My 4 year old son Michal died 11 years ago and I still grieve him every day. It is deep in my bones, an abscess. As this beautiful and heavy article describes, the act of grieving became an addiction to me. I kept "breaking beautiful things" in my mind because living with the ghost child instead of the living world kept his memory closer and my hands less shaky. He was an addiction, I had rituals I had to do (watch old videos, peruse old photos) every day. Without these things, I felt like I was betraying him. I fantasized about digging up his bones a lot. All a ruse, a cycle in my own mind, designed to soothe an addict haunted by his ghost child. A divorce and lots of personal writing and tears (and so many years) later, I am in a healthier place. But "grief is what love looks like when they're gone" is a simple and poignant way to put it: I will always be haunted, and I will always love the haunt, but I cannot be owned by him like I was for so many years. When he comes to haunt me, I welcome it. But unlike before, I don't smother him. Now I let him float away too.
As a new father of a 9 month old son, I am so very sorry for your loss, because this sounds like a horror. There seems to be a pattern of divorce after a child is lost which seems to just add insult to injury, I'm really sorry
Those a beautiful words. And as though those feeling might haunt you, I hope you can find and keep the peace for the years to come. Thanks for sharing.
I pulled myself out of a family riven with poverty, addiction, bankruptcy and bad choices. My father died at 40. It was not a surprise to me when my brother, high on something that made him delusional, pulled a gun on a police officer that had pulled him over for speeding. He shot the officer multiple times. The officer survived with multiple debilitating injuries that made him unable to work again. My brother died.
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.
There's no sense in getting madder at him each time you think about it. You might want to try to find a way to forgive him or at least let go of some of your own anger at his choices. It really can eat you from the inside.
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.
From what I read in your comment, you seem to be a deep, thoughful, strong human being, and your ability to respond so responsibly to a devastating set of issues is remarkable.
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.
Forgiveness is not something we do for the forgiven, it is something we do for ourselves. In the end forgiveness is the ultimate revenge. Forgive for the sake of yourself and for you mother.
I saw the title of this post, once, twice... and thrice... I kind of sensed what was on the other side...I didnt want to click and read it because I was/am still going through the same grief.
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 lost my father and then 10 years later my brother to suicide. With my father, I already had a therapist, so I worked through it with her. With my brother, I didn’t have one and I was about to travel alone to a foreign country for a few years. I was much more isolated and I explicitly thought, “Nope. I am not going to feel this right now.”
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.
Sometimes it's more like an amputation of an arm than a deep cut.
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.
I think this is less a simile and more a physical reality.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I think sometimes it sort of helps to just run through explaining something so many times that I get tired of talking about it. It's not quite the same as a "fix", like you said. But eventually over enough iterations the story of the traumatic event becomes less painful - almost like playing a song enough for it to go from "love" to "boring/repetitive".
My father died almost a year ago today and I feel nothing. I have zero motivation and I’m not interested in anything or anyone. I can barely get my work done everyday because I don’t give a shit. If I didn’t have a wife and kids I’d definitely be out wandering the Appalachian trail or working the grill in a Waffle House in some nothing town just hiding from myself.
You have to move forward, parents are supposed to die before their children and I’m sure he wouldn’t want you to react like this. Especially since he sounds like he was an excellent dad.
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?
My dad was murdered outside his business just over 19 years ago. I wrote about it and shared it on HN at the 10 year mark. 10 years was significant to me because when it happened I wished 10 years would go by so it would just be normal. But the truth is it never became normal.
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.
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.
While I don't have much faith in general Level 5 self-driving car autonomy, I DO have faith in AEBS (automated emergency braking system) and other more-easily-implemented systems that would largely prevent the stupidest sorts of human errors (like running red lights, stop signs, A-pillar blind spots in turns from oncoming traffic/bicycles/pedestrians, etc.) Just... basic "harm prevention" tech would go a long way IMHO, like the system in Teslas that keeps the interior at a survivably-cool temp if it's hot inside, because loving parents can and do sometimes still forget their kids inside.
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.
When my parents died, I would ask myself- is being sad and not moving on with my life what they would want me to do? No. They’d be angry and giving me shit about it everyday just like I’m sure your dad would do to you. He didn’t want to leave you, but he had to. Now your life is still here and you need to go live it - you better understand than many people how fleeting time is.
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.
This is better advice than it probably sounds like right now too.
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.
Mine died when I was 28. The way I felt was like when you finish the video game civilization and can continue playing but there’s no more winning or point. Emptiness. A few things I’d say is one if your mother is still alive don’t neglect her like I did. Channel your grief into appreciation and love for those who are still with, know the pain fades.
If your first instinct is "be out wandering the Appalachian trail", maybe you owe it to yourself to go and do just that. Either for a day or a week, but putting yourself in that position to fully embrace your grief in a place of your choosing might be very beneficial.
My dad died unexpectedly recently. For a period, I was hyper motivated, but now I'm starting to similarly feel unmotivated. I've also thought about just disappearing, but having to be there for my mom and sisters has been stopping that thought early in the process. I don't know if there's anything I can say to help you, but if you want to talk about what you're going through, I'm happy to listen.
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.
Are wandering the Appalachian trail or working the grill in a Waffle House in some nothing town bad? If so why?
What qualifies a town as "nothing"?
How can you hide from your self? that doesnt make sense.
Considering this is HN are you currently working as some sort of programmer or business guy? if so why is that better than Waffle house?
I don’t think OP is making a claim about better or worse. It appears to be about getting away and doing something where the commitment is minimal and attachment is zero.
I've carefully arranged my life to be like that. Zero responsibilities, zero stress. It's great! Imo it's optimal and I don't know why anyone wouldn't want to live like that, other than bullshit peer-pressure or conspicuous consumption related reasons like having high status.
i've similarly architected my life and lifestyle to minimize stress and avoid drama. however, zero responsibility and zero vulnerability (emotionally) is a dangerous place to find yourself, I wouldn't advise seeking that out. Easily allows someone to slip into depressive state and make bad judgements.
Sure, this is called being a kid. Zero responsibilities, also zero impact on the world. Having a family isn't about gaining status, obviously. What I hear is that this man's wife and children are the only thing keeping him afloat.
My best friend committed suicide at the start of the 5th grade.
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 had two of my closest childhood friends die when I was young. It was a much different situation to yours, but I just wanted to say I know what that's like. I'm not haunted by it either, but it stuck with me in that it made it really hard for me to make friends again afterwards. I hope you are doing better these days.
This article duplicates, almost word for word, and action for action, a death in the family that impacted a friend of mine. She was devastated by her grandmother’s death, and had a similar reaction to it, attempting suicide and changing her life in so many different ways. I’ve tried for some time to make sense of her experience, but I really can’t because it’s not mine and is so divergent from my own life. This author has done a great service trying to describe and communicate the problem to those of us that haven’t been down the same road.
My dog died just over a year ago and I'll never get over it. I'm going to be old and demented thinking she is right next to me. And I semi look forward to seeing her again in that state. I love that dog forever and ever.
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.
I have a crude hypothesis that the difference between the old and young is the accrual of profound grief.
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’m old. Your concept of accrued grief is new to me, but resonates.
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.
Abraham Lincoln wrote this letter to a girl who had been struck by severe grief following the death of her father in the American Civil War. She was so overcome that she had locked herself in her room for weeks at a time. It really seems to touch on your point here.
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.
One thing I've learned to say is that I don't know your grief, but I do know great big grief up close, and there's just a difference between people who know and people who don't.
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.
> No. You do not. You CANNOT. It is profoundly insulting and diminishing to claim you do.
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.
It is not incumbent upon the person who is grieving to take care of the sensitivities of the well-meaning people who don't know when to keep their mouths shut.
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.
Both of you are right. It's not incumbent on someone grieving to be gracious, and yet choosing grace is better than choosing to react with anger or hurt.
If you think you get to choose in moments like this, you've had no experience with overwhelming grief.
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.
You're making the point that someone else's experience can't possibly match yours: that's why they shouldn't claim to understand what you're going through.
The reverse is also true. Don't assume so casually that your experience is the only valid one.
You're not wrong, and the attempts are appreciated, but grief just hurts. so. fucking. much. It is, even among friends who also lost the same person, so isolating and lonely, that there is no solace, no comfort, only guilt and shame, anger and hurt. With time there's space for more than those four things but in the moment (which may last years); in that moment, there's no space for anything else but grief.
> 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.
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.
Listening to American Gods. One of the interludes puts it well. Paraphrasing: everyone is unique, everyone is the same. You are both right. However, I do think grief is more similar than not. The tragic specific circumstances will always vary, but it is always the same. It is a loss. A hole. Some people are not prepared, can’t be prepared. They sink into the narrowness of their unique experience and can’t or won’t permit themselves perspective. It is /their/ grief, dammit. Saying you understand takes something away from their grieving experience. Sneaks perspective in. Hints at the commonality of deep grief and loss.
> It's one of the most hurtful things you can say,
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.
The depth of your ignorance of pain here is something I envy.
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.
> 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.
But you know what that somebody on the internet has and has not felt, right?
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.
I know folks are disagreeing with you a bit in this thread, but I just wanted to say that I 100% agree with you. 17 year-old me could have written the same words after the loss of my mom. I know loss. I will never know your loss. To me, that acknowledgment is a show of respect.
It's exactly this. As I said, I don't even know my brother's grief and we lost the same sister.
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.
Evoked memory of these passages from Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, on the compounding of this by life extension:
> 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)
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'm sorry for your loss. My cats are getting older and every once in a while I get pangs of anxiety about how the heck I'll be able to handle it when they pass, whether they'll be in pain, how I can make it better, etc. I find it difficult to even imagine being able to move on from it. I also wonder about whether putting a pet to sleep is really as painless as everyone claims or if they just say that to make the owners feel better, and try to prepare for the practicalities of it to make the process as comfortable as possible for them when it comes to that.
I'm no expert but I'd imagine it's similar to getting put under for surgery, the drugs are similar at least, and the most painful part of that is the needle. Once the IV is in, there's no pain, just a slow and warm dark moving over everything.
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.
I don’t know how painless it actually is, but putting an animal to sleep is a quick and dignified death compared to what I have seen happen to most people.
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.
There's a thing about bond and grief. With some persons / pets, your emotions are tangles with him/her. Unless they're here, it's as if you can't feel or share reality anymore.
I have a dog too, a girlfriend and friends and family also but me and my dog are together 24/7, sleep in bed together, etc. At this point his death will be devastating, I already know it will completely wreck me.
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.
I consider myself a huge "dog person", yet I don't own one. If I'm honest with myself, the fear of losing them someday is the biggest blocker to me getting one. I feel like I already have a lot of inner turmoil, and I'm not sure that all the joy my dog would bring me would compensate for the grief I'd inevitably feel when saying goodbye. My brain tells me this is the wrong way to look at it, but I can't help it.
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.
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.
> Meaning if you are so sure of the future, that you will never get over it, than you are cementing this future.
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.
This is spoken like it comes from someone who has never grieved, or even been close to someone who has. Maybe someone who has lost, but not someone who has grieved.
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.
Sounds like you are using definition of grief much different the rest of the world. The person I responded to did not defined it as infinitely long lasting either.
"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.
I don't think so. Those words express how they feel right now at that moment. They put into words hopelessness they feel at that moment. Expressing it is part of process.
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.
"Forcing them to lie about their real feeling at that moment won't help them overcome anything."
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.
There is no such thing as "getting over grief." You even allude to this yourself: "The grief is not over, maybe never will be."
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.
This hits too close to home for comfort.
My brother committed suicide. I still think about him often.
In the beginning my thoughts were consumed with How could he do to this us? How could he be so selfish? Look at what he did to my parents ? etc.
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.
>The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
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”.
That's part of why societies have, or used to have, codified mourning time. Give enough space to let you sink in the emotion, but then draw a line in the sand and get back on with life.
Many do. As a westerner living in Vietnam, mourning is a process takes months and has clear protocols.
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.
The same was true in the west, but it was codified by religions. We let go of both the bad and the good parts as we shrinked or eliminated the roles of religions in society, often without replacing them.
In the age of 22 and within 2 years, i experienced loss of my younger sister, my first love, a beloved cousin and the only grandmother i have ever met. I literally don’t remember anything from these 2 years, only that i was like a skeleton and i have forgotten how it is to be naively happy and careless. I suppressed my feelings for more than 10 years, until another traumatic event released everything x100000 times worst. I seeked therapy and finally feel happy about myself, but really wish i should have done it back then. The pain is still there, but at least i don’t blame myself for any of it.
My brother killed himself when he was 25, and I was 23. I've never really known how to talk about it/him with people. I sometimes wonder what he would be like now if he hadn't done it, but mostly I don't think about him - unless I'm talking with my mum.
I don't think I'll ever really get over it. But yeah, it's not really something to talk about. Life can be hard, and sadly there is suffering and tragedy in every family.
"But yeah, it's not really something to talk about."
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).
Agreed -- talking about things really can help. Sometimes you'll unexpectedly discover that talking about things isn't just helpful for you, but also for the person on the other side of the conversation; at some point, everyone's working through something.
For anyone reading this: best practice to prevent damage from psychological trauma is the iCOVER method, check it out on the US mil psy sites, apply it! In short: No calming words, orient and give simple tasks, make sure the potential victim does not become one by staying in the mind, active.
The amount of troops coming home with PTSD would suggest it might keep them functional on the battlefield but it doesn't set them up for a healthy life afterwards.
This is quite new, so work in progress, the neuropsychology as far as I can fathom does check out, not just for immediate capabilities preservation, but also to prevent longer term damage.
Can't find any details about the "simple, 6-step procedure" itself. What are the steps!? (The paper is paywalled.)
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.
Our society hides death, and even discomfort. Elderly are placed in "homes". Youth is prized, marketed, and heavily skewed in media, while old people are only glimpsed or bit characters. A glut of entertainment consumes your leisure hours. Family is deemphasized. Perspective and reflection are replaced with a full schedule and sleep deprivation. We don't spend time in nature, we use ac and heat to avoid extremes. We don't exert ourselves, don't get hungry.
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.
I was working with a partner in our company closely for a long time. To the point of being friends/talking on the phone a lot. So his face/data is really integrated into our app/marketing. Couple days ago he died and it's so weird... my unanswered text asking why he's not at our weekly meeting/if he's alright. And every time I see his face in our database/marketing material it's so odd like this guy was alive a couple days ago now gone.
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.
People always say “no indication of anything being wrong.” Of course. Those who actually intend to commit suicide, hide their idea, otherwise someone may make them backtrack. By that, I mean, it’s not your fault.
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.
Maybe not "purge," but it might be helpful for awhile to put the pictures somewhere they won't sneak up on you and surprise you.
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 a related issue with my address book and calendar. I have always been diligent about putting birthdates in my address book. iOS/macOS does the right thing and shows me the birthday on the calendar. Every day, one of my favorite activities is to look at my calendar and think about birthdays for the day or the coming days and send greetings.
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.
Personally I never liked the idea that one should "get over" the death of people who really take central roles in one's life. It in my mind cheapens what relationships are and that for many people a lot of relationships are final and so is losing them, there is simply no replacement for everything and there shouldn't be, it would be weirdly robotic.
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 lost my older brother when I was in my early 20's, and both my parents has since passed as well.
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?
When my father was in declining health, his brother came to our home and started shouting at us about his medical treatment and overall decline.
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.
The reactions to my mothers death were similar if less extreme. I was struck how few of the stream of visitors helped alleviate pain and how many simply made it worse.
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.
"Ring theory"[0] was one of the most important things anyone shared with me when my sister died.
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.
You're welcome to try having as much consideration as you can.
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 sympathetic that there is grief in losing someone but I always find it strange when it lingers long. The person grieving is not honoring the person (or animal) they are grieving for. If the person they are grieving for saw them grieving they'd be upset and say something like "Move on! We had good times. Now go forward and have more good times! Every time you continue to grieve you're actually hurting me and the memory of me so stop it! You're also hurting yourself and you know I wouldn't want that. Go and have a new life!"
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.
I think I had a similar reaction to my mother's death, although hers was drawn out over a period of years; a lost battle with breast cancer. I think I only miss her more with each year. It's been 7 years. Part of the trouble I think was that some important people around me basically collapsed from grief. And so it felt like the entire family just sort of disintegrated when she died. No way to process any of what happened. Just a lot of denial. The way things happen on the Hallmark channel is a sort of sickening caricature.
I have more dead friends than living, and I have spent the last several years trying to heal, and mostly succeeding. Sometimes the only thing you can do is cry, and while I'm not a single parent, I have accepted that there are so many things in the world that are going to bring me back to so many dark places, but, for me, I always have a song I can play and cry to and come back to life. Because, I wan't to live the hell out of the time I have left.
There are types of therapy that specifically work with grief (ranging from woo-woo to clinical). I think they are worth looking in to if you are debilitated by grief. Yes, taking time to process tragic/traumatic events is normal, but you should not forfeit the rest of your life to them. Not to be "that guy", but on the more adventurous (and imo more effective) side of things is ayahuasca, kambo, mdma, and/or mushrooms.
My father died when I was 7. It was years of therapy and being an angry child, without the maturity to know where to direct my angry energy. If I didn't have an extremely active, attentive mother, I would no doubt be in a gutter somewhere right now.
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.
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.
It’s been 23 years and my grief is still fresh as if he died last week. I was very young too and I’m realizing these days that I didn’t even have a chance to grieve while consoling my mom and figuring out what I was going to do with my life. I’m glad that I tried to stick with the kind of life how my brother wanted me to live. I loved him so much that the the excitement and joy I had when he visited us is something that I never experienced after he passed away. He is still my beacon even though we had only so little time together. Thanks for sharing this.
"I made pottery and then smashed it. I patiently sat with jigsaw puzzles and coloring books. I went into the forest with a chainsaw, cut down invasive species and set them on fire. I devoted hundreds of hours to punching pads and round-housing bags at the local mixed martial arts gym. I zombie-watched TV shows and absently scrolled the internet."
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.
A few months before covid, a little girl from my kid's school died of cancer. I went to the funeral and felt sadder than ever, despite not knowing the family. It felt so awkward shaking hands with the father at the wake. I was imagining my own kids dying.
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.
Man that's a rough period for you. I've gone through similar, the deaths tend to cluster. My dad was a pretty weird guy but he had some interesting insights, and one of them was "the only real sign that you get older is how often you have to wear black, and then one day they'll be wearing black for you, but don't let it get you down, it is the reason to live as if it really matters". At 9 I didn't really know what to do with that information but now that I'm 57 it rings quite true.
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 lost two of my close cousins, my aunt and my uncle to suicide (one by one, at Christmas each time) when I was a teenager, ~10 years ago.
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’m sorry to hear about your situation. Wisdom is seeking help, and knowing that we need each other for the hardest problems encountered in this precious life.
Hey.
Life is a mistery. And it's a miracle every single millisecond of our life.
If one day we'll discover all the phisyc behind our existance and behind the universe, life will continue to be a question. So don't think about death, because he's only another status of existance. Nothing else.
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 can't imagine the pain it must be to lose a brother. 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.
some great copypasta from reddit way back when. I've sent this to many people to help them deal with grief. The original author is /u/garysully1986 and is still active I believe:
> 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.
