Death and Grief

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How do you handle death and grief?

I only ask because my mum's cousin died on Friday and everyone else was quite upset by it. Naturally, my response when my mum told me Ben was dead was, "well, people die. It happens." And then I made myself lunch and prepped for my Calculus class while she phoned the rest of the family. Honestly, I was far more anxious because I didn't know how to handle my mum more than anything else.

It was the same way when my grandfather died three years ago. Everyone else was crying, and my face was contorted into a weird smirk-thing because I was mostly overwhelmed by the whole thing. (Catholic funerals have gross-smelling incense.)

I have a hard enough time with ritual and tradition as is, but dying seems to be a huge spectacle for everyone but the deceased. I am not likely to participate (except, of course, when the death is my own--and then I don't think I've got much of a choice).

If someone were dying in front of me, I would do my best to perform CPR and/or First Aid as necessary. But if they're already dead, I find it to be a much more effective use of my time and energy to attempt to circumvent any practical issues that might come up with the absence of said person (legal stuff, finding a new babysitter, laundry).

It makes me feel cold and sociopathic.

I grieve for people grieving when someone dies, but that is about it. However, I did cry over my mother's final four months of life being painful and sad, and I cried for my wife while helping her bury her life-sad daddy.

The only time I became emotional over a death was when a guy from my dorm at college died. I think it was more of an overwhelming feeling, or simply a reflection of the sadness around me, because I hardly knew the guy.

I can remember when my father told me his mother died (died of cancer from smoking so it wasn't surprising). I was six and he came outside where I was playing. I simply said ok and continued on. When thinking back I assumed the lack of reaction was due to not being particularly close to her.

My mother's parents moved close to us when I was young and spent a good deal of time with us, and yet when my mom's dad died a few years back, I felt absolutely nothing.

This topic has come up at my work because an ex-coworker was near death and my coworkers were making fun of me for my lack of caring. I was having them feed me condolences to pass on that would sound sincere. They have been asking me if I would be upset if they were to die and then glare at ne when they can see the answer in my face...no.

The only thing death seems to invoke in me is an interest in the process, I love medical topics. So, I share your frustration, I dislike being seen as cold and uncaring.

Hard call.

I generally don't grieve for people I know who are dead, but then again, I rarely get close to anyone.

When my grandmother died (which was expected) I was more stressed by the emotions displayed by everyone else. In an odd way, I'm empathic in that I can "feel" other people's "emotions" in such cases, but it's a stressful experience. It's not what I feel internally, but what I sense from others.

Back in 1995, a friend of mine was killed and since I didn't expect it, at first I felt nothing, but other emotions surfaced over a period of months as I worked through the anger and sense of loss of that person. So I did "grieve" in my own way.

Yeah I don't usually grieve as well.

When I was a kid and heard my grandfather died, I kinda just stood there and thought for awhile because I thought I was SUPPOSED to be sad about it, but I just kept thinking about going back to playing video games.

I even went to my great aunt's viewing a couple years ago, and wasn't sure what I was supposed to do, so I just went through all the motions everyone else was going through. I spent almost the entire time building my own complex fictional afterlife system in my head because someone had handed me a pamphlet and I became curious. Then I just waited to go home so I could get on my computer...

Honestly, I'm not completely sure what grief entails. I've heard over and over that everyone deals with grief differently, that it doesn't always sink in, that it doesn't always feel real, that sometimes it can hit later and sometimes, it just never totally registers. I've always had trouble understanding things that happen outside my presence. I can know, logically, the of course people exist even when I have no contact with them, but the whole concept that there are billions of other people on the planet with their own minds, living out their own lives.. It's kinda baffling. So the concept that somebody is dead, that they're completely gone, it's hard to figure out what exactly it means. And if there is an afterlife, then they're NOT gone. I might not be able to see them again, but if somebody still exists in an afterlife, it's hard to understand how that's different from them existing on the other side of the planet. There are billions of people in the world that I'll never have any communication with, but they're not dead, they're just in various places where I can't contact them. And if death is total nothingness.. well at least then nothing bad is happening.

Sometimes I find that my grief for the living is greater than my grief for the dead.

A good answer is: "I need time to metabolize it". People will think that you are too shocked to show your emotion. Actually I don't dare death. I don't feel anything but for people I loved yes. I still feel a loss thinking about my two dead grandfather (but I lived with both for long period more than my family). But I don't feel particulary upset for death on its own. I feel more pain for the consequence. For istance I'm worried if my mum die for my sister future and for my son and because If I need help I can't ask her and things like that. If I think that my wife or my daughter can die, I'll panic. But I'm pretty sure that other people feel things differently. 5 years ago I know that my grandfather was going to die. I had a lot of thing to ask him or topics to talk about and he was a very good guy so I obviously feel bad about it, but when I was there and saw him strugling with pain I said: "why don't we let him kill himself?". People looked at me like a monster

As was much the same with my grandmother. I think it might relate to routine, that you are in your routine that day, it's where your head and emotions are, and then someone drops the news of someones death and it simply isn't part of your routine so it doesn't register.

If I'm close to the person, then I get emotional, but if I'm not that close, then I don't really have a reaction. Then, there was the time when an uncle died when I was 15, and it didn't hit me until I saw the casket. Last year, a great uncle died who I only saw maybe a handful of times in my life, and I didn't go to the funeral, but did send flowers.

Now, I'm dealing with the shock of knowing someone who died Thursday from the H1N1 virus who was a healthy 29 year old. Another death that actually hit me hard was when a 19 year old I knew in college was killed by his dad who then killed himself.

I recently learned that I may be an aspie (although I haven't been diagnosed). I've been reading books and online information about Asperger's Syndrome, and a lot (though not all) symptoms sound a lot like me. Because my widowed mother is 87 years old, and may not be with us much longer, I've been wondering about what my response will be to her death. I haven't been very close to my mother in the past, because she has always been very critical of me (likely because of my Asperger's traits, which she didn't know I had, because she never heard of Asperger's until about a month ago, when my brother told her I likely have it). I've noticed in the past that when a family member or friend dies, I don't seem to feel grief the way other people do. Mostly, I just feel sympathy for the people who loved the deceased. I do know that the person's spirit lives on, and that I will see them in the next life. But I'm concerned that when my mother passes away, I may seem cold and uncaring, if I don't grieve the way that other family members do. My siblings do know that I'm likely an aspie (so hopefully they'll understand), but other relatives do not. I'm afraid that I'll actually be relieved when she dies, because she misses her deceased husband (who died in 1960) so much, and I do know that she'll be with him again when she dies. Will this be an appropriate way for me to feel and react? Or should I just try my best to "fake" the grief, so relatives will think I'm normal? If any of you have any ideas about this, please comment.

I see faking anything as being less than helpful to/for anyone, and at times even harmful. Just be yourself.

I think you're right. Being myself, not faking grief, seems like the right thing to do. As I think more about it, my mom's funeral should be a celebration of her life of more than 87 years, and a time when we should be happy that she can again be with her husband in the spirit world. It's true that I can't honestly say that she was my "best friend" (as many daughters feel about their mothers). But she tried to be a good mother to me (in spite of my not being the type of daughter she had always dreamed of, probably due to my aspie tendencies). She has touched the lives of so many people, especially since she was a preschool director for many years and taught thousands of children about how to find joy in their lives. But since the preschool wasn't started until I was 17 years old (and the curriculum came from my brother's ideas, not hers), she didn't know how to bring joy into my life when I was a child, and my being an aspie made it even harder for her to know how to meet my needs. I know I need to forgive her in my heart for the difficult times I had as a child (the teasing, the bullying, the social difficulties), which really weren't her fault, but caused by my being born an aspie. I want to be at peace with myself when she dies, happy for the many good things she has done, and mostly just honest about the amount of grief I may or may not feel, so I can just be myself.

I feel frustration for not being able to do something to prevent death from happening or sadnes for not being able to spend more time with that person anymore, and not having had the time to do so before because of the damn job and other stupid things modern society forces you to waste your time on, instead of the things that realy matter. But I don't like going to funerals, I mean, that's a corpse, it's not the person I knew anymore, why should I care? I'd rather remember him/her from the happy times we spent together earlier, not as a decayed vessel laying stiff inside a box.

I used to be freaked out by seeing a corpse in a box, maybe because I'd been to so few funerals during my life, and maybe because it reminded me of those weird horror movies where a dead guy rises out of his coffin.

But, now that I'm older and I've been to more funerals (grandparents, aunts, uncles, mother-in-law, friends), it doesn't bother me anymore. From what people have told me, going to a funeral isn't really about just looking at a corpse, which is just the outer shell from which the person's spirit has departed and gone to the spirit world. I've been told that the real reason we go to viewings and funerals is to express our condolences and sympathy to the people who loved the person who died, and who are grieving their loss. As an aspie, I do have difficulty with empathy, as well as with grieving as neurotypical people do. However, I can feel sympathy for those who are grieving, so I go to funerals to express my love and support to family members of the deceased. Sometimes I have even been to a funeral for a dead person that I never even met (or only knew slightly) because I did know someone in their family very well, and I want to express my condolences to that person. Funerals are not really about the corpse in the box, since that person's spirit is now in a very joyful place. It's really about comforting the living people who are left behind in mortality.

I'm not going to funerals anymore if I don't want to. They are okay, but anymore I am rebelling against anyone expecting me to feel or act anyway that I don't feel. The wakes, to me, are sick. People socializing and gratifying themselves with a dead person lying there. Bizarre.