What happens if I don't grieve my loss?
October 18, 2022 12:50 PM   Subscribe

My mother died a couple of days ago. I'm just curious about the consensus for people choosing not to grieve. I know that might sound weird so I will try to explain.

I can compartmentalize pretty well. I've got normal grief symptoms and I'm not really trying to avoid it. But it's also easy to set it aside, somewhat unintentionally. I've also got complicated beliefs around attachment (like Buddhist informed beliefs but you know it's still my mom so one can't be entirely non-attached).

I'm taking the day off so I can feel my feelings because otherwise in my day to day life, I won't really feel my grief without making the effort to do so. And I'm just wondering what psychologists specializing in grief would say about this kind of scenario.

I took some coursework in complicated mourning like a decade ago and I don't work with this topic much so I have no idea what the latest philosophy says. Am I doomed to having future physical illness if I don't wring out my grief from the dish towel of my emotional body every day? Is it actually ok to ignore it unless it shows itself, or is the fact that I have unusual compartmentalizing ability a red flag that says I really need to do the scrapbooking or whatever?

Admittedly I also hate the depressed state but I'll feel it on purpose if I really need to.

I'm also wondering whether it is thought that grief resolves faster or more efficiently if you feel it on purpose vs just letting it exist and show up when it wants to.
posted by crunchy potato to Health & Fitness (27 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm not a psychologist, but I have a very similar grief response, and I can tell you how grief has gone for me. Like you, I tend to do pretty well in the early weeks, though I definitely will have some spaciness and other executive function issues. But it definitely comes for me in other ways. A good friend died somewhat suddenly last year and I was relatively ok in the weeks afterwards but then had a period of mild depression afterwards. It's been almost a year but I still get sharp pangs of sadness that I won't see her again, especially now that I'm planning a trip to her city. A friend has another friend who is struggling with a similar illness to what killed my friend, and I had a hard time talking with them about it without crying.

All that's to say, you are very early on and I hate to say it, but you may well be still in a state of numbness, and you can't really control how you're going to experience this. That said, I'm sure you remember from your reading that there are a wide range of responses to grief that are considered normal. You're going to experience this the way you experience it, and it's not really something you can optimize, except by accepting your feelings (a good exercise for a Buddhist).

I'm sorry for your loss.
posted by the sockening at 1:01 PM on October 18, 2022 [17 favorites]


Condolences for your loss. I agree that everyone grieves differently, and there’s no one way to do it. I did not grieve much for two members of my immediate family (although one made that easy due to working homophobia into his funeral service, so I was more angry than sad with him), but I’ve been much more deeply hit by coworkers, friends, and even pets. So I think your situation/approach seems pretty normal.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:14 PM on October 18, 2022 [5 favorites]


I’m sorry your mother died.
There are no “shoulds” regarding grief. Feel what you feel, and what you *don’t* feel.
Society has some very heavy expectations around grief, or absence thereof, and it feels like a transgression to not knuckle under to those expectations.
Feel as much or as little as you feel.
posted by BostonTerrier at 1:16 PM on October 18, 2022 [11 favorites]


I'm so sorry for your loss. You have every right to deal with these feelings however you wish. There are no rules (or there shouldn't be, anyway). In a lot of mental health discourse there is this insistence that "you MUST deal with your grief" and "you MUST process your feelings" and I think that's bullshit. Who the fuck are they to tell you how to feel and what to do? Your body and your mind know what they're doing. If compartmentalizing is what seems right, then it IS right. If that changes, so be it. If it doesn't, well, la dee da.
posted by MiraK at 1:21 PM on October 18, 2022 [8 favorites]


Good answers above.

So if the question is: Is it normal if I don't grieve the way people expect and/or at all?
The answer is: Sure, that's how it is for lots of people. Very normal.

And if the question is: I feel okay for now. Is grief going to sneak up and kick my ass later?
The answer is: Maybe, sure. It does that sometimes. Also very normal.

And if the question is: Should I be doing things differently than I am inclined to do them, for one reason or another here?
The answer is: Nope. You should do what you feel best about right now and if you are going to have additional feelings later, about the loss, about how you dealt with things in the moment, or about both, that is a normal thing that happens and trying to avoid it by trying to skip ahead of where you feel you need to be right now wouldn't change much.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:24 PM on October 18, 2022 [8 favorites]


I don't think you're going to have much control over what you feel or don't feel, even in the long term, but would suggest giving yourself more than one day as space to let anything that's going to come in the short term come. In a similar situation, I took a few days off and made a short trip somewhere where I would be by myself and could experience some nature, etc. In the end, I never did grieve very much in any recognizable sense, but it felt right to have set off some time for it.
posted by praemunire at 1:25 PM on October 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


I'm so sorry for your loss. Grief isn't linear. Grief can be writing a post about grief.

Here's a recent piece in the Atlantic about grief that might be helpful. The old five stages trope has been debunked. This was written by a scientist trying to sort out her own grieving by reading research on it.
Although most people will experience grief when they lose someone close to them, they won’t be overwhelmed by it. For roughly half of the bereaved, grief is mild or moderate and then subsides. Among those who experience high levels of grief at the outset, distress will usually begin to ease in a few weeks or months too. It’s not a straight line, where each day is better than the one before, but the overall level of suffering does go down over time.
posted by bluedaisy at 1:38 PM on October 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


I am not an expert or anything but one thing I've learned is that grief sometimes shows up randomly months later than you would expect. Intellectually you've processed the bare fact of her no longer being alive but the emotional repercussions can creep up when you least expect...ie: the first time you remember you can't call her on a Sunday night, or the first time you forget she's gone and set out to tell her something, then you'll really start feeling the grief. You can also set aside specific times to grieve, but I don't think it ever leaves your system. The intensity and overwhelming emotions subdue over time but the core effect never goes away, in other words grief changes you
posted by winterportage at 1:40 PM on October 18, 2022 [11 favorites]


Grief I have found has no roadmap. Our response is highly individual. You can try to build in some time now to mourn, but it still may hit later in odd ways. It will not necessarily be something you can control.

Immediately when my mother died (i.e. funeral home was on the way to pick her up) my sister was crying uncontrollably for almost an hour. I was sad but quiet, and did not even cry that much.

What happened to me months later was something along the lines of - going about my day and and then noticing - oh look, Mom's favorite movie is on TV - then the tears would flow and I would have a sense of almost physical pain for a bit. Then it would fade till the next time.

Like others in my family, I turned to nature and poetry for consolation, but that is how my family does it traditionally. My mother was an artist and poetry is a big thing also in my family, so it felt right. We also do stuff like plant trees in memory of people (the nature aspect), though otherwise we are not into plaques and physical memorials. As I said above, this is individual, and reflects personal and family values in my family. Yours will be different.

The hardest parts were - going through her stuff to decide what to keep or get rid of, especially dealing with my sister's big emotions about it all. We could not keep everything so my mantra pretty much became - Mom loved this and valued it in her life and so it has served its purpose well, but that does not mean we need to hold onto it too. Also, dealing with all the emotions of the other relatives about her death was tough - lots of people tend to come out of the woodwork who want to tell you how you should be grieving, and what you should be doing, and that you are doing it wrong. It can be hurtful, even though intellectually I understood a lot of it was due to their own grief.

Note that I loved my mother dearly, she was my best friend, but her death was a long time coming, so I had been doing some pre-mourning for a while, and I also have a bit of a Buddhist outlook as well (have studied Buddhism). The sudden death of my father was a whole different experience with grief though.

My advice is that it would not hurt to arm yourself with some resources you can call on, if you would need them later. Metafilter has a lot of past questions about grief and some good recommendations. Other than that, do not worry one minute about whether you are doing grief "correctly"; just do what you need to do in the moment as time goes on.
posted by gudrun at 1:46 PM on October 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


Honestly, when my dad died, I was relieved because he wasn't suffering any more.

You feel how you feel.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:58 PM on October 18, 2022 [13 favorites]


You don't owe anyone a specific performance of grief. It sounds like you have the frame work in place to recognize and resolve any grief that comes up over time. You may go through different feelings over time, as significant dates come up that make you think of her, or as things remind you of your loss or of some lack of closure. Those feelings might be grief but can be anger, relief, etc.
For me the most intense grief comes from unexpected death, when there is an element of surprise and shock then I do go through waves of disbelief, anger, etc.
When I have lost people who were already ill, especially those who had had lingered near death, I have felt a sense of calm sorrow rather than intense grief. And in some cases when I knew someone had been sufferings foe years (or even decades), I felt relief that they could finally rest.
posted by buildmyworld at 2:03 PM on October 18, 2022 [5 favorites]


I did not greive the loss of anyone yet. Only the loss of relationships in which the other is still alive. I did not grieve the loss of my parents, by the time they went, it was what they wanted, and they were very ill. I have a complicated relationship with them, and I am looking through old pictures to see what the surface of things looked like, taking a walk through time. I still don't grieve for them, but I know them better, and in retrospect, understand their times better. Let me say I did not learn to love from them. I more learned to survive from them.

If the ones you grieve were close comfort and supportive of you, then you had the best thing. That in it's self gives you the strength to go forward in a healthy fashion. You still get to love them, in that way, you never lose them.
posted by Oyéah at 2:07 PM on October 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


You're doomed to have some physical illness in the future anyway because you're human, so don't worry about that. Or do worry about it, but at least not in the context of "I grieved wrong, so now I have a disease."

Do you have any sort of group framework for loss? Funeral rites, religious ritual, non religious ritual, anything? What strikes me about your question is how much you dislike your own feelings and want to get them over with as quickly as possible on your own. It's a little like the mental equivalent of eating something that disagrees with you and knowing you're going to spend an hour closed up in the bathroom. Which... It's emotional reaction, it's not quite that easy.

Maybe a group setting would allow you to feel some of those feelings in a structured setting where they're "supposed" to happen? Even making your own ritual that you perform yourself could be helpful.
posted by kingdead at 2:10 PM on October 18, 2022


In my personal experience it's certainly possible to delay grief, but then it comes out in other, often unhealthy ways. And then eventually, years later, you end up having to do the work anyway.
posted by wierdo at 2:23 PM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


You cannnot know how this will go. In the end it's all normal if you're not harming yourself or others, but you don't really get to pick where on that normal spectrum your experience will fall.

Feel what you feel, which you say you're doing. I don't think you can decide you simply won't grieve. Understand that the way you feel after 6 hours or 6 days is likely wildly different from 6 weeks and 6 months, so you also can't decide you're done today or decide you'll just do it all at once and get it over with.

You're going to go through whatever you go through, and I think if you're willing to deal with whatever does bubble up if it does when it does, there's no need to force any kind of specific feeling.

You've had a complicated loss and a lot of people do a lot of their processing in anticipatory grief so you may have no real reason to experience the sudden-stop shock some people additionally have to deal with in a loss that was either unexpected or unprepared-for. It has sounded in previous discussions like you were in a pretty realistic headspace about what was coming and that can definitely make a difference.

There may be trauma surrounding the whole situation that you will eventually need to process. For some people it can be almost impossible to separate that from the grief; you have seemed to have a handle on what is what there. Unprocessed trauma can eat your life, but all you can really do is watch and wait and see if you recognize something that needs intervention.

I had a fairly disconnected loss just before the pandemic (and so did my partner) and of course there is NO way to distinguish what was Stress A and what was Stress B, but I can tell you I definitely expressed physical symptoms of intense stress for quite a while. Executive function in the crapper, intense fatigue, diminished emotional elasticity, brain fog, these are all reasonable ways for your body to react to prolonged stress, grief or no. If you have those, you should prioritize rest and self-care and maybe opting out of additional stressors for a bit where possible.

All you can really do is be honest with yourself about how you're doing, and maybe prioritize checking in with yourself over the next year or so. If something comes up, deal with it rather than ignoring or avoiding it.
posted by Lyn Never at 2:27 PM on October 18, 2022


Don't force it. Keep an eye out for it. Leave some slack in your system so that if you suddenly need to spend time processing strong emotions you don't have to wait long to get to a safe space where you can do it. It may take weeks. It may not happen. It may take years, such as until you are as old as your mother was.

Don't do performative grief unless it comforts you.

If you had a trouble relationship with your mother, or if you have seen the elephant, you may have already done a lot of your grieving.

Remember grief takes many different forms, such as hunger, restlessness, irritability, queasiness, fatigue, clumsiness etc.

It is good to be able to grieve on your own schedule. It makes no more sense to have to do flamboyant grieving in the first week than it does to have completed all your grieving by the end of that week.

Treat your inner child with extra care and affection. There may be a wounded child inside you that needs Mommy. There may not. Hot baths, comfort food, comfort reads, early bed are all good things. Your immune system may decide to make you sick. Treat yourself as if you are sickening for something. Like when you are in a car roll over and walk away astonished to not be hurt, you could find that the next day you laugh a lot as the implications of your brush with eternity hit you and otherwise be physically as usual, or there could be no part of your body that doesn't hurt.

As long as you don't do something stupid or desperate that you will regret, like cut your hair or impulsively get married or quit your job or get passing out drunk in a strange bar, do what feels right and keep listening to your body and your emotions and trust them. If you need to feel grief, eventually you will. If you don't, then either you don't need to, or you are not ready to.
posted by Jane the Brown at 3:43 PM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


With awesome powers of dissociation you can totally dissociate grief. It just may come back at an inconvenient time.

I don’t think you have to create those emotions in between though. But take time to be present each day if possible, each week or at least each month. If the feelings come - let them. Grief is not a disease. It’s feelings and a process. I don’t think you have to put yourself on a timeline.

About time though…you’re in very early days. I watched my *daughter* die and although weird emotions came along, they were on a delay. So it may be in a few weeks this question seems redundant.
posted by warriorqueen at 5:17 PM on October 18, 2022 [4 favorites]


I say just feel how you feel, even if that's not feeling much grief now or later or ever. And in fact that's basically what my therapist said to me after one of my parents died and I was puzzling over how I felt. Make sure and check in with yourself occasionally over the upcoming weeks/months just in case something is sneaking up on you, whether it be depression or grief or whatever. But that may never happen.

The alternative seems like forcing yourself to grieve and that sounds much more unhealthy to me. Of course what you have to do in front of others may depend on your family/community/culture, but for yourself, anyway, I think it's OK to simply carry on.
posted by kutsushita nyanko at 5:28 PM on October 18, 2022 [4 favorites]


As someone whose dad died last year: spending a bunch of time reading up on whether I was grieving “right” was in fact part of the grieving process.
posted by showbiz_liz at 6:18 PM on October 18, 2022 [5 favorites]


I found genealogy very helpful, as a way to think about loss, but not think about it, and not feel so alone.
posted by Violet Blue at 6:30 PM on October 18, 2022


My condolences.

I lost my mother roughly six years ago. I can’t say I’ve ever mourned her loss, at least not in any recognizable manner. Some part of that probably has to do with how she died, in that she had Alzheimers and more-or-less faded away over the course of a few years. That may seem cold, but I tend to believe I worked-through her loss long before she actually died.

My experience may not be applicable to yours (I sincerely hope not. Dementia is a horrible way to go), but I offer it as a way of saying that there is no right way to mourn. Right now, you’re probably deep in the sort of organizing and paperwork and whatnot that always accompanies a loved-one’s loss. Consider that this, too, is a form of mourning. Attending to the loved-one’s final needs.

Please don’t question yourself because you haven’t experienced some sort of stereotypical mourning scene. It may come later. Or, it may not.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:18 PM on October 18, 2022 [5 favorites]


Sorry for your loss.

I know I have had losses, and some were terrible, (the stillbirth of my son at full term), and some that were not so bad, (my parents). But grief is a weird thing.

Feel what you feel. Yes, you will have to accept condolences from folks who don't get what you are feeling. Do your part, and let those things wash over you.

You are not required to grieve in a certain way
posted by Windopaene at 12:16 AM on October 19, 2022


I'm sorry for your loss.

My father died unexpectedly in difficult/notable circumstances. I processed my grief in a very specific way - essentially by telling people what had happened. It took maybe 6 months to a year. The pattern was probably set early on when I was the person who informed others of the news.

Basically though, everyone is different and every bereavement is different. The last I heard, the general rule of thumb is that there are no specific rules and it will do what it does naturally but that if you're finding your grief a day-to-day problem after a year or so you'd probably benefit from getting help.
posted by plonkee at 5:45 AM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


I'm sorry your mother died. Grief hits everyone differently. When my own mother's mother died, I was in my sullen teen phase and my mother was upset with me about not grieving correctly — the performative grief mentioned above. You do you.
posted by emelenjr at 6:50 AM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


Whatever you have to do, do at whatever pace feels best. Anything you don't have to do and don't want to do, don't do. If you suddenly start weeping in a grocery store or whatever, do that for however long seems mandated, and then go get the bananas and cream cheese and TP and go about your day. If you don't feel a mandate and you would rather not right now, then stifle that weeping and think no more about it. Either way. Whatever works. If compartmentalization comes naturally, go with it and don't worry about it. Compartmentalization is a valuable skill. One should never devote a large share of attention to grieving while driving a car, for instance. But driving can be very meditative and leads naturally to rumination. Driving while sobbing is very dangerous. So being able to compartmentalize is good for your health and safety.

You are going to go to sleep for some portion of almost every 24-hour period. Whatever grief slog is required that you aren't doing while awake will happen while you're asleep.
posted by Don Pepino at 2:22 PM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


Gosh, Crunch Potato.
My understanding of grief and mourning are that they are in fact the actual process of healing over the rupture in our world after a loss.
The loss of a parent is profound (including when relationships have been challenging or after estrangement - I've done both). But the rupture is still there, and it's a rupture of your world, so you get to heal it over at your own pace and in your own way.

In the tradition I was raised in, grief and mourning were highly ritualized, and specific rituals and observances were performed for each cycle of time after a death: a day, a week, a month, a year. That kept the grief front and center for that one year, and gives people the opportunity to feel their feels (not only sad ones; lots of laughing is involved, too; and any number of other feelings) in every possible setting, until it's been well-integrated into ALL the pieces of one's understanding and knowledge.
While I've left that tradition, I've never stopped appreciating their way of handling grieving. If you have such a tradition, leaning on it is a fine thing to do. If not, borrowing seems fine.

As to the title question: what happens if you don't grieve your loss? It doesn't compute. You will grieve your loss. You will rebuild an awareness of the new reality and make new ways of being despite it.

I'm sorry for your loss, and wish you a full and thorough (and manageable) rebuilding of the world after this rupture. At the pace and in the manner of your choosing.
posted by Shunra at 4:07 PM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


When my Dad passed in May definitely there was some relief as jenfullmoon said above - thankful he wasn't suffering anymore. But I didn't cry at the funeral and immediately was thrown into handling my dying cat's issues when I returned home. The grief has now been coming out for both of them in the months since.

I don't know if you can force it or avoid it. I'm sorry for your loss.
posted by getawaysticks at 9:13 PM on October 24, 2022


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