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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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.
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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 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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