Handling Spouse Who Handles Death Much Differently

September 4, 2024 7:21 AM

My wife doesn't react much when her friends pass away, and I'm not sure how to navigate it. How do you do it?

Our friend passed away suddenly two weeks ago and I cried. My wife did not at all, she comforted me but she didn't seem to need anything, and was definitely more concerned about our toddler learning about death at a time.

Three years ago her best friend/maid-of-honor died suddenly and she didn't seem to shed a tear (it was right after the birth of both of their sons, so I could imagine that).

She's explored it a bit, and her rationale is that she had her father pass away before she turned 1, so she's had a definitely different perspective of death. She's fairly flippant about death "when you die, you won't know so my perspective I'm not scared of it". I've been thinking and crying about death since i was 8 years old (I almost purposely would think about loved ones passing away so I could feel the emotion. Still do.)

I do not want to change the way she reacts but it made me feel, I don't know weird? Our friend wasn't a super close friend, so maybe I felt like my reaction was outsized? I dunno man. I just want to understand this better.

posted by sandmanwv to Human Relations (20 answers total)

Everyone handles grief very, very differently, and very uniquely. Some people's brains shift into a very practical mode - they start thinking of all the stuff that needs to happen now (call the funeral home, start going through their things, do XY and Z for the family, etc.). Some people have accepted the fact of their own mortality already, and some others have accepted the fact of a loved one's mortality already too. When my paternal grandfather died, it was at the end of a very long period of decline that my father had been helping him through for about two solid years, so....it didn't come as a shock, he knew it was going to happen one day and now hey, there it was. When he called to give me the news, he was mostly telling me about when the funeral would be, and he was actually a little surprised when I asked "and how are you, are you okay?" He honestly hadn't stopped to reflect on that yet. He later said that you know, he knew it was coming, and so he'd already preliminarily dealt with that. Maybe he shed some tears privately or with my mother, but for the most part he'd already processed it.

I'm a bit more surprised, though, about the fact that you deliberately imagined other people dying when you were a child to make yourself cry over it. Not that that's....weird, but that suggests that there's some thoughts you may want to explore yourself, just like your wife explored her own feelings towards death. Neither one of you is "doing it right", mind you - but it sounds like she's examined her own thoughts, but maybe you haven't quite done so yourself yet and that may be something worth doing.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:29 AM on September 4 [15 favorites]

I have a link in my profile to a google doc (which is probably due for some updates, but that version is fine) with a bunch of resources on grief and trauma, and you might find something there that helps you understand.

Grief isn't crying. Crying is a neurobiological function and different people have different chemical trigger levels for emotional or stress crying; not everyone is a crier and that's fine because it's only tangential to grief.

There is no way for you to know her actual internal landscape around grief, and it may be that she's not especially in touch with it either, but biologically grief is stress and stress is sometimes very subtle. A lot of people even in Big Obvious Grief don't realize until months or years later: I didn't sleep through the night for two years, I had acid reflux for months, my temper was on a hair trigger, I only watched cooking shows.

Not to overly pathologize, but losing a parent before adulthood is an Adverse Childhood Event, and being short one parent during childhood is often the cause of additional ACEs (whether that's financial stability, the other parent's social/romantic life and moves/upheavals related to same, plus just incidents where it's assumed everybody's got a dad and you don't). Not saying she's got PTSD, but if she does she certainly earned it, and if her experience mostly only manifests as a bit of a distant relationship to death that's still fair.

All that matters is if she's hurting herself or others. For me, I'm pretty dang pragmatic but I'm also an easy cry, and for me what often hurts the most in loss is my own personal selfish desire to still have that person in my life. But I'm also not afraid of death or what's after, I'm not sad or scared about what I think the deceased experiences, my only real gripe and fear for myself/others is to die before I'm ready to be done living. And I'm often absolutely gutted with empathy for their family etc. But I'm pretty externally okay, minus a little cry usually alone, and it's not driving me to maladaptive behaviors or other self-harms.

(I too did a bit of dramatic crying as a child. Crying IS a release, that's part of the neurochemical processes and really does literally make you feel better, and as a kid it's pretty common to do this especially if you're a bit of a sensitive soul and too young to be a proper poet.)

To that end, you might find The Grieving Brain pretty interesting.

I recommend basically everybody read It's OK That You're Not OK, before they need it for themself or someone they're supporting.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:38 AM on September 4 [19 favorites]

As a veteran, this is very similar to my own reactions about death. (I also, for what it’s worth, have PTSD). I don’t cry or deeply grieve about anyone not a super close friend; but my friends have been dying every year since my early 20s. It’s just a part of the (sad) landscape by now.

I think the prevalence of death in your experience tends to immunize you a bit to it. If you read literature from higher mortality rate times, people had similar practical views of death as well.
posted by corb at 7:40 AM on September 4 [4 favorites]

I live in fear of people close to my friends/family dying, because I truly don’t care about death and I can’t be there for the people I love when this happens. And I’m tired of trying to pretend I do, trying to arrange my face into the proper approximation of sympathy for a terrible thing happening.

I suspect many others feel similarly, but society has deemed that verboten or morally bankrupt or unempathetic or something.

Like, I’m fine with the fact that my father died. It’s unfair he didn’t get to live better, or have a better end, and I also feel terrible that I never gave him grandchildren as an only child from an ethnic ultra-minority and his line just ended. That kind of thing can keep me up at night. But death? Big whoop. It happens to everyone.

Meanwhile I kill myself helping others all day in my career, and am known as extremely empathetic and someone who goes way beyond to help vulnerable people. And suffering and injustice affects me profoundly, sometimes debilitatingly. But death? What even is death? It just doesn’t have much emotional resonance for me. Just offering myself as an example. I’d be glad your wife doesn’t feel the need to fake it. I’m envious.
posted by octaviabutlerfan at 7:41 AM on September 4 [1 favorite]

There is a pit in me where all of my loss lives, and wear it every day. Sometimes it's heavy, sometimes it's not. Crying is for dog food commercials and documentaries about NASA. My grief is more like a physical thing.
posted by phunniemee at 7:46 AM on September 4 [5 favorites]

I'm like your wife. I'm not bothered about dying, myself. I don't believe in any kind of afterlife and I'm fine with not-existing and being forgotten.
If someone I love dies and I am sad about that, it'll well up in private and I'll feel my feels in private. I certainly don't want to share, because that invites other people to share with me and I feel that as a burden (i.e. something I'd do intentionally and only to help other people).
I don't get your way of dealing with death, because it seems to intentionally lean into the sadness, but that's fine, too. We all react differently, right?
posted by Omnomnom at 7:47 AM on September 4 [9 favorites]

I do not want to change the way she reacts but it made me feel, I don't know weird?

This seems to be the heart of your question. It's not so much about how your wife feels or doesn't, or understanding that, but that you feel as if her being different from you means your reaction to grief might be wrong?

It's disconcerting to be confronted with the fact that another person has such a different experience of reality than you do?

We all have different ways of processing emotions. Your account of your childhood exploration of grief is an example of one way of processing and exploring.
posted by Zumbador at 7:49 AM on September 4 [3 favorites]

Her reaction seems fine and healthy. Your reaction seems fine and healthy. Frankly, the only thing that seems unhealthy here is the instinct to compare the two.

I’m also not a crier and move on pretty quickly after loved ones die. I have always viewed that as a personal strength for me—not so much the style as the ability to actually process and move on. I think you can and should view your own style of processing as a personal strength for you, because it sounds like it’s also effective. However a human processes grief is okay as long as the grief gets processed, and it sounds like you both have processed this in a way that felt healthiest for you.
posted by moosetracks at 8:26 AM on September 4 [4 favorites]

I wondered whether part of your questioning related to gendered expectations - your wife ought to cry because she is a woman and (speculatively since you don't mention your own gender) you ought not to cry if you are a man? Or that it's only ok for you to cry if she also does? There are people that would believe that, but those people are wrong. Both crying and not crying are normal reactions to grief for people of any gender.

I think it's lovely that she was able to support you in processing your emotions around your friends' deaths. Your reaction doesn't seem at all outsized or inappropriate. Nor does it seem odd to me that she has different emotions to you and/or processes them differently. Even without a particular deep reason, some of us cry more quickly than others or in different circumstances to others simply because humans are not all identical.
posted by plonkee at 8:38 AM on September 4 [3 favorites]

My mom died last month so I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of content about grief while I go through it myself. The one point that is always emphasized is that grieving is entirely personal and there’s no wrong way to grieve, unless it gets destructive, like if a person is no longer functioning in their day to day life, things like that. There’s no timeline for grief either.

So in that regard I’d suggest perusing some resources on grief, loss and bereavement to better understand that both of your reactions are normal.

If you don’t want to read a whole book I’ve found the podcast Tendrils of Grief helpful.
posted by girlmightlive at 8:42 AM on September 4 [1 favorite]

she comforted me but she didn't seem to need anything

have you asked her if part of her comforting you / no outward emotional response is part of her reaction to your grieving style? In my case, if my partner leaned into grief to the extent that they purposely emotionalize thoughts of their loved ones dying, this would send me into level 1000 pragmatic mode every time the topic came up

Context, because I can only tangentially answer from the other end of the spectrum:

one parent’s mother passed away when my parent was 15. This was most definitely an extreme ACE in their life and continues to be, they meet the diagnostic criteria for prolonged grief disorder. This parent is also very emotionally volatile around the topic and will quickly get dysregulated, often says things like others aren’t empathetic to the extent of their grief/emotional pain, how can others be so unfeeling, etc. and use their vocal rollercoaster of outward grieving a defensive response to any mention of their emotional lability issues. As such I developed a really good set of skills early on to pragmatically problem solve and try to provide objective structure/context when this parent would fall apart and subsequently start isolating themselves for feeling so uncared for and alone.

I am much like your wife in some senses, while I’m a huge crier in some arenas, my response to this day, to people who really lean into their emotions (especially grief), is often to go into super pragmatic problem solve mode as a foil.
posted by seemoorglass at 8:56 AM on September 4 [11 favorites]

Frankly, the only thing that seems unhealthy here is the instinct to compare the two.

I don't think even that is unhealthy, as long as the comparison is being done for the purpose of coming properly to terms with emotional diversity as a thing in itself, as opposed to trying to settle the question of which of those quite different grieving responses is wrong.

Because of course neither of them is wrong. Nobody has the right to tell anybody they're doing grief wrong; the shit cake of grief is not improved by the shit icing of getting scolded about it.
posted by flabdablet at 10:15 AM on September 4 [6 favorites]

I find it disappointing when someone disappears from my life, but it doesn’t really matter how or why they go. They could be moving, or just have moved on in life, or died.

In one of the later Arabian Nights stories, a devout Muslim from the land is given a tour of a Muslim civilization under the sea. Everything is similar until they come across a group of people exuberantly celebrating the death of one of their family members. The land dweller explains that death is a terrible thing for his people, and the undersea Muslim vehemently rejects him and his culture as he believes that true Muslims would be overjoyed that the person they loved was now in eternal paradise.

I’m not religious in the least and believe that an afterlife is unlikely, but I think about that a lot.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:22 AM on September 4 [2 favorites]

Both of your reactions to these losses seem well within the range of common, normal, and reasonably healthy to me. I don't think your reaction was outsized or that hers was undersized. I can imagine that the two may be related - I know sometimes I can only handle one person in the family being an emotional mess at a time, so if my partner is having a really hard time, I pull it together to get through whatever's going on relatively stoically and do my own processing at some later date when I'm not also on emotional support duty for someone else.

But it's also very possible that this is just how your partner would be reacting regardless. I have a loved one who has been more-than-normally face-to-face with their own death regularly from a young age due to medical issues, and as a result they're simply much more cavalier and flippant about the concept of death than I am. It's a little jarring, but I can see how it's a result of the life they've had and how they've coped with it.

She's fine, you're fine. But if the distance between your reactions is bothering you, that would be a good thing to give yourself some space to explore - maybe on your own via journalling or self help book, maybe with a therapist. Probably eventually with her, but maybe not until you have more of a handle on what's bothering you and why and whether it actually is something you need her to help you process at all.
posted by Stacey at 11:31 AM on September 4 [1 favorite]

I am like that. When my mother died I cried when I was told and at the funeral and then not for many years. I was more consistently upset when my grandmother died but again after the funeral I was not outwardly emotional. I did do a lot of processing though because I had memory issues for a while - I was in my 20s, my memory is just fine.
posted by koahiatamadl at 12:00 PM on September 4

I do not want to change the way she reacts but it made me feel, I don't know weird? Our friend wasn't a super close friend, so maybe I felt like my reaction was outsized?

Just echoing that this sounds like you exploring your own grief process more than hers. I think both are fine…hers does strike me as perhaps a little informed by a bit of PTSD in that she might have developed some numbness to a close set of feelings…or not.

It really and truly is okay to respond very differently. My husband and I processed grief about our daughter’s loss in different ways at different times.
posted by warriorqueen at 12:07 PM on September 4 [2 favorites]

Our friend passed away suddenly two weeks ago and I cried. My wife did not at all, she comforted me but she didn't seem to need anything, and was definitely more concerned about our toddler learning about death at a time.

Three years ago her best friend/maid-of-honor died suddenly and she didn't seem to shed a tear (it was right after the birth of both of their sons, so I could imagine that).

I'll echo that both of your responses seem within the normal range of how people respond to events like this, but another thing that may help you gain insight into her way of processing is that she's focused on how the kids are doing/how she can be there for them. Kids' responses to learning about death and/or to having a parent who died before they could remember can be very hard for adults to perceive or understand, and her life history has probably made her very, very aware of that. Again, this isn't in itself healthy or unhealthy, but could be part of a response that is either.
posted by Why Is The World In Love Again? at 2:08 PM on September 4

How do you handle your spouse's different way of handling grief? I think asking this question is great, you're getting lots of great normalizing of different ways of grieving, and I'm just going to throw in my little weirdness.

I have had more experience of big life losses than I would like. My first baby died when she was four months old. My beloved brother died from suicide when he was 35. I am staring down the loss of my husband in maybe 6 months?

I have found that I am VERY VERY PRIVATE about expressing my grief. I can scream and cry and howl in my grief and almost never has another human witnessed it. Because I don't want to have to deal with thinking about what they're thinking about all my howling while I'm howling.

Some of this is just that I am always very self-conscious in any situation. Maybe some of this comes from specifically being a mother who has lost a baby, which comes with a lot of expectations for expressing grief. I can never quite TRUST my expression of grief if another person is there. How much of this is a PERFORMANCE for them? Certainly there were moments when I was performing what was expected of me.

So, you know, it's possible that your wife does experience very very deep reactions and it just isn't something she wants to share or even something that she CAN share.
posted by Jenny'sCricket at 2:58 PM on September 4 [4 favorites]

I have to keep reminding myself that grief is unique. My mom passed away a month ago today, and I haven't cried. At first I was too busy...I'm the executor, and the only child close at hand. Then I told myself I've been grieving for five years, which is as long as she'd been in memory care. In a little less than a month we'll be having her memorial service, and as we get closer to planning that, I find myself getting closer to tears. It's especially hard when I think too much about a certain song, which will definitely be played at the service. It was played at my dad's funeral in 1997, and since then I can barely listen to it, but it needs to be played here as well. And then I will probably cry like a baby.
posted by lhauser at 5:15 PM on September 4 [3 favorites]

I'm a lot more like your wife because I do a lot of processing as I go, I guess. I'm constantly aware of how impermanent things are and how easy it is to lose people, and how this could easily be my last moment with anyone I care about. I relate a lot to phunnimee's answer. When it finally happens, I'm sad, but not overwhelmed. In my experience, people who get emotionally overwhelmed by grief get that way because they haven't been grieving a little all the time already.
posted by wheatlets at 12:43 PM on September 5 [1 favorite]