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Wellness Wednesday for November 1, 2023

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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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 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.