The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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