Current Events > Is it healthy to still feel grief over someone's death even a decade later?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Such as say you're just minding your own business and it suddenly hits you that person isn't there anymore all over again and you could cry your entire life and you will never see them ever again.Is that normal? The feelings that day, the sight of their dead body , the anger they died like this, the complete unfairness of it.
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PTSD dude. Some people will never "get over it" and it will affect them their entire life.
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doesnt mean its ptsd, if you always miss someone its a good thing.
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probably not good. it's okay to miss someone, but 10 years later you shouldn't necessarily still be grieving. might want to consider like counseling or something.
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Being sad and missing them is normal.

But grieving and the thought of them making you cry after a decade? I dunno. Maybe if the death was really unexpected and traumatic.
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Yeh seems like it was pretty traumatic, that's prob why.

Darmik posted...

Being sad and missing them is normal.

But grieving and the thought of them making you cry after a decade? I dunno. Maybe if the death was really unexpected and traumatic.

12 years ago, mom is up, shes moving she's talking, she has tubes through her body and she's smiling, I think she might okay, then a few minutes after leaving the room a hear a code blue and see doctors running towards the direction I came from, all of a sudden my aunt is hurrying me back towards mom's room, the code blue was her, there's a priest there, there's the rest of my family in a circle around her and we're all holding hands, I can't hear, I can't understand, My mind shuts down, my both moves by pure insntic as I'm directed to kiss my mom on the forehead and hear the life machine drop and flatline, She's gone and all I can think about is how badly I wish that was me instead of her, how badly I wish I could have thrown myself out of the hospital window then and there.

Fast forward to last year, my grandma is barely alive, I see her in the hospital, her eyes move but she doesn't respond, her hands are cold, her body barely alive and I can't even utter any reassuring lies to myself that she can hear my words of encouragement and reassurance, Go home, find out she passed the very next day, don't see her again until the wake, flip out and excuse myself to a secluded hallway and scream into a chair because even like this I was still sound of mind enough to not lose it when everyone else in the building are giving their dead as well.

It's pathetic, isn't it? To cry,scream and be as undignified as possible,even in private, despite knowing the rules of the game, "We all die", "This is where everyone ends up, no exceptions." Even reassuring messages like "If they were here they'd surely tell you to go forward you have to keep moving on" can feel like daggers to the heart when I think about it, again.
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Yeah that's a bit different. Another traumatic experience brought back feelings of an old one.

My Mum died a couple of years ago and I'm dreading seeing other people go through the same thing. My father-in-law has been in the hospital a lot lately and I'm still feeling the trauma of what I went through a couple of years ago.

Death is fucked up. There is no good way to go. Sorry you're going through this.
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When it comes to grief, there are no rules; we just learn to cope with it better every day.
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It largely depends on your relationship to them and how they died. Under normal circumstances a death shouldn't inflict that much trauma unless it was your child or spouse. Suicides, murders, and painful deaths (as in the deceased died in pain) are more complicated, and from the tone of your post it sounds like a "complicated" death. But grief is an ongoing process, and everyone moves through it at their own pace. The stages of mourning aren't even a linear path from anger to denial to depression to acceptance - mourners often shift between stages chaotically.

It sounds like some counseling may be helpful, or even a support group if counseling is unpalatable or the cost burdensome. Ultimately, it may be something you'll need to cope with indefinitely, and I empathize with you there. Best of luck, man.
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tremain07 posted...

It's pathetic, isn't it? To cry,scream and be as undignified as possible,even in private

No, that's not pathetic at all. I screamed into my empty house every day for weeks, begging my husband to come home after he died. We do what we gotta do to let out all that pain and loss.
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I don't believe grief should ever go away 100%.
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I'd say it's normal if you cared about them. Everyone grieves differently.
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I went to a local high school to pick up my nephew from a summer course. While walking through the halls I found a big digital yearbook tv screen. I didn't grow up here but I knew a teacher I was very fond of did (he committed suicide on the second last day of school when I was in grade 11). I searched a few years and eventually found him and that whole wave of grief from 12 years ago came rushing back. I was staring at a picture of a smiling 18 year old that barely had a decade of life left on this earth.

It really affected me for a few days after that... the sad feeling of knowing he was still gone, and wishing I could go back to the day it happened and stop him.
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I'm just make sure to keep my mind busy so it doesn't get the chance to return to these thoughts. Thankfully I'm pretty stupid and tend to over think and worry about pointless stuff so I'll have plenty of distractions tomorrow. Talking about this kinda felt good,thank you, posters and good luke in your own grief.
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