Depressed over friends who passed away

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This is just a rant that I needed to write about. its likely TLDR

In my life I've lost several people-my grandfathers' deaths I understand and accept, but there were others, friends who were young. When I was 13, my best friend was a girl who a few years later was my first girlfriend. Her brother Pat was my mentor/older brother/friend. He was killed in action in Iraq in the first week of the US offensive. In a nutshell, my world kind of collapsed-I had few friends and he was a very important person to me. My world spun, things didnt make sense anymore...I cursed God and spoke out against Him. Pats death hit me hard because my grandfather had lost a large part of his soul during WW2 in Europe. He told me many stories from when he was a young man-when he was at Pearl harbor when the planes started bombing the Navy, the distrust us Japanese-Americans recieved from our fellow Americans, volunteering for service and fighting in Italy/France. His stories of the battles and losing his friends stayed with me even though i didnt realize it at the time I was told his stories. When Pat died, it felt as if I was feeling what my own grandfather must have, though I was not a soldier nor was I present when Pat was killed. I got depressed thinking of my grandfather and Pat that year. It destroyed me. I hated the world for a good year after, then recovered. His death left me psychologically effed-I thought I was over it for years..but apparently I'm not.

After graduating high school , I left to go to school in another state by myself. Through the first year I met many many people and made a myriad of friends. I developed a crush on a girl who I thought was an amazing person- she wasnt particularly attractive or anything ...8 months into our friendship, she developed a freak case of meningitis and was admitted to the hospital. She passed away; her family didnt tell anyone about it for two days. When I found out, I felt the same way as when Pat passed away. My world spun, I angrily threw away a letter I began writing her and my speech I thought of to tell her I liked her. It was Pat all over again- somehow I talked to nobody about her death and was able to finish up the semester of college. The ordeal left me in a low grade depression- enough to function everyday and to come home exhausted and not wanting to do anything.

For two years until last year, I was in love with a girl, Alice, who was one of my closest friends- she lived thousands of miles away in Italy. She didn't reciprocate feelings for me. I was torn up and couldn't keep my emotions in balance even though I knew it couldnt work even if she did. I became very erratic and had angry outbursts (I have Borderline Personality Disorder) on bad days. We remained close friends..at the same time, I had another friend, Ryan...who had been in love with me secretly for a whole year. She also had Borderline Personality-we had bad childhoods, its probably why we clicked so well as friends in the first place. Ryan was in the middle of a lot of stuff- she was going through family issues with her dad and sister, she was stressing over working and paying for college, she had bouts of depression/withdrawing from the world, she thought she was the most hideous girl on earth (I thought she was very pretty). She had spent the entire year as my friend watching me get depressed over another girl who didnt even like me back-someone who was on the other side of the world. i can't imagine how Ryan felt....she was in love with me- I didnt have those feelings for her-instead, I had feelings for someone else far away who didnt recipriacte my feelings. She had outbursts, silent days, normal days...I tried to be there for her and to talk to her as much as I could. When my own depression got bad due to thinking too much about Alice, Ryan got worse too-she was taking in my sadness and it was compunded by the fact that I was in love with someone else who didnt recipricate feelings while she was right there next to me the whole time in love with me, while I didnt feel for her. to most people this situation is plain unfortunate, but for people with borderline PD it can be hell. I knew because I was already in that situation at the time. Ryan didn't tell me much towards the beginning of 2012, we just met up every other day and had fun like normal. I thought things were going fine, that everything was healing with time. I got really busy with work, other friends, travel, and fell in love with ANOTHER girl, now my ex-and I didnt get to see Ryan as much anymore. One day, her mom called me. It came as a surprise because this lady didn't really like me much...she called to ask me if I'd heard from Ryan lately. I hadn't and told her so-Ryan had been really depressed and yelled at her mom over skype the night before. her friends knew about her Borderline PD and her issues with depression so they went to her apartment to check on her. Ryan had killed herself. She slit her wrists and they found her on her bed - the part that has stuck with me and has been haunting me is that among the emails/facebook chats that were open on her computer history included several of her friends, myself and her ex boyfriend. I didn't say anything to make her mad or sad...but I have always felt that her feeling the way she did about me had a lot to do with how depressed she was. It's not my fault-yet in a literal sense, I am somewhat a contributor. It wont leave my head, its been crushing me.

All in all, I have my issues with money, women, working on the grind to save money for school and general life issues that everyone expereinces-but people who have passed on have left unresolved issues with me out of my own inability to process their deaths. I get stressed and a little depressed when life throws me a small issue, but then I compound it by thinking about it too much - it leads my mind back to the loved ones that used to be in my life. Every once in a while they will appear to me in my dreams to console me over things I go through..but their consolations leave me happy for only while I'm dreaming. Once I awake, I realize they are no longer here and I end up very down the next day. I won't talk to people unless they are makijng a serious effort to talk to me..I will do things like skip going to the gym and either OVER eat or not eat anything at all. I feel like my mind is seriously spinning out of control as the years go by...at the same time, my mind is becoming stronger as time goes by...but I'm hoping that is just how life goes. I'm thinking of seeing a therapist again (havnt seen one in two years) to help me out.

What are some ways to accept deaths? I'm very stubborn and I feel very powerless-I'm having a hard time accepting those things happening. When lifes going great, I honor them in my mind and have no problems with it. It doesnt hamper my days. When life gets tougher its like I never got over their deaths at all.

congrats if you made it all the way down here.

Dear tangomike,

Let me start by saying that I am so, so sorry for your losses. I'm someone who doesn't have much experience with losing a loved one at this point in my life; the only deaths I've experienced so far were my maternal grandmother's and paternal grandfather's, and I wasn't close to them at all, so I don't know if anything I say will be of much consolation to you. But it sounds like you have been so busy going through the motions of life that you haven't given yourself enough time to grieve and process the deaths of your loved ones. My advice would be to relax and give yourself permission to experience whatever emotions you need to experience. Maybe it would be beneficial to keep a journal to help you get in touch with your feelings. I would definitely encourage you to get back into therapy as well.

Hope this helps.

When I was in graduate school the first time, about ten years ago, six people I knew died.
It happened in sets of threes - the first three within one month, the next three about a year later and again within one month, when I was still grieving the first three.

Some were family, some were friends - I'd known all of them for at least 12 years, if not all my life. Only two were natural deaths - the other four were not - suicide, accidents, aneurysm.

It was devastating.
I spent xmas break existing on four things: m&m's, coffee, cigarettes, and prozac.
( I wouldn't recommend it - it's a pretty crappy diet)
I stared at the wall for hours.
I played the same movie for days.
I was devastated.
I felt cursed.

I left school.
gave away about 80% of my everything.
moved back to my home state after years of being gone.

Slowly but surely my life found a little equilibrium.
Then it found a little more.
Then more.

It took a while, but I finally found my balance again.
Believe it or not, taking vitamins regularly helped a lot.
I wouldn't say everything went back to normal because so much had changed:
I had definitely changed - in the short-term for the worst, but in the long-term for the better.
Time was the best healer.
I still grieve from time to time, but I don't wallow in it.
It's natural to think about people who are dead and be a little sad,
just so long as it doesn't become a hobby and take over your life.
I've gone back to graduate school.
I'm happy.

I don't believe in God, so there was no help there.
I am a spiritual person, though, so that did help.
I analyze everything, so I analyzed this over and over and over.
I don't have any real answers, but I am stronger because of it.
I believe things happen for a reason and we don't always get to know what that reason is.

Now I encourage people to talk about death before it happens, when everything's in "normal" mode, because when death happens (and death will always happen), it's too late to talk about it, emotions are raw and thinking processes are all mixed -up.

It can get better, but you have to let it.
Everybody negotiates death differently.
I have no idea how to explain acceptance of death.
I know that watching "Six Feet Under" helped me. And reading about death, even Terry Pratchett's "Reaper Man." I think people throughout time have tried to find ways to accept death, so they write about it and make movies and tv programs. Some of these can be wonderful tools to help us to think about death differently, and to see different perspectives.


I hope this helps, if only just a little, just to know that someone else can understand the raw aching pain that comes with such grief, to understand the empty feeling.

_________________
Diagnosed with High Functioning Autism well into adulthood.
It's never too late to get a diagnosis.
Hell, I thought I was just weird.

i can (obviously) come off as really abrupt and my tone can sound sharpish, so feel free to ask me to clarify