Grieving and confused

Debate Room
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Question will follow…It is only 5 weeks since I lost my little boy to many medical complications. Once a week I post my memories or dreams of my greatest love. I mention that I don’t mind dreams that remind me to celebrate his life.

An ex colleague has told me that I am stuck in my ego and that I am allowing my emotions to take control of me and that this will destroy me. She has said that I will be in a depression for 1 to 3 years. She said that I may never be able to understand her and that I might be stuck in my ego forever. In fact she pretty much concluded that is what will happen to me unless I cut off my emotions right away.

I was angry to say the least held it back when responding. I can go on and on about the rubbish she brought up about my past as if they are somehow connected, like when I was banished from certain family members. She started saying that I have mental issues and that i am bi polar which I am not diagnosed with. I have last seen her about 15 years ago but once a year we keep in touch. It has never been on this level as it was yesterday.

She says every time I write about him I am just making matters worse.

She left me puzzled, confused, angry.

Is my grief still normal after 5 weeks? I can’t imagine stopping the feelings or memories.
Should I tell her to F off and get out of my life?

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5 weeks? After losing a child?

FFS. It will take a minimum of two YEARS too realise that the sudden memories and upwelling of grief are subsiding in frequency and intensity. live through, talk to your friends about your feelings, try and focus on the best memories.

If you feel like crying, just cry, dammit. There is nothing “manly” or “brave” about denying the feelings you have for your son.

Dammit, now I am crying with you.

Heads up champ. Many of us here are with you.

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Oh my dear chap

Your ex colleague is a fuckwit with the empathy of a house plant.

You have suffered perhaps the greatest loss one can suffer. Please, do not let anyone tell you how you ‘should’ feel or for how long . It can take years to come to term with such crushing grief. It will never go away completely, but you will learn to live with it and you will enjoy life again.

Same fuckwit? . So fucking what? At 73, the best I can claim is that I have come to know some people ‘quite well’ . Have never insisted any other person has an obligation to understand me. No such obligation exist as far as I’m aware.

I’m out of my depth here. Mate, grieve as long as you need to. I feel for you.

Vent all you like here

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Holy FUCK!!! Jesus fuckin’Christ… OMG :flushed: I imagine I’d still be curled up in a ball on the bed, and if out of it, moving through my day like a fucking zombie.

Don’t you dare stop feeling. You’ll work through all the emotions and eventually get to where it’s an occurrence that hits you like an sledgehammer.

AND bi-polar??? Who the fuck is she to diagnose anyone!!! And ego??? Hahahaha - ego is fucking awesome :sunglasses: - only new age “enlightened” asses want to rid themselves of it.

Your grief is normal to you and how you process it. No one “should” tell you anything about how you feel about this experience - nor “where or what stage” or whatever dipshit “advice” they want to heap on you.

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3 1/2 years ago, our son and his wife were expecting their 3rd daughter, Piper. They knew it was another girl so they just started calling her by her name. What happened the doctors aren’t really sure why, but at 8 1/2 months pregnant, our daughter-in-law realized that she hadn’t felt her moving for several hours. She called the DR. and he said to go straight to the hospital and tests revealed that she had died in the womb. As if this isn’t cruel enough, they gave our son’s wife some hormones and she had to give “birth” to their still-born little girl.

Needless to say, our entire family was shocked. The DRS. don’t know why, but Piper’s heart just stopped beating. Our grief and anguish(my wife and I) is nothing compared to what our son and daughter-in-law went through. How do you explain to your 10 year old and 6 year old daughters that their sister Piper never even got a chance to live, and that all of their preparation to welcome their baby sister was for nothing.

Now, 3+ years later, it’s still a topic that my wife and I would like to bring up just to find out how they are all doing, but we don’t dare. I’m still incredibly angry, so I really can’t imagine what our son and his family have been through.

Don’t let anyone else tell you how to grieve. Unless the same thing happened to them, they have no right or reason to say a single word to you on this subject. I know that I will never be the same, it feels like a part of my heart died with her. We don’t grieve the loss of our loved ones so we can forget about them, we grieve so we can learn to live without them and still remember them.

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I’ve read that in the past (and still where there isn’t modern medicine) some communities didn’t name their children until they had survived a few years after birth; to (presumably) reduce the trauma suffered by families in these kinds of situations.

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One of the saddest experiences I had growing up was I never got to speak or ask about my Uncle Stanley.

He was my dad’s brother. Died in a car accident at age 19 when my dad was 12.

It was like he had never existed on my dad’s side of the family. No pictures. No stories. I only know the story of his death.

What is sad, is the memory was not passed along. He did not get an opportunity to “be” in any sense through family memory. Perhaps the thought of him was too painful? I don’t know, and can’t judge- I just know that at my current age, I still wish (to some small degree) that I could have heard his family remember him…mention him.

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I think that giving her her name before she was born and referring to her by it actually made it worse. I still have a hole in my heart for her, so I got a memorial tattoo of her foot-prints and her “birthday” on my chest.

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First of all, sorry for your loss. That is about all anyone can really say. You are certainly welcome to continue sharing and you will find plenty willing to listen.

Next, It is no one’s fucking business how long it takes you to finish the grieving process. Tell them to fuck the hell off.

Next, when the How in the fuck do you get “stuck in an ego?” Your friend is an idiot who probably read one too many psychology books and ended up believing in the magical story of psychoanalysis and the blocking of information from the unconscious to the conscious. If you spent 8 to 10 years in psychoanalysis, the average term for clients, you would be all better by then. Tell your friend to stop using words he does not understand.

Cut your emotions? What a dipfuck stupidshit dumbass thing to say. You never cut your emotions. That is the stupid, turdshit comment of the year. What you do is learn to live with your emotions. Any asshole that can not sit quietly and recall a lost friend to memory and not feel the loss, genuinely feel the loss, is probably not a friend worth having. With that said…

What has happened has happened. There is nothing you can do under the sky that is going to change it. NOTHING So, what purpose is your grief serving? You ‘ARE’ grieving for a reason. Not just the lost of your little boy. Not just the loss of your future dreams. Not just the fact that the world is a cruel place. Not just the fact that you are now being confronted with mortality. Yet all of this and possibly more; What does the death mean to you? Have you made sense of it yet? Is it okay to never make sense of it? Regardless, grieving is not an option. HOW YOU GRIEVE is.

You can choose how and when you grieve. You can choose to get on with your life. You can recognize that there is a past and there will be a future. The future starts now. The future is not forward without, but forward with the memory and emotion. It is a load you carry. You do not put the load down. Your legs get stronger, your back gets stronger, you become a more worldly person, a deeper person, a person more in touch with life, death, and the tragedy of the world around you. By doing so… you really learn to appreciate the amazing moments of pure joy and happiness that fall upon us and lighten our load and just how amazing those moments of joy really are.

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I’m leaning in that direction, she’s definitely talking through her arse.

Only you can decide how long you need to grieve over a loss this traumatic.

Tell her she’s woefully wrong, and that her insensitive opinions are adding to your grief. If she doesn’t wind her neck in after that, then consider telling her to fuck off.

Seriously the loss a child will take a long time to come to terms with, and only you can decide how you feel about that.

Take as long as you need, and no one else’s opinion matters, unless you feel you need help with this at some point. In which case you get to decide whose opinion you listen to.

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I want to slap you upside the head now and call you an idiot. It did not make it worse. It made it better. Don’t you fucking remember. Don’t you remember the joy you felt picking the name. You fucktard. you are blending the two memories. You are blaming the good for the bad. Knock that the fuck off. You have so many good memories. So many fantastic hopes and dreams. So many experiences that showed you who you were as a person. And now you want to blame all that amazing shit for the way you feel now? Go fuck yourself. Those memories, just like these, are now a part of you. They tell you who you are as a person. They show you exactly who you are. They they showed you who you want to become and what kind of dreams you have for your future.

Okay, they were not to be. They will never be. These dreams are gone. But do not confuse the dreams with the memories. The pain you feel in one direction is at least equal to the joy you felt in the other. The higher you fly, the more it hurts when you hit the ground, and we all hit the ground sooner or later. That does not mean we stop flying! It means we get realistic about flying.

We get realistic about life. I have to go back to my days of Carlos Castaneda. He talked about death always being just over our left shoulder. Okay, it was mystical bullshit the way he explained it. But it is a fact of life in the real world. The real world does not give a damn about us.

I was about 28 when I made a phone call to a girl that I had not seen in a few years. She was younger than me by about 4 or 5 years but I always remembered her. We got along great. I thought it would be nice to see her again and somewhere I was thinking, “the years might not matter so much now.” I looked her up and called. Her mom answered the phone. I asked for the girl. “I’m sorry, were you a friend of hers? She died last year in a car accident. She was coming home from a party in the back of a pickup truck when it flipped.” The worst 10 second phone call of my life. And I still remember her bubbly personality, her kindness, our conversations, and the fact that she was in High School while I was in University. It’s life.

I’m not comparing. Don’t think that. I’m just saying we have no idea at all what is coming our way. I figured that out one day when I was giving mouth to mouth to an 8 year old child that managed to ram his bike into an opening car door. Somewhere between clearing his mouth of vomit and listening to some hysterical woman screaming behind me I realized that life just happens.

So while you are looking to blame this or that for the place you find yourself in now… don’t you dare settle on blaming that wonderful person you were while choosing baby names and imagining a future full of possibilities. You leave that man the FUCK ALONE.

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Let yourself grieve for as long as you need to. I’m sorry for your loss.

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Edited for sense by author

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You’re right, life just happens, and so does death. Unless something like this has happened to you and your family, I won’t be taking any advice on the subject from you or anyone else. This tragedy almost destroyed all of us. My son and his wife(I’ll call her Sara because her name is the same as our daughter, and I think of her as another daughter) were preparing their house for the arrival of their 3rd daughter PIPER. They moved our then youngest granddaughter ZOEY into her sister SADIE’S bedroom so that their new sister could have her own room. They were excited about having another sister in the family.

On the day that this all happened(sept. 15th, 2017) I came down stairs into the lobby of the gym where I was working out and saw my wife waiting for me. I could tell by the look on her face that something bad had happened. She told me that Sara was on her way to the hospital because something was wrong with PIPER and that we needed to get to their house which was about 50 miles away to stay with SADIE and ZOEY while our son(JASON) was with his wife at the hospital.

About 2 hours later, our son called his mom(BECKY, my wife) and told us that PIPER’S heart was no longer beating and that she was dead. To make matters even harder, SARA was going to have to deliver her now deceased little girl, but it was going to take a few hours for the labor-inducing drugs to do their job. So our son told us that he would come home for a couple of hours and then go back to the hospital. Of course this meant that we couldn’t say anything to our granddaughters about what was going on. Can you imagine having to drive home from the hospital knowing that you have to tell your daughters(they were 5&9 years old) that their baby sister was dead and never even got a chance to take her first breath?

Somehow my wife and I managed to keep these facts to ourselves and told SADIE and ZOEY that their dad was on his way home and would tell them why their mom had to rush to the hospital earlier. When JASON got home, he asked us to stay while he tried to explain what happened to his 2 little girls. I don’t know he did it, but he managed to stay calm and slowly told them that PIPER’S heart stopped beating and that she had died and was not coming home with mom.

I can’t even begin to imagine what emotions JASON and SARA were experiencing during all of this. Can you imagine having your labor induced and knowing that after a few hours of labor pains and going through the delivery process, that you were going to give “birth” to your still-born daughter? My son is an amazing father and broke the news to his 2 little girls in front of his mom and dad with the kind of (class?, I don’t know which word to use here) that I can’t even begin to imagine that I could have done. Of course there were tears and questions that couldn’t be answered, why?

Our daughter-in-law SARA is also an amazing mom. I still can’t even imagine what she went through having to deal with all of this. After JASON said about all that could be said, BECKY and I drove home knowing that our 3rd granddaughter was never coming home and that we all had this fucked-up situation to deal with. SARA’S mom drove down and watched the girls while JASON had to go back to the hospital. PIPER was delivered about 9 hours later and the nurses at the hospital(they were fucking amazing) wrapped her up like any other newborn and JASON and SARA just held her and talked to her for a little while. They told us that she looked like she was sleeping and that she was beautiful, just like her sisters.
I’m starting to cry now. I need to take a break and get some air.

The nurses at the hospital were amazingly professional and went out of their way to help in any way they could. After they took PIPER from her parents they went way beyond anything that I could have imagined. They took some clay, made it into a disc, and took PIPER’S footprints with it and put her name and the date on it in the shape of tiny building-blocks, then they put 2 holes in the top, and put a pink ribbon through it. They waited for it to harden, then they sent it to the funeral-home where she was cremated so her parents could pick it up when they went to pick up her ashes. That was so fucking cool for them to go out of their way for our son and his wife. We have a photo of that memorial in our living room, and that’s what I have tattooed on my chest, along with memorials for my mom and older sister.

It’s been over 3 years now, and it still tears me up inside whenever I think about her, but that’s why I have the tattoo, so I won’t even begin to forget the granddaughter that we never got to meet. It took a long time to try to get back to “normal”. Would you want to have to empty out PIPER’S room, take the crib and the changing table out and move your youngest daughter back into “her” room? ZOEY didn’t want her room back, she wanted her new baby sister.

My wife and I and SARA’S parents dealt with this as best we could, and we still call her by her first name whenever we talk about our grandkids. They have a total of 7, and we have 4 now, ages 13 to almost 2 years old. We’ll never forget her even though we never got to see her. I’m still incredibly angry about this and always will be. I’m not angry with anyone or anything, just this fucked up situation that our families had to endure.
Sorry, I need to correct something, including PIPER, SARA’S parents have 8 grandkids and we have 5.

So unless you’ve had to deal with the same situation that we had to endure, my family and I won’t be taking any advice from someone that we don’t know, and sure as hell doesn’t know us.

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Missed the point entirely I see. Too bad for you. You go ahead an whine all you want. Like I said before. The only thing you can control is where and when. I might add to that… to whom.

Exactly what advice did you glean from anything I said, aside from what you have repeated and agreed with in this post? “Don’t be hard on yourself?” Yea, fuck me for suggesting such a thing. “Carry the good memories of who you were and your dreams with you as well.” What a flacking dope I am for suggesting anything good could come out of a fucked up warped personality such as yours. You are right. I take it all back. Fuck me for even suggesting such stupid shit stuff.

And while I at it, how dare I suggest that you take as long as you need to grieve. Fuck me. YOU JUST GO AHEAD AND SHOW ME UP> GET OVER THAT LITTLE GIRL DYING RIGHT NOW<> Hell you don’t need any advice from anyone. (YOUR FUCKING SPECIAL. NO ONE ON THE PLANET HAS EVER FELT THE PAIN OR LOSS YOUR FEELING.) I would call you a pedantic self absorbed piece of shit but I am too kind to do so and understand that you are not seeing things very clearly at the moment.

Fuck you and fuck your “dealing with the same situation” You whiny piece of shit. Who the fuck made you so fucking special on this planet? “I’m special because I got a tattoo.” WOW! How fucking impressive. John Wayne had an airport named after him. “Like anyone gives a shit.”

What you are is a professional victim and the people around you are getting sick and tired of listening to your whining. That is becoming obvious.

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Your ‘ex colleague’ or whoever, is a total moron.

Simple as that!

I lost my dad last year, following his suicide and I still feel completely broken.

But at the same time, I accept this is perfectly normal and perfectly rational to feel.

Surround yourself with better people.

Also… if one person ever told me to forgot my dad, or something akin to the tripe this person spouted, they’d promptly be told to go forth and multiply.

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WOW, you should get a job as a part-time “grief counselor”, you’re really good at this. As you stated in your initial post on this subject, you said “It’s no one’s fucking business how long it takes you to finish the grieving process. Tell them to fuck the hell off”. Well, there you go.
My wife and I have moved on from the loss of our granddaughter, and our son and his family have also moved on about as well as can be expected.
I wouldn’t wish what happened to our family on anybody else, but in your case I’d make an exception. Telling other people how they should feel from a distance is an easy thing to do. It doesn’t make you right, it just displays your arrogance.

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Special?

I had a tattoo engraved, New Year’s Eve Singapore 1969. Quite small, high on my right arm. All I’ve ever felt is embarrassed [at being such a dickhead]

Tough love/ reality therapy? In sincerity, it is my impression that the poor guy lacks the self awareness to understand what you’re talking about.

Regardless, I remain truly saddened at his anguish, and utterly powerless to help.

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Yep. It is no one’s business. Now suddenly you want to quote all the kindness I showed. You want to take the advice you spit on? Go play with your tattoo and whine to someone who wants to a whiny adult who thinks they are so special that their suffering is more important than that of anyone else. Why don’t you go volunteer in a children’s cancer ward for a month you pious shithead.

Then why are you whining about it instead of patting yourself on the back for the great job you have done.

You quite obviously do not know your ass from a hole in the ground.

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TO EVERYONE

Thank you all for your comments. I deeply appreciate the words and the time you have taken to respond.

Yes sometimes I am curled up into a ball in bed just thinking of him and missing him. After some time of reading the responses and talking to other friends and family, it is without any regret that I have shunned my ex colleague. I simply told her that it was in the best interest of both parties (she and I) that I shun her. I don’t need more pain and confusion in my life and she doesn’t need to see anything I post that she finds offensive. I don’t regret the loss of this friend and i frankly don’t care how she feels about it.

I kept wondering why she brought the ego into this so i looked into her online posts just to find what Whitefire referred to as “new age enlightened asses”. I had no idea that pseudo spiritualists were misusing the definition of ego. I told her that she was preaching pseudo spiritual bs.

I kept wondering if perhaps she was going through a difficult time in life and concluded that even if she was, how dare she take it up against someone who is grieving. I found no excuse for that. I had given her enough time to apologize but got none even after i told her i didn’t exactly understand the message she was trying to send me. She thought she would have the last word by saying that it was best to end the conversation as is or the friendship would be fractured. Well I made sure it would end with my last words to her. This was not a friendship worth salvaging.

Oldmanshouts, I’m sorry for bringing you to tears. If life permits us to meet let’s turn those tears to cheers and laughter. In fact that gives me an idea that I will post when the time is right.

I am a little stronger now thanks to EVERYONE who made me feel normal in this situation. Thank you for your insight, your feedback, your sympathy and your empathy to say the least.

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