are you required to feel something when someone (once) close to you dies?

this thread is probably a mistake, but i think i need to go away from ilx (and the internet) (and various other asepects of my life) for a while and this is as good an explanation/excuse as any.

ilx: you've enriched, entertained, exhausted, and infuriated me, equally. catch you later, maybe.

? Jess, good luck with w/e...

Good luck, Jess, don't disappear. You know where we're all at, even if it's just a fuckin' email or something.

sorry, Jess.

To answer your question, Jess, no, you are not required to feel anything, especially if the person is no longer close to you. Sometimes it's odd, you'll be sad but there will just be this void and you get more upset that you AREN'T as upset as you should be.

I'm really sorry, dude.

Ally is OTM. I had a childhood ex-girlfriend of mine die a couple of years ago, and I didn't really feel anything at all. It confused me for quite a while.

Grieving can be overrated. If that person didn't mean loads to you, there's no point forcing yourself to grieve.

On the other hand, emotions can take weeks to spill out. You can be down the shops comparing the price of Toilet Duck and BANG you're hit by The Grief Bug.

i'm sorry jess, i hope you find a way to deal with what's happened. i've experienced this and, as sphagnum says, sometimes it takes weeks (or longer) to take it's toll, something small will go wrong and then there's an accumulative outpouring. but i don't know if this process is necessary in way we might generally think. i read a recent article that suggested that kubler-ross's "5 stages" are more comforting pseudo-science than a "healthy" grieving manual that you're required to follow to the letter. death can be processed in ways that don't conform to traditional ideas of mourning, i think. but i don't think you should feel guilty for not feeling immediate grief (easy to say, i know). whatever though, hope you get through this okay.

Mitch is right. Sometimes, in fact, there is no obvious grief process. I think this is more the case as you get older.

When my first grandparents died, I was distraught. By the time my remaining grandmother died, I was much more familiar with death and didn't feel the same level of emotion I had done with the others (even though I was pretty close to her). I felt pretty guilty about this but have since learned, this is quite normal.

A very old aunt of mine who I was extremely close to when I was younger, is pretty close to death. I'll be sad when she dies but I know I won't be grief-stricken.

(i think the (once) is important too, sometimes it's hard to accept how quickly we can become distanced from people that used to be (more) important to us.)

I doubt my story is that much like Jess' really, but this afternoon I'm going to the funeral of my ex-boss who dropped dead at 57 last week of a heartattack (I used to work in a pub he owned/ran = his lifestyle was not at all conducive to longevity). While I worked for him we were pretty close - he was kind of like a substitute father-figure, encouraging me in areas of my life that my real dad didn't even know existed, all my crazed university jaunts and such, drinking, meeting people, being a psychopath, etcetera. Anyway, my girlfriend found out he'd died from her brother (long story), but she didn't tell me straight away because she knew I was driving and didn't want me to do so if I was grieving at all. The long and short of it is that, other than last night when he was in the deaths column of the local paper, I've not really felt anything at all - I'd barely seen the guy in two years and, as much respect and affection as I had for him, he's not actually family or a close close friend or anything. I imagine I'll well up this afternoon when I see his partner and daughter and all the people from the pub, because it will be revisiting a part of my life that I enjoyed but have moved on from. The last funeral I went to, oddly enough, was one of the locals from the pub a couple of years ago - he was my boss' best friend and the closest thing I'd ever had to a grandfather, and that shook me up an awful lot, but it was because I'd seen him (I'd served him loads of fucking gin, as usual = I helped him die, in a way) the morning before he had a heartattack and died.

You're never REQUIRED to feel anything, ever, for anyone. Sometimes you just do, and that's great or not great or whatever. Sometimes you wont feel anything in a situation like this for a while, until something snaps you back to a mental point from a previous part of your life when this person was key. It could be another person, a scent, an image, a song, a place, whatever.

Other than that, everybody here seems to be talking a lot of sense. Keep safe, buddy.

Yes indeed. Attachment weakens over time when there's been some distance created.

xpost

I agree with everything that's been said here. Hope it all goes okay, and come back soon.

I think the key thing here is to not beat yourself up over your emotions. it's something you cannot change, so it would be better for you to just let it go. Best of luck.

my attitudes towards death and mortality have changed a lot since i was young. it's troubling watching my family grow old now that i've known them for so long. when i was a kid, death was just this thing... you're alive, then something happens to you, then you die. i understood it and i was never emotional about it. then again, i only knew my grandfathers as being one age: old. i didn't watch them deteriorate over the decades; i knew 'em for a small handful of years and they never changed until the very end. when you're seven years old in a fairly comfortable, fairly nuclear family, your idea of "impermanence" seldom cuts any deeper than the power going out during the smurfs. shit's different now.

A wise post from JBR there. And there have been many good ones throughout the thread. I can but echo -- stay well, Jess, and take all the time away that you need.

You're not "required" to feel anything when someone (once) close to you dies. But the problem is you probably don't feel at all how you'd EXPECT to feel and that is extremely disorienting.
I went through this seeming lack of affect when my mom died and it was very troubling because we were quite close. Over time feelings of grief, loss and dread totally overtook me and I wound up in therapy. Don't be afraid to seek some counseling if you really do feel like you've gone off the deep end. As corny as it may sound, the traditional "talking cure" can shed a lot of light on this situation. Since this all happened to me, my dad died too and while that wasn't any easier, I did feel better prepared to handle the emotional confusion.
The death of a friend or family member forces us to confront not just our relationship with them but also struggle w/the whole concept of mortality. This is the real rite of passage into adulthood (and one most people don't complete until middle age).
Good luck. I don't know you at all, Jess, but I suspect you will emerge from this crisis stronger and wiser.

Well I had a little cry this afternoon at the funeral, but it was still most intensely odd rather than really sad, as it were. I shall be popping back to the wake again this evening. Death is a weird business.

Just over two years ago, I found out from a college magazine that my best friend while there died suddenly of pneumonia in hospital a few months after our last conversation. We were constantly in touch until about 1999, but in 1995 she came down with a strange ear condition which wiped out the hearing in one of her ears and made it difficult to take long-haul flights from San Francisco. She was also incredibly sad because this was a girl who owned every single 4AD record, that she couldn't really go to gigs because her hearing loss created all sorts of balance issues.

When we'd spoken, she was despondent about her condition and kind of entrenched in a slash-fiction community and we talked every couple of months. Her dad, who once gave me a summer job at the Minneapolis branch of his stock brokerage, had died a few years before, and I wasn't as close to her mom, so when she died nobody from her family got in touch with me, or mine.

It upsets me that I haven't yet managed to find it in myself to contact mutual friends or her mom, who may even be dead because her health wasn't so great either. It upsets me that I have never been able to pin my grief to a place or a thing in a box; I'm the stoic who falls apart at unforeseen funerals.

If things had been different I like to think Ashley would have wound up here. If you lived in SF you might remember a girl, complete Anglophile, who spent her disposable income at Mod Lang (and was friendly with the people who ran it) and could line-quote at least 5000 films, dyed her hair Gillian Anderson red and probably missed her real calling, writing. I also wish that when we last spoke I'd had some sign that she was as happy as I had allowed myself to become, and there really are no words for the loss of her.

Sometimes you don't really know your grandparents at all.

i felt this way about my grandma, but i never really got to know her all that well.

feeling nothing is still feeling something, no? perhaps, you've come to terms and accepted death more than the next person. & after a point, having come to terms with death, is simple and boring. its odd how the mundane mutates it shape sometimes

no.

i felt more upset about my cat dying than my estranged father, who after about twelve years of being completely erased from my life rang from the hospital to arrange a meeting. after seeing me, he said he would keep in touch. he didn't. a couple of months later, he died. it's been a couple of years now, and i still can't say i really care that much. i don't know if that makes me a bad person.

I think that's one of the most poetic thread titles ever.

It took me several days before I felt the death of my Grandfather -- then I was just driving somewhere and boom. I burst into tears.

i'm really sorry jess. be well, ok?