Does anyone handle grief atypically?

[Wayland Woman]

Originally Posted by tijlover

I shed not a tear at my mother's funeral in 2004. I asked my mother before she got liver cancer: Where have you always wanted to travel to, so you can have a happier death?

Hurriedly, we went to Hawaii, Alaska, fall colors in New England, Smokey Mountains, 2 trips to California, and that's all she talked about the last days before she died, the trips she took!

Had she died before we had the opportunites to do all that, I would have cried at her funeral! There were times I almost laughed aloud, given some of the funny things that happened on those trips, like her desperately wanting to go to the bathroom, one time, in Hawaii, where she had to settle for a forest-like setting, and fell back into her pile while trying to clean herself with some leaves!

Crying doesn't always entail grief, pain, it could be tears of guilt, selfishness.

What a great gift you gave your mother before she died!---not just the trips but all the time you spend with her.

When my dad died we knew 7 months in advance. (He had lung cancer that he choose not to have treated.) He felt pretty good in those months and we made it a mission to do as much 'memory building' as we could in that time frame. There was a lot of happiness and love shared and when he finally passed away I had no tears and no regards. I was at peace, knowing that I did my best for him while he was alive.

You're right about tears not always being about grief. When my husband's mother died one of his siblings cried like there was no tomorrow while my husband and I didn't shed a single tear. His mother had been in a nursing home for many years and we went to visit twice a week. The relative that cried her eyes out at the funeral hadn't even visited her mother once in all those years---even though she lived in the same town. I think we had watched his mother decline over the years and grieved in stages while she was still alive. My husband's sibling had to have feeling a lot of guilt for abandoning her mother. She once remarked that she couldn't go visit the nursing home because "she wanted to remember her mother the way she was when she was younger." I think she thought her mother would die in a few weeks but she lasted 7 years and the longer she put off going to visit the harder it became in her mind. At the funeral I think all that guilt of not going caught up with her. Bottom line, you can't judge grief in terms of how many tears a person sheds or doesn't shed.

[tvdxer]

Originally Posted by callmemaybe

When my grandmother died, I didn't cry at all. At least not during the funeral or even months after. I guess I've cried a couple times since, but overall I was deeply surprised --- and disturbed by how little her death grieved me. Especially because I really did love her a lot, she was an amazing person. And I do miss her.

I guess I suffer depression anyways, I think happy people tend to grieve harder because it's more of a diversion from how they normally feel.

A good point you have there.

I didn't really grieve when my grandfather died in 2000, as I was not that close to him (our personalities just didn't mix). I was more affected indirectly through my father, who now had no living parents (although he did have one great-grandfather left!)

...and I didn't cry much when my father died either in 2006. I had a lot of things going on in my life then that took my mind off grieving. I was very close to him and loved him dearly, but was the "strong" one in my family, going to college (it was my first semester then) and graduating. My mom actually ran a business - she had no prior experience running a business - and ran it for just over four years, while very distraught over my dad's death. She feels the stresses of running the business interfered with her ability to grieve.

I guess part of it may be a inborn distinction I make between events that have happened in the past, the present situation, and the future. For me, events that already occurred...occurred. There's nothing you can change about them. For the present, I do invest emotionally in those type of things that can change my present well-being...and for the future, I am often very nervous and anxious that things won't turn out right. I think this distinction is also responsible for the ease with which I forgive and forget. Not saying I'm virtuous or anything - I simply don't invest emotionally much in the past (intellectual interest in it is a whole different thing), and therefore if somebody has wronged me in the past, even gravely, I am perfectly willing to forgive them and do so with ease.

I too suffer from depression and anxiety, although it is much worse now than it was at the time of their deaths, due to my diagnosis with an incurable brain tumor and subsequent thefts, property damage, impoverishment, etc. I sustained. I do agree (perhaps with a bit of envy) that a death of a family member can be much more of a "deviation from normal" for a "happy" person for whom everything seems to go well than a person who is already depressed, and perhaps has had many major traumatic or saddening experiences in their life. I just think of my family business - it's happened more than once that somebody has said the delay of their installation date was the "worst thing that ever happened to them". If you're getting your stuff installed a little bit later than you thought, and that's the worst thing that has ever happened to you, than you must have not been through much else!