People Mourn in Different Ways
Cats: Personal, Blog|Note: Please see posts The Best-Laid Plans… and Lessons Learned From a Parent’s Death for a bit of context for this post. I am not allowing comments for this post, and am respectfully removing comments from these other posts. If anyone wants to discuss this with me privately, please do so by sending email to blog (at) metamorphilia (dot) com.
When loved ones pass away, it hits everyone a little bit differently - big surprise, given that we’re all different. Some people like to place all of their feelings deep inside and never share them with another living soul. Others make sure everyone they encounter in daily life knows what has happened and how they feel about their loss. I think most people fall somewhere in-between: they can journal in a private journal, which is a step above bottling it up completely; they can talk about various amounts of their feelings with a various amounts of their nearest and dearest. I have found in my own experience that people can mourn in different ways for different people who have entered their lives and left them.
What have I been doing with my mother-in-law’s passing? I feel it’s an important subject to mull over, as I know no real peers (mainly my father, cousin, and grandparents) who has ever lost a parent–and this is the closest I’ve come to it personally. It’s brought a lot home to me, and made me think a lot about what it would be like to lose my own parents, as life would inevitably bring (assume they are not the ones to bury me). I’ve talked it out a little here and there with my wife, and in lesser degrees with anyone else I trust with my feelings. While I have in the past used this blog to discuss my feelings about a wide range of subjects, I do not feel compelled at this time to share my inmost feelings with my readers, and I hope that they will understand that choice. Overall, I’ve kept a lot of my feelings of grief inside to be strong for those around me who are grieving more deeply or openly than I tend to do.
Death is naturally a time for sadness, as it draws to mind our sense of loss of the person who was in our lives. Death also brings up thoughts about our own eventual passing. However, I’ve also felt some responsibility to God & to my wife’s family to point out, to people who happen to bring it up with me, the good that has come about from the sad loss of my mother-in-law. After all, if I believe God is good, and if I believe that everything that happens works for His Glory and the good of those who love Him, there must also be good that comes from the tragedy of the death of a loved one. I believe it would be inappropriate to remember lost loved ones only for the pain that their passing has caused.
In this case, as I was not blessed to know my mother-in-law very closely, I happen to take away lessons that I must remember now. Now, while my parents are both still alive, I must remember to value & honor my parents, to spend time with them and get to know and love them as much as possible while they are still with me. I need to also take the time to remember the lessons I’ve learned so that when that time comes that my parents leave this world, that it can be a time of remembering them and celebrating their lives, and minimize the amount of morbid ‘business’ that must be attended to surrounding the things that ‘you can’t take with you’.
I’m frankly not a fan of this sort of thing. I dread - irrationally, perhaps, and probably even more than the loss of loved ones - the act of dealing with what a person leaves behind. This is what I fear more than my own death - that those loved ones I leave behind have to deal with the stuff I chose not to deal with myself.
The lessons posted previously are not directly drawn from the events surrounding my mother-in-law’s death, but filtered through my own experiences from childhood to the present, and have more to do with my own family history than that of my wife’s. Going back through that post, I have tried to edit out any statements to the contrary. So I apologize to those who were offended at previous posts of mine: that I was insensitive to their own grieving time. This has been part of my own grieving, and I must admit I was selfish and did not think of how others would read my post in light of their own loss. I hope those people understand, or at least accept, that this was my way of mourning, and it was not remotely intended to hurt others. I regret any pain I have piled upon others’ grief in this way, and I ask for your forgiveness.
