This is a project that’s been in my head for a while. I’m collating responses with the intention of writing a book along the lines of what to say when there are no words. Is “I’m sorry for your loss” enough?

If you’d be so kind as to answer the questions, I’d be most grateful.

https://surveyhero.com/c/8bf2609

Done survey. Probably not the responses you were hoping for.

Done & dusted.

mollwollfumble said:

Done survey. Probably not the responses you were hoping for.

Nonsense! I’m interested in all responses. Grief is a very personal thing and people respond in different ways. I’m interested in what worked for people and what didn’t. Thankyou for your responses :-)

(There’s no identifying features to any responses other than what people have mentioned here or elsewhere.)

https://surveyhero.com/c/8bf2609 – did not match any documents.

Ian said:

https://surveyhero.com/c/8bf2609 – did not match any documents.

Page loaded here, but didn’t bother doing the survey.

Good luck trying to separate responses to the more immediate realities of some actual loss from responses related social and cultural impositions.

Done.

Thanks Tamb. Here’s another virtual hug for you.

Divine Angel said:

Thanks Tamb. Here’s another virtual hug for you.

Thank you DA. Hugs truly are healing.

> what to say when there are no words

How about: “Here, have some of my lithium?”

mollwollfumble said:

> what to say when there are no words

How about: “Here, have some of my lithium?”

Or “Here have some THC . No I mean TLC

Complicated subject really.

To some extent grief (of responses) allow abnormality (time to renormalize/adjustment – generosity that way), but it also lends to some less helpful things, perhaps not so much a stereotype exactly, but that is in there, about it. You see it in terms like devastated. And people can be weird, death somehow makes the deceased and those near public property, sort of issues a license.

It often involves misery, no question, a mind or minds’ committed/dedicated neurons adjusting to a new reality. But for some period, quite a long time (possibly many years, don’t underestimate that) the work of adjustment is the norm.

Crazy thing is the conventions/expectations related can be murder, over and over. This may seem odd, but what you don’t want is to kill the person (deceased) again and again. They are a memory, and mostly always were while alive.

Normal of the living has no great love of death, or the dead. Call it aversion. It’s not the territory of native competencies, perhaps more so in modern times, as there’s detachment from the practical reasons for burying people (bodies rot, they smell, and animals feed on them).

So, the grieving want to keep of pull some normal from the whatever.

Death (notions related) feature big of behaviour controls, most of which resides in the informal field, in the aether, though the state (that ideological mostly) delivers, it’ll help dissipate the deceased into a larger social field.

Which maybe raises the question…

Is some of grief (twisted) acknowledgment, a lament, that culture (to generalize upward to a larger scale) no longer has any power over that person. A loss that way – entity dissolved.

Maybe not entirely unrelated:

Please stop telling me to ‘keep fighting’

This may have some relevance: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-21/your-stories-of-building-resilience-after-trauma/8634460

Is it “normal” whatever that means to not have a expected grief response when someone you know dies but it doesn’t upset you in an way, this is people I know but may have never had a conversation with bar an introduction and occasional words with relating to my job.

Cymek said:

Is it “normal” whatever that means to not have a expected grief response when someone you know dies but it doesn’t upset you in an way, this is people I know but may have never had a conversation with bar an introduction and occasional words with relating to my job.

Probably true to some extent individuals limit how many people they care about that much, otherwise’d be attending a funeral every week. That’d bring cheer to ones life.

Anyway, even of imagination, who (over-) indulges too many life-endings (or horrors), even ones own, you know to do so wouldn’t be living.

glad-it’s-not-me, and envy (or avoiding it) are universal.

the council guy that digs your grave will be glad it’s not him, and same the undertaker.

point being, there are circumstances glad-it’s-not-me will fail, even completely fail. Yet it’s a big part of normal, the work of minds.

Mrs m gets paid for playing music at funerals. Though when friends die she plays for free. As she gets older, there is more work of the type.

Often they are of people she knows. She needs to insulate herself against the emotions involved, and is largely over the grief within a day.

mollwollfumble said:

Mrs m gets paid for playing music at funerals. Though when friends die she plays for free. As she gets older, there is more work of the type.

Often they are of people she knows. She needs to insulate herself against the emotions involved, and is largely over the grief within a day.

One of my younger sisters sang a song at my Mum’s funeral, a cappella. She was very good.

Bubblecar said:

mollwollfumble said:

Mrs m gets paid for playing music at funerals. Though when friends die she plays for free. As she gets older, there is more work of the type.

Often they are of people she knows. She needs to insulate herself against the emotions involved, and is largely over the grief within a day.

One of my younger sisters sang a song at my Mum’s funeral, a cappella. She was very good.

You know the ladies on TV who say, “we are the music”? Well the one that speaks is my wife’s niece.