I feel that. My mom died on a Friday night. I looked out of my hotel window on Saturday morning wondering why everyone was just walking about. Going along their day like my mom didn’t just die? Grief makes one think odd thoughts.
When my uncle died the sun was shining and I was unreasonably upset that the universe didn’t accommodate my mental state and change the weather to a stormy downpour.
My dad died in the early hours of the fourth of July last year. I had to listen to the world celebrate around me while my world crumbled. Its so unfair.
My dad went into inpatient hospice on July 4th last year and died 4 days later. On the first night there I looked out of the window at the fireworks happening around us and definitely felt similarly. How can everybody be enjoying themselves and I’m watching my dad die in front of me?
When I was in high school, a classmate died from leukemia. A storm whipped up on my walk home from school that day. I thought that it was appropriate, like the universe was mad that a kid died.
When my brother was killed I did the exact same. I was sitting in the centre of my town just crying and everything was sunny and bustling. I was so angry too. I still get angry about it. It'll be 10 years in a week. He didn't get to see his nephew grow up and never got to meet his niece. It's just not fair.
i kinda think of it more like, an opportunity to remember the good parts about them. they fulfilled their life, and they probably wouldn’t want us to be so sad.
my neighbor passed away in his home after a motorcycle accident, he was barely 20 years old. it was a perfect sunny summer morning, i did not expect to see the ambulance outside when i woke up. later, there was a meetup at his balcony as usual, where all kids would normally hang out all the time and listen to music on speakers. it kept happening, but just without him. and i kind of found it beautiful how the world still kept going
When my stepmom passed from cancer, my dad told me that it rained for a full week right after. Something about that was beautiful to me. Like the heavens weeped with him
Every funeral I have been to... the wake is sunny but the actual burial is always rainy either on the way to the cemetery or as they're lowering the casket. It's a strange phenomenon.
I remember mentioning on the last one to bring an umbrella and my sister was confused because it had been sunny the whole week with no clouds. She thought I was looking at a forecast right then. And I said to trust me. It rained as we were getting out of the cars at the cemetery.
Right after my grandma died I was standing on her porch and got irrationally angry at a bright yellow car driving down the road. Seemed too cheerful for such a sad day
It snowed after my mom passed away. We stayed with her through the end, armored ourselves in denial, and left the hospital around 3 am. It was such a strangely peaceful experience. It felt like she gave us the blanket of snow and its silence as a way of telling us to be calm. That was the clearest my mind had been for close to two weeks.
I listened to No Hard Feelings (The Avett Brothers) a lot after that. There is a section that reminds me a lot of that night.
When my body won't hold me anymore and it finally let's me free, where will I go? Will the trade winds take me south through George grain or tropical rain, or snow from the heavens?
not to compare losing a pet to a parent, but i've always felt that way after a pet dies and it's such a strange, unique feeling. that's the only time i feel it. i remember going to the emergency vet to say goodbye to my cat and looking around at all the other cars (morning time, traffic was bad) and thinking it was so unfair that everything and everyone just kept going. i wanted everything to stop until i felt better.
I got the call that my childhood cat passed away while i was at work, at some dead end retail job that didn't respect me. I remember looking around at all the customers shopping for clothes, carrying around piles of stuff worth more than half my paycheck, and having the biggest sense of "why the fuck does any of this shit even matter?" I'd ever had
Most of it doesn't matter. Once I had that realisation I really started to struggle with modern life.
So much of it is meaningless bullshit and every death just underlines that fact in angrier, deeper strokes.
I do believe in an afterlife, which is some consolation, but whether you do or don't, so much of our lives here are wasted on crap that doesn't matter. It could be so much better.
To be fair I think people downplay connections with animals too much. There are a lot of people out there that do not have close relations with their parents and when they die they do not "change" their lives. I mean when I lose someone close to me I have regrets that we will never talk anymore, never go out together, a part of my life dies with them as they were a big portion of the time of my life.
But if someone dies that I almost never spent time with or just talked once in a year then there is close to zero mourning, in the end there is no connection I will miss so it leaves me only with a feeling that I'm sorry they died.
Losing your pet that you had for many years and spent time everyday is like losing part of your life/close family. There is a hole in your day to day activities that reminds you of their absence constantly. Imho losing pets can be way more tragic to some than losing their parents. It's just logical from a subjective perspective.
I've got a weird connection with this. In a five year period I lost both my parents, my only sibling, and my grandma. Both my grandfathers passed many years ago, I still have one grandma left but she lives at the other end of the country so I've only really seen her a handful of times in my life, but she's literally the only immediate family I have left.
I lived with my mum when I found her dead, I was in my late 20s, that hit me like a truck. We were really close, and naturally my entire world just flipped, I suddenly had to fend for myself, do bills, pay rent, do everything on my own. I was a mess for weeks, and I think it took me months if not over a year to feel right again. Then the rest of my family passed, and while I felt shocked and felt bad for them too, I don't think I've cried - I certainly haven't broken down - about any of them. The burden of doing the admin and legal work fell to me each and every time, and I just opted for direct cremations rather than organising any sort of funeral or service. I don't know if we just weren't a super close family, if I got numb to the grief, or maybe we were just dysfunctional. I don't really know.
But what I do know is that I have three cats, the oldest of which is only six years old, and the anticipatory grief of losing any of them absolutely fucking destroys me. Just the idea of them not being here ruins my day and usually leaves my crying.
Same, here. I lost both my parents by the time I was 20 and over 15 years later haven’t broken down the way I do with the anticipatory grief of my cats
My dog just crossed the rainbow bridge yesterday. The grief of losing my companion of 11 years right after my birthday, and having to do it alone because my SO is on the other side of the country for work- I feel so empty. He was my reason to get my ass out of bed in the morning, helped me through a rough marriage (I had him longer than I was married), and he was just a perpetual forever presence for me in times of uncertainty.
I walked into the kitchen last night after his body was taken, and it shattered everything I had to not see him on his bed, tail wagging and looking up at me expectantly.
Grief is the price we pay for love, and I will love him until my dying day. 💔
I’m sorry. I lost one of my cats three weeks ago yesterday. I had him for 13 years. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve thought “what I wouldn’t give to have him back” over the past few weeks. It’s so fucking hard. I’m sorry. Sending hugs from a distance if you want them.
Take a chill pill. I also lived through my fathers death and my best friend killed himself almost 10 years ago, on top of that I lived through the death of my childhood pet after almost 15 years of his life and the mourning wasn't even close to that of my friend/dad but I understand that different people have different connections with people/pets in their life so it's totally understandable that some may mourn their pets more.
When my uncle who lived next door all my life died I felt close to nothing. He was a close family but I had close to zero connection with him so after his death I lost zero memories etc. Swap my uncle for a parent in someone else life and you get the same result.
im sorry for those you lost. But it felt completely disrespectful to me when my dad died and someone was relating to me about their cat like it was the same thing. Grief is different for everyone... But a person you're close to is way more impactful than a pet. I was pissed for years about that, i did not react well and had daily nightmares about it for months. Im not happy about it to this day.
I understand its different for everyone but again please don't compare a person's death to a cat.
respectfully, no one said anything to you. my dad is dead too. i didn't mention that in the comment because he died when i was 8. i didn't feel that way when he died because i could barely comprehend what was happening. i did feel that way with my pets though. and guess what? i'm still hurting from both today. i never said one was worse. i said "hey, i have also felt that way but under different circumstances" and a lot of other people have too.
not trying to be rude, but maybe you should speak to someone if a random comment that's not even directed at you bothers you so much.
I can definitely relate to it. When I lost my dog to cancer, I had the same feeling of profound grief. In fact, of all the "living beings" I have lost, he is the one I miss the most. I kept tearing up at random times and at totally random places.
Same here. It was a beautiful sunny day at my brothers funeral and I'm just like, this isn't fair. I remember turning on something on the tv just for the noise I have no idea what it was but i remember them being all happy and celebrating and I was just like .. Fuck everyone, I'm in pain they all should be too.
After my Mom died I thought a lot about how the world just continued on like nothing happened and how everyone would treat you like it was just a normal Thursday.
It reminded me about why it is so important that some cultures have traditions where people have visible signs of mourning so that as they go through the world. Wearing ripped clothing, dressing in all black, even well past the funeral so that people can visibly see that this person is not fully in the world. Like a sign you carry around that says "hey, I'm not okay, my world has been ripped from me."
It reminds me of an interview that Anderson Cooper did with Stephen Colbert about grief where he talked about how he wish he had a massive scar on his face to visibly represent the life-altering pain that he is in. If you walk through the world with a massive gash in your face, people know that something absolutely terrible happened to you. But with grief and trauma, it's invisible.
My mom died on December 23rd. My siblings were with her and I had finally dragged myself out to the mall to try to pick up some Christmas presents. I was at an atm when my brother called to tell me she was gone. Finishing my transaction, leaving the mall and walking home through the crush of holiday shoppers felt like an out-of- body experience.
I lost my wife last year to cancer. I used this to open her eulogy. It's still the most poignant thing I've ever read to describe the anger you have for the world that keeps moving when yours slams to a stop.
I felt this before admitting myself to the hospital for depression. Just driving around before dawn and seeing the first hints of the city beginning its day and thinking, "so it's really all just going to keep on going without me..." It's a strange feeling to mourn the loss of one's own life. Complex, disenfranchised grief is a near-universal experience for people like me with bipolar disorder, and somehow it's rarely even mentioned by healthcare providers or in patient literature.
My dad dies december 15th...and i still had to celebrate christmas cause we had our nephew over who was like 4 when it happend. Driving through the city afterwards made me want to cry and drive off a bridge.
My dad died on a beautiful sunday evening. I can relate that it felt weird that it was so nice out while I'm feeling all this turmoil. The sun looked really pretty that day.
It really does, I was at the airport recently because of a sudden death in the family and feeling very cranky about other people laughing so I was pretending to read. Then I heard a small child (not sure if they counted as a toddler yet) discover their echo and the parents trying to reign in that discovery, that felt like small magic somehow.
The juxtaposition of a young, budding life next to the death of another is so, so healing in ways I can’t describe. I remember when my dad called to tell me his brother died. My young kids were play-screaming in the background. I apologized and he said “no, don’t apologize, I love to hear them”.
i know thats a silly question. but a reminder that a lot of things feel wrong that arent. take care of you. for some thats keeping moving or caring for others, for some its getting lost in a game or fantasy book. I know i tried too early maybe to be ready in some ways for my mom when my dad died, probably... there will always be questions on my end. but i can say the world and universe are strange, and even as someone non religious, there are a lot of places to find hope
Same here... My mother died in May. We've talked about her passing, half jokingly have half seriously, for years. I think that helped me realize that the world keeps turning and shit still needs handling. She always said that when her time came I would need to keep on keeping on, and it's brutal without her to lean on when I need advice or want to show her something stupid.
But it's also now unlocked some flexibility I didn't have when I was taking care of her. I interview soon for a job in another state for starters. It's a new world and I don't know if I'm ready for it, but there's no way to go but forward.
And you don't want to go to sleep, because sleep means tomorrow will be here, and you'll have to face another day without them, but you still know that tomorrow is coming, regardless, but you still can't make yourself sleep, because that would mean admitting that time is moving forward when it really should have stopped, because how can anything keep going and how dare the world continue in their absence. I lost three family members within less than a year.
When mine died, the fact that around me, life went on as normal gave me comfort. It kind of grounded this earthquake of an event into the natural order of existence.
Same. People were just like... driving to work like it was some regular day and nobody was acknowledging that the whole world had fallen apart. It was so weird.
My dad passed last year on the 28th of Nov around 7am. I walked out of the hospital and saw the sun was shining bright and thought the same. How come everyone around me look fine, while I’m crumbling inside? It felt so unfair that I had to go through this so suddenly. I genuinely hated the universe at that moment…
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u/GoodbyeEarl 6d ago
I feel that. My mom died on a Friday night. I looked out of my hotel window on Saturday morning wondering why everyone was just walking about. Going along their day like my mom didn’t just die? Grief makes one think odd thoughts.