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I agree. Don't make up things to be grieving about. It will find you out soon enough. If you have reasons to be happy, enjoy what you do have. Some people may have mental conditions that may prevent them from enjoying what is good in their life, but I strongly feel that is in a different category than grief.
The loss from death of a person with whom one has a deep, strong bond is entirely in a category of its own; I also have a strong feeling that I will confide on here but would not share with someone who has lost another in this way, that an unexpected loss is different from an expected loss. Only those who have experienced it can know what it is like; and I would not wish it on my worst enemy.
Your statement (bolded) really infuriates me. Nothing is "made up."
My grieving does not invalidate your grieving.
Your minimizing my grieving is not cool.
Please ignore my thread. It is not about grieving the loss of a loved one by death, but it IS about grieving the loss of loved ones and other things. Thank you.
I have a beautiful 42 year old daughter. She is brilliant, creative, sensitive, caring and successful. She is also paranoid bi-polar. During the years when youngest son was his most ill I did not leave his side. During this time, in a phone call to my mother I threatened to spill our families' grossly monstrous secrets because my daughter was pregnant and I wanted to make sure they were protected.[ I had also started writing about my family to an online Autistic group, because I had discovered that there were many Autistic people who had been horrendously tortured as children. I wanted others to know they were not alone]
My truly evil family filled her mind with terrible lies. She actually believes I am literally, a demon. For so many years I have tried to reestablish a relationship with her. I have finally come to the realization it's not going to happen.
So, just recently I bought a bench mold with the words " When someone you love becomes a memory, that memory becomes a treasure." I painted pictures of her on it, and pictures of sunflowers, roses, purple iris, her favorite dogs and other things that were [maybe still are. I do not know. it has been so many years] special to her.
I put it in a private space on our property. I visit and cry and grieve every day.
My first husband died, my mom and dad, so many friends. My grieving for my precious living daughter exceeds the others combined by a hundred times [at least]
Actually finally going through the grieving process has helped.
By the way, I was a very loving mother, no drugs or alcohol, no hitting, no name calling. She used to tell me that I was the most wonderful mother in the world. [until my family convinced her I am a demon]
I have a beautiful 42 year old daughter. She is brilliant, creative, sensitive, caring and successful. She is also paranoid bi-polar. During the years when youngest son was his most ill I did not leave his side. During this time, in a phone call to my mother I threatened to spill our families' grossly monstrous secrets because my daughter was pregnant and I wanted to make sure they were protected.[ I had also started writing about my family to an online Autistic group, because I had discovered that there were many Autistic people who had been horrendously tortured as children. I wanted others to know they were not alone]
My truly evil family filled her mind with terrible lies. She actually believes I am literally, a demon. For so many years I have tried to reestablish a relationship with her. I have finally come to the realization it's not going to happen.
So, just recently I bought a bench mold with the words " When someone you love becomes a memory, that memory becomes a treasure." I painted pictures of her on it, and pictures of sunflowers, roses, purple iris, her favorite dogs and other things that were [maybe still are. I do not know. it has been so many years] special to her.
I put it in a private space on our property. I visit and cry and grieve every day.
My first husband died, my mom and dad, so many friends. My grieving for my precious living daughter exceeds the others combined by a hundred times [at least]
Actually finally going through the grieving process has helped.
By the way, I was a very loving mother, no drugs or alcohol, no hitting, no name calling. She used to tell me that I was the most wonderful mother in the world. [until my family convinced her I am a demon]
This is what I'm referring to . . . I am so sorry. I am imagining creating beauty and having a place to express your sadness must be bittersweet. It's a beautiful testament to your love for her.
Is that a biblical quote? I had never heard it. It makes a lot of sense. I am so sorry for your losses. I had not read that your brother had passed, as well.
Yes, that's a biblical quote.
Matthew 6:34:
Quote:
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Thanks for your condolences. It's been a terrible few years for me emotionally but 2020 really takes the cake.
Since 2014, my husband and I lost, in this order - His father, his mother, my father, my mother, and then my brother, one right after the other. That was through 2019. Then I lost my darling husband in 2020. I am really sick of all of this. Six deaths of immediate family members in six years. It's been horrible.
I am really working though at not letting all this change me in negative ways. I'm trying to hold on to joy. I am naturally a joyful person but I have to admit that this is really wearing me down.
So what I am grieving is I have many family members who I have "difficult" relationships with - some people have substance abuse issues, some are avoidant (so you can't work through anything), some are not self-aware (again, no space to work through things).
And I realized that many of these people don't REALLY give two ****s about me - so in that case, I am mourning what I thought was a loving family - squaring it with the reality.
I try to keep upbeat, but I always wanted a supportive family and I have never had that. It is time I come to terms with that, and in doing so, there is grieving for relationships I might never have.
I have done a lot of inner work and most everyone in my family has not. I don't judge them but I do note that their lack of interest in WHY they do things or more importantly to me - why they are unable to work through garden variety disagreements - and get to the other side - I have to grieve that. Every petty annoyance becomes a big deal because NOTHING IS EVER RESOLVED. I am the type of person who likes to work things out - and "they" (some family members) prefer to sweep stuff under the carpet.
That's the basic gist of it. There are lots of nuances.
The bottom line is that I really have no family - and that is something to mourn.
I do have my children, one of which (out of four) has removed herself totally from my life, along with her four children. So I do understand grieving for a loss that isn't death.
Of my immediate family members (other than my kids, who are all in their 20s and 30s and scattered across the globe), I have my youngest brother, who is seriously mentally ill, left. I also have a brother in law and his wife, my sister in law. And I have my brother's wife, even though he's dead. So I'm related to only my brother by blood, the others are by marriage.
I went to some grief counseling to get past losing both parents and when my daughter was beginning to wig out and my brother had pancreatic cancer stage 4 so I knew he was probably going to die soon (which he did). It was helpful. Basically I just wanted to be sure I was responding to all this loss in a healthy way, which I basically was but it needed a bit of tweaking.
One very basic thing that the counselor asked me to do, and which I did, was this: She told me to go around my house with something like a laundry basket, and take down every single thing that made me feel sad and put up something in it's place that made me feel happy. She said, "You don't have to throw any of it away, just put it away." I did that, and filled up the entire basket with mementos from various family members that did not make me feel happy, but made me feel sad instead. And then in their places, I put photos or little doodads that made me feel happy instead. AND IT WORKED. One thing I remember doing specifically is that I had one credenza that had a lot of family photos on it, including photos of many people who were deceased or otherwise gone from my life (my daughter and her family). I took all those photos out of the frames and replaced them with photos of my husband and me on vacation together or just doing fun stuff together.
My husband died six weeks ago, and I haven't replaced those photos. Not sure if I will. They don't make me feel sad, they make me smile. If that changes, I'll put them away.
I did have to almost immediately get rid of things like his suitcase, which always made me feel like he was home (it was the one he carried on overnight trips and if it was in his closet, he was home and if it wasn't, he was gone - I didn't want to walk into our closet and see it). I also got rid of most of his clothes and shoes, only keeping the items that meant something special to me, and I put those where I don't normally see them. Just last night, I opened the top drawer by his sink in the bathroom and realized that all his usual toiletries were still in there - his brush (with a few strands of his hair in it), his toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, etc. I cleaned out that drawer. I cleaned out his nightstand drawer. I gave my brother his grill because I will never use it and it just made me sad to see it sitting there when he loved grilling so much. I guess what I need to get rid of is things that make me feel like he's going to just come right back home and start living here and using those things again. That's not happening and every time I see something like that it is like it stabs my heart.
I also cleaned his coats and jackets out of the coat closet.
He loved jackets. I was thinking as I bagged them up to donate them "He better be dead because if he comes home and all this stuff is gone, he's going to be really mad at me."
When one is suffering from a long term terminal illness, anticipatory grief rules the day. The closer to end of life, the more you feel its effects. This is a very damaging and difficult type of grief over the long term.
There are other types of grief, they feel differently from a physical death of a loved one, IMO.
KathrynA- I suspect there are people who live best with the departed persons personal items surrounding them, or staying in the same home after a loss. They feel comfort from that. Others, find it much too painful to face the day in that situation and need to find healing in new surroundings.
I am grieving a person who is not dead but should have been.
My sister is eight years younger than I am (65). We were best friends; traveled together, spoke every day, shared same twisted sense of humor. She lives in NY and I am in OR. Every year I visited her for a few weeks and we had fun. Our future was tied together. We were going to sit in rocking chairs on the front porch while drinking wine and having fun.
Last year she was in a dreadful accident. She fell down the stairs in her house and wasn't discovered until almost a day later. Her brain was damaged and her lung had collapsed so her brain was oxygen deprived. She spent one month in a coma.
As of now she is in a nursing home and will be for the rest of her life. She can't walk or do anything for herself. She can chat and converse with a raspy voice (damaged vocal cords) and laugh at a joke but then will talk about "going shopping yesterday", "had dinner with Mom last night", "have to pick up my cats at Dad's house (Dad has been dead for 30 years", etc.
For all intents and purposes my sister is gone. We have a once-a-week FaceTime but there will be no future together as we get old. As it stands now, I can't even get to NY to visit her because of the Virus. Our weekly chats leave me feeling heartbroken. The person I speak with is not my sister. That person is no more. And yet... there she is....
I grieved the loss of my grandmother before she died. And I grieved for the losses my mother suffered as she progressed through dementia. It was a grievous loss when we could no longer have real conversations over the phone. She died after suffering numerous mental and physical losses. I felt relief for her when she passed. Much of my grieving had been done in the previous few years.
My dad died more unexpectedly. He lingered, then died. But I was not prepared, and I remember grieving after his death. His death hit me hard. I had no idea, until he got sick, that he was in poor health.
Yes. Being shunned and being scapegoated are things to come to terms with - VERY difficult.
If you consider yourself a "good" person who tries to live with integrity, realizing that others don't necessarily do that is a hard truth to reckon with (or has been for me).
Shunning is the most painful thing - just horrible.
I am glad you got through it!
I would love to hear more if you care to share.
It's a standard religious shunning. I belong to online support for exJWs and it happens a lot. Only my mom is in but most people lose their entire family and friends. The weird part is I left in 1987 and she waited until 2014 to shun me over leaving. I was never disfellowshipped so technically family doesn't shun inactives. I think they upped the shunning rules because they got some other people who had been out for decades.
Oddly enough, it was probably the best thing she has ever done for me. I had so much denial over my upbringing and the shunning caused it to come crashing down and I was forced to work through it. She is a very sick woman so it's good I'm out of her orbit. I would never have been able to do that to her. She doesn't consider other people's feelings when doing things. She shunned her own parents the last six years of their life because she was pissed off at her siblings and didn't want to deal with them. Not even a phone call to explain it to them. When I would go see my grandma she'd ask about my mom.
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