go of the continuous thoughts.
So personally as I get older and people die I think grieving and having that 'weight' with you is normal, I couldn't imagine that losing a brother, or a wife, or decades long friends is something to get over with. I think it's important that people who have problems functioning get help but I'm not sure there's a lot of need to pathologize that kind of grief wholesale which seems so common nowadays.
I don't like the phrase 'get over' either, but you absolutely have to come to terms with the loss. Carrying the weight forever is pathological.
Everyone and everything you know will die. Yet I find ways to both enjoy life, and help others with theirs. Grief will still find you at times. Let it wash over you, and on. You will remain. What, then, to do with your time?
Not 100% relevant with the original post, but reading it reminded me of it.
He passed less than three months later, but none of us have forgiven or forgotten, and will never see him again.
Another uncle, who was a major league a-hole heard about father's decline, and studiously avoided visiting us while he was ill. Another one I will never speak to again.
Some of the well wishers would want an explanation for her passing, others wanted assurances that we would be okay, others studiously avoided us, others would unleash a torrent of grief and we’d end up comforting them.
I realized that in most cases these seemingly bizarre reactions were peoples attempts to manage their own emotions. Those looking for an explanation were mostly needing assurance that it could happen to them. Those wanting us to tell them we’d be okay that we’d be okay we’re looking to manage the pain they were feeling due to empathy.
I also realize that my community didn’t really know how to comfort someone in their grief or pain. They simply lacked the ability to emotionally regulate themselves enough to support someone in their grief. These were all good people but somehow most lacked the ability to feel empathy, feel the grief and pain while also being able regulate their own emotions enough to simply stand with the person going through it. It seems that this is a rare skill as valuable as gold.
Maybe it is because death these days is a rare event and our immense privilege means that we don’t learn those skills while we’re are young and when we’re older there is nobody left to model it for us. Maybe our natural wiring for empathy and mirroring others emotions isn’t the panacea that we’ve been told it is and people need to learn other skills, compassion maybe? I simply don’t know.
Tl;dr: Whoever was the closest to the deceased is in the innermost ring, perhaps a spouse, a parent, close siblings (in my case, my sister's husband).
The next ring is the people next-closest, in this case, my mom.
The next ring includes the next-closest people, like me, my brother, my dad, etc. And the rings keep going outward.
Here's the rule: You can dump absolutely any pain, need, or struggle you have on anyone who's in a farther/larger ring than you are. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE are you allowed to dump anything on anyone in a closer ring. Support works one way in the ring. The outer layers support the inner ones. ONLY.
Very early on, I relayed this to one of my sister and brother-in-law's friends and asked him to make sure anybody who wanted to connect with us understood. He did it masterfully, and I recommend tucking this theory in the back of your mind somewhere for when you need it.
[0] https://www.everhomehealthcare.com/post/ring-theory-and-sayi...
I think you may have to have more consideration than that.
This is written for people in a catastrophic/traumatic grief scenario, and pretty accurately accounts for the fact that that takes over EVERYTHING while it's happening.
I'm sure easier said than done. Maybe long term grief is a disease or something. Still, there's logic (to me at least) that your long term grief is dishonoring the very person your grieving for. They'd hate to see you in this state and would love for you to be happy.
I lost my father 3 months ago. Yes, I miss him. I have lots of good memories. But he'd not be happy to see me grieve long term.
Looking back, I can distinctly recognize the stages of grief, even from when I was a child. They almost exactly line up with the 7 stages that therapists tell you about. I remember them all, one after the other. I literally remember bargaining with god to bring my father back.
That experience, and recognizing grief for what it is, has made family deaths much "easier". My grandfather just died a few months ago. First death of someone close I have experienced in 24 years. Of course I still grieved, but it was much easier this time. Recognizing the grieving process, and being able to understand that what you are feeling is natural, are extremely important to getting through it.
Grief is something that people just don't understand until they are floored by it one day. And it can last years. I'm glad society is more openly discussing how difficult it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
This figured in Renaissance Art. I remember seeing Holbein’s The Ambassador’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambassadors_(Holbein)
There’s a skull in the picture but you have to be at an awkward angle to see it, I thought it was a gimmick; on reflection though if you have to make the effort to see it it is going to make you think about more deeply, rather than just another object on a table.
Talk about Ambassadors these days and people may think of the Ferro Rocher advert.
Thats way more than most people do. Most people just goto work then go home for tv and food. Also, she seemed to be fit and could also afford a bunch of therapy, so relatively speaking she was doing extremely well.
We lost our brother a while ago. Known to many as Matthew Rudy with the silent Jacobs at the end. Nobody has ever been prouder of their middle name.
I've found it useful reading about other people's loss. Here's the latest book I read. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/29/my-partner-die...
Around this time, I also learned of the death of some schoolmates, kids that I knew growing up but wasn't close with. A suicide and two murdered, seemed quite unlikely but it happened.
This turned out to be the prelude to a number of deaths in my family.
My uncle got a brain tumor. I flew to the bay area to see him for the last time. It seemed bad, but he could still walk.
My father passed away, slowly and suddenly. He'd been in and out of hospital with "the everything": COPD, IHD, diabetes, just everything that happens to you when you don't watch what you eat and don't exercise. It was never going to end well, but it also doesn't have to end at any particular visit to the hospital. I literally have a photo of the last thing he ate, which turned out to be the thing that killed him.
A few months later, the family chat lit up. I have this massive set of cousins, and when something happens they write. I started reading the "With great sadness..." message, thinking this will be uncle having passed. I screamed. It wasn't my uncle. It was my 36 year old cousin. He died of a heart attack overnight. We ended up doing the funeral on zoom. I still remember the last shot of him in the coffin, he looked like me, same haircut (bald) and same face.
Not long after, my mom's sister phoned her. She wanted to cheer her up by having her come visit. She'd been locked up in the flat since the lockdown, but now things were easing. She went to see her sister and they both caught the virus. It's weird when someone goes to hospital with covid. To start with, chances are you just need some oxygen and then you'll get better. That seemed to be the case, but they kept her there a bit because they weren't sure. Then they put her in intensive. At this stage, there's a significant chance of dying, but probably not huge. Then they put her on a ventilator, where I think it's a coin toss. Then she flipped tails.
I talked to a grief guy, which I think helped. He'd sort of seen it all before, in terms of how your relationship with your loved ones might have been. It's also useful to remember the highs and lows. I've been lucky, it's mostly been positive, can't really think of anything terrible in my childhood.
Several friends lost a parent in the months after my mom passed. It was good to be able to talk them through things. Both on a practical level ("this is how you do a funeral, this is how you do the paperwork"), but also on an emotional level, particularly reliving memories about the person. We've all met the parents of our friends and like our own parents you more or less assume they'll be around forever, until they aren't.
Hang in there!
I was disappointed to see that she appears to have not been given the option of Transpersonal therapy : medicine, aka psychedelics.
Keeping in mind these diagnosis only really exist in the DSM and are a sort of short hand for trying to make sense of symptom clusters, PTSD is remarkably treatable w psychedelics.
And if you don’t want to take an illegal drug, or wait for a clinical trial, Breathwork often works just as well.
(Feel free to join our sessions as a VIP at BioMythic.com).
Also, Oxytocin can be quite useful is helping grief life, Although it’s rarely prescribed for it.
You can hack that system via cuddle therapy or you can buy Oxytocin nasal spray and nebulize it (it is powerful and I owe the community a full write of my reckless experimentation with it - but it’s certainly safer than suicide).
And as always, reach out to me directly if you need to talk or want guidance.
I didn't feel anything at first, except guilt. I felt guilty because I was not feeling sad while others were crying around me. I felt guilty because we all felt that it was going to happen, but didn't do anything to prevent. The only survivor of the family, my cousin, never got over it, and after that she attempted suicide multiple times, surviving until last year.
I also felt a lot of guilt because at that time (and since then), I was depressive and had very frequent thoughts of suicide. I've seen first-hand what it did to my family, and to myself and I don't want to cause that for anyone.
These last years, I realized that I'm isolating myself a lot more, from friends, from my own family, from... everyone, because I don't want to hurt people : if it ever happens, the less people I know, the less damage it will do. And I can't talk of it to anyone I know.. I think of the guilt they would feel if it happened after I had told them of my intentions.
Since I was young, I've had this thing where I have lots of trouble handling my emotions, sometimes explode in anger and start being very violent to myself, wounding me and endangering my life. Since last year, I've managed to control this a lot more, and now I haven't hurt myself intentionally since 14 months.
It may seem like a good thing, and at first it did, but I feel like it was my way to express that something was very wrong and that I was thinking of taking my own life. Now I don't have that anymore, I cry everyday, never see anyone.
These dark thoughts start making me more and more anxious, each morning, every day. I've gone from thinking about the consequences to others, the usual thoughts about your own funeral, to thinking to my cold body rotting in this shitty room I rent, and becoming completely desensitized to that thought.
I don't know what to do. I feel like I'm stuck in "limbo". I don't enjoy life, I'd prefer quitting, but I'm unable to do that because I don't want to hurt my family & friends. But since I'm also completely isolating myself, I suppose it still hurts them.
I think that someday it will happen, it feels like I'm getting closer and closer each year. I've had a few moments where if it could have been easy, simple and painless, I know I'd have done it.
I don't want to be the death that someone couldn't get over. Ruined lives should not be transitive.
I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don't want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don't want it to "not matter". I don't want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can't see.
As for grief, you'll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you're drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's some physical thing. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it's a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.
In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you'll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything...and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.
Somewhere down the line, and it's different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O'Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out.
Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don't really want them to. But you learn that you'll survive them. And other waves will come. And you'll survive them too. If you're lucky, you'll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/garysully1986/comments/6g3brt/gsnow...
> Alright, here goes. I'm old. What that means is that I've survived (so far) and a lot of people I've known and loved did not. I've lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can't imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here's my two cents. I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don't want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don't want it to "not matter". I don't want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can't see. As for grief, you'll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you're drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's some physical thing. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it's a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive. In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you'll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything...and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life. Somewhere down the line, and it's different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O'Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out. Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don't really want them to. But you learn that you'll survive them. And other waves will come. And you'll survive them too. If you're lucky, you'll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.
We can't control the sea, but you can learn to surf the waves