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One of my Wife's best friends passed away this last weekend, she was 8 months pregnant, her baby boy was lost as well. She had a 3 year old daughter and husband that survived her. It originally sounded like it might have been a pregnancy complication, but some news stories I found through sleuthing suggest it was a fatal car crash.
It has been rough on my Wife processing it all. She cried the whole night when she found out. And since then I've found her sobbing in the middle of the day as some errant thought or piece of news reminds her of it all.
I knew the woman that passed away. Hung out with her a dozen times. She was in our wedding party. We went to her wedding. She was nice, a bit of a boring conversation partner, but a good friend to my wife.
I feel ... almost nothing. The only time I shed tears was when I had some particularly vivid imagery of this scenario occurring to me. Selfish tears. I do feel a little sad for my wife going through this all, but that is the extent of my emotion.
When my grandfather passed away a month or two ago, I also felt very little, I thought it was cuz his death wasn't very tragic (he was 90 and lived a very long happy life).
Is this normal? I've noticed plenty of guys around me can also be a bit unbothered by death, while most women seem to be physically pained when hearing the circumstances.
I've been hit with different levels of grief depending on how close to the person I was. Also, the manner of their death.
I had a close friend take his own life when we were both around the age of 30. That hit me pretty hard, possibly because it was the first time I was confronted with death and I was the one who found his body.
After that, death hasn't really affected me as much, even for immediate family members.
So yeah, its horses for courses. I find the best thing is to show reverence for the deceased, even if you don't really care. Besides being socially appropriate, it can help others through their grief.
This is generally what I do, I've just been doing it for so long, and people around me do it too, that I'm not really sure how anyone really feels. Which is why I asked here.
There's been a few situations after a death, where I've been having a quiet drink with someone I trust who doesn't seem to be grieving. I'd say something like 'you know, this hasn't really hit me much. How about you?'. I've had replies like 'Yeah, I'm not sad really at all'. Or 'Yeah it sucks, but they had a good life so I'm not really upset about it to be honest.'
You just need to be careful about how you probe people about this kind of thing, but you can get some really honest replies from people that ground the whole experience. For people who haven't experienced deaths of people in their lives it can seem like this really big thing that you need to walk on eggshells around, but after a few deaths you realise that its just another life event like a wedding, or a birth. At least if it wasn't something really tragic like suicide, murder, or the death of a child.
I don't really expect death to hit me hard any more unless its my wife or child.
I feel a bit the same. My parents and siblings would probably hit me hard, as well as a few close friends and neighbors.
Surprisingly SSCReader went through that and seems like they came out ... not great, but not ruined either.
I guess people get through stuff.
I've dealt with clinical depression most of my life, and the weirdest thing to explain to other people is that it seems worse when I should be happy. Its when something terrible happens that it almost fits better.
Yeah, I've been through periods of acute depression in my life. I can see how you would have people around in the depths of grief, but for you it was Tuesday.
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I've never been made particularly upset by any of the people I've known who died, but I wasn't very close to any of them. I'd probably feel differently if it were an immediate family member or close friend, but I can't imagine sobbing all night over it. I doubt I would cry at all. I think some people are just much more emotional than others. It's hard for me to imagine what could happen that would make me cry for more than a few minutes. I just can't imagine being that sad or having that reaction to being very sad. But I know people who cry at movies or when people they never even met died.
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Men are largely far more stoic than women, it's a stereotype because it's true.
I pride myself on being quite stoic myself, not that the thought of my family or my dogs passing away doesn't fill me with premature grief. Well, at least it helps me make the most of our time together, until we can finally banish aging and death to the same hell as smallpox.
Much like you, if it's a person I'm not particularly familiar with, it doesn't bother me all that much, and that's a good thing, a surfeit of empathy is a liability for doctors, and we usually learn to compartmentalize pretty quick.
I've only cried once for a "patient", I had never met the man before, and he was already dead and cooling by the time I discovered him on my morning ward round, left to slowly decay on a floor with the flies and cockroaches. It was only the wailing of his daughter when I broke the news that made me cry, and I was fundamentally unsupported by anyone, including my colleagues or seniors, and while that rankled at the time, I've never cried for a patient since, even if I've pitied many.
Death is terrible, but since my day job is preventing it as long as possible, I can't say I'm not helping, and weeping and wailing doesn't by itself. At least nobody I really love has passed away since my grandma two decades back, and even then I was too young to really process things. I think I'm going to breakdown if my elderly German Shepherd passes, as much as I don't give a shit about the rights of animals, dogs have a soft spot in my heart, especially my own.
Medicine in America seems to work a little differently; when tough shit goes down people are at least a little supportive. This goes
doubletriplequadruple on the pediatric oncology unit.I think it would have been different if I was a girl, not that I can tell for sure! Then again, that would have made my life hell if I was one under the sadistic female gyne postgrad trainees lol. Couldn't find a bigger assortment of bitches at the Kennel Club..
At any rate, I'm only slightly bitter about it, they told me to toughen up, and toughen up I did. Not to mention I was responsible for a COVID ICU during the height of the pandemic here, watching people die slow painful deaths is only troubling in passing unless it's someone I love.
Tears are no substitute for normal saline.
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I've always been somewhat stoic (I've been called a soulless automaton and an emotionless sociopath at different times by different people), but I think this would be normal for me as well. The only times I have ever cried as an adult that I can recall was losing my infant son, and losing my wife (at different times, just to be clear). One was sudden and unexpected, the other was after a long slow battle with cancer. An acquaintance is unlikely to get more than a passing feeling of sadness. Though of course my wife's feelings would be more of what I would focus on helping with in your case.
Having said that, while both of those losses made me heartbroken, it didn't particularly last, I never fell into a depression. I don't think I have ever been depressed, no matter how bad things get. You have to move on, no matter how bad things were, things will get better. And I did find my (innate?) optimism did get some odd reactions from people who expected me to be depressed for months or more perhaps. I cried on and off for maybe a day or two, then very sporadically when something reminded me of the loss for another few weeks. In both cases though I was supporting other people, my wife or my other kids as well as dealing with all the practicalities, so there was a limit to how much falling apart I could allow myself.
I do have very distinct memories, of thinking to myself, ok, time to put a lid on this, it hurts, but there is nothing to be done except to deal with what needs to be dealt with and get through it.
Friends don't understand how man not depressed
I'm kind of the same though. I don't I'm think I'm really capable of depression, at least not in the way some people around me are.
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This sounds normal to me. What upsets me viscerally is somewhat unpredictable, but the best predictor does seem to be the "selfish tears" aspect that you describe above. When I think about the incident you describe, I have the strongest sense of empathy for the husband, alone without his partner and grieving, trying to raise his child with the memory of his wife. In that, I see that what really upsets me is considering the possibility of losing my own wife. This is obviously a failure of empathy towards other people related to the story, but it ultimately is my sincere reaction.
I recently went back to listen to MartyrMade's Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem to refresh myself on his perspective of the history of the conflict in the Levant. The opening is a dramatic telling of a pogrom from the perspective of a husband trying to shield his family from the situation, with the common refrain, "what would you do?". I find the whole thing pretty harrowing, and I think it's precisely because bringing this scene to life from the perspective of the man of the house makes it much more vivid for me than viewed from any other angle.
When it comes to the death of people whose time had come from old age, I generally lack any sense of grief, even for people that I care deeply about. When an octogenarian dies, it just isn't sad to me. I think of the good times I had with them, of their accomplishments and contribution to the world, and I want to celebrate what was bright about them, but I don't feel grief. I suspect that this difference from others contributed to my confusion at why other people cared about Covid so much more than I did.
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