Not grieving

[Komnenos]

I've been pondering something for the last hour or so. I received a phone call to say that a close relative has died in the last few hours and, to be honest, I'm not really sad.

 

I mean, I am a bit sad. I don't feel like going for a beer for anything like that. But at the same time I just don't feel as sad as I expected to feel when I got this news. This feels like a pretty stupid question to ask, but I'll ask it all the same. Is this normal? It's not something I've ever had to particularly deal with before. Perhaps it's because I'm so far away right now and can't actually affect the situation (I'm in Germany, they're in the UK). I'm just a bit confused.

 

Apologies if this is deemed an unsuitable topic or something similar.

[Elastigirl]

Grief is just one of those things that affects people differantly,and people have different reactions. Could be your distance. Also sometimes it just takes a while for it to be reality, especially if you are far away. It may hit you harder when you are home and it feels more like that person is actually gone. 

[insanity]

I've been pondering something for the last hour or so. I received a phone call to say that a close relative has died in the last few hours and, to be honest, I'm not really sad.

 

I mean, I am a bit sad. I don't feel like going for a beer for anything like that. But at the same time I just don't feel as sad as I expected to feel when I got this news. This feels like a pretty stupid question to ask, but I'll ask it all the same. Is this normal? It's not something I've ever had to particularly deal with before. Perhaps it's because I'm so far away right now and can't actually affect the situation (I'm in Germany, they're in the UK). I'm just a bit confused.

 

Apologies if this is deemed an unsuitable topic or something similar.

 

Were they older? I know when as all my grandparents passed there was more of a 'It was their time" feel to it, and it was easy to move forward, but when my younger brother passed, it messed me up pretty bad, even though we knew it was coming.

[wildross]

What the others said.  My Dad died at 52 and I didn't really grieve at the time, as we were not close.  Now that it's been a number of years, I miss him a lot.  I'm in the early stage with my Mom, who died a year ago at 82.

 

Other people, it hits right away.  Neither my dad or my mom were in my life every day at the time of their death.

[Komnenos]

Sorry to be so late, but I just wanted to say thanks for the replies.

[Hong WeiLoh]

I moved through the Stages pretty quickly...but I'm not given to "passive" emotions like sadness -- I got all that out of my system as a teenager (I was the self-destructive "the world hates me boo-hoo" suicidal emo teenager before all that shit became "cool" and "tragically hip" or whatever).

 

Are you a gamer? If you're into Mass Effect, look at Paragon Shepard. No matter what happens, no matter how tragic, you stop and remember, grieve a moment, then get your shit back together and you keep on trucking, keep moving to the next objective, the next step, whatever that may be. If there's someone else depending on you in life, that's who you keep going on for.

Granted, you don't have a galaxy to save, but if you want to save your own world, your personal universe, it's not a bad method.

 

My mother died last October, the day after my birthday. She was the last of my blood family. If I hadn't had my gf, our lil family of cats and wolves (2 and 2, plus an Akita dog), I would not have had anyone else to keep going for, and yes, I likely would have imploded.

Maybe it's circumstance, maybe it's detachment as a coping mechanism, maybe it's something else. Maybe you're just a tough sonofabitch. Who knows? Only you have that answer.