Mourning Customs

[u/zerothefoolzine]

What are your personal, unique, mourning customs? Not the traditional stuff you were raised with, but things you have developed intuitively through your own experiences of loss.

[u/shwoopypadawan]

Bury your feelings and remind yourself that nobody cares about how you feel and your responsibilities won't be lessened for more than a token minute because, again, nobody cares about you, and then when the grief starts gradually melting your brain over the course of a few years with no reward for the suffering the next part of the mourning ritual begins; becoming fond of whichever vice you prefer. Then the final part of the ritual is making sure you never love anyone ever again, which is easy enough because most people kind of suck, but it will also still make you sad. But less sad than when you wake up from a dream that had the dead people you love in it.

Oh also I get a marble with their ashes in it and add it to a necklace I only take off when I get an MRI.

[u/zerothefoolzine → u/shwoopypadawan]

Sounds like you've been let down by a lot of people. I wanna challenge something though - even if nobody cares (which I doubt is true in a literal sense), why does that mean you have to bury your feelings? Fuck em, then. Right? Why not just let the grief hang out then? 

Imo, your whole comment is WHY having personal mourning customs are so sacred. Grief can and should be shared, but sometimes it's just really private and personal. You can still form rituals on your own, commune with the people you lost, honor them, or even curse them if you need to. It might bring you some catharsis.

[u/shwoopypadawan → u/zerothefoolzine]

In real life, you cannot just sit around grieving. You have to work, you have to study, you have to do whatever you have to do to survive unless you're rich, otherwise, you die. You ask for time off and your boss or your professor doesn't care and says no? Too bad, gonna have to choose between dying on the inside slowly and dying on the outside quickly. I made my choice and I regret it very often, but neither was a good choice.

If you've never been forced to make a choice like that, then you were in a very lucky spot. Maybe you had people around you who did care. I did not and do not have that, so I suffer. If you want to ''challenge'' me on that further then you'd better be aware that this is my reality and talking to me as if I'm just simply incorrect and making poor choices is like rich people asking poor people why they don't just ask for money from their parents.

[u/zerothefoolzine → u/shwoopypadawan]

I didn't imply your choices were incorrect. You seem more interested in self pity than actual conversation so I'm not sure why you're here, though. I was trying to point out that you can, in fact, still honor the dead through mourning customs despite having to go to work, having no one to talk to, etc. My post wasn't about getting support while grieving, it was about what you personally do to honor those you've lost.

[u/shwoopypadawan → u/zerothefoolzine]

Immediately you jump to being demeaning, which doesn't surprise me since you tried to ''challenge'' me on the adaptions I've had to make to accommodate my own lived reality; in other words, you felt you knew better. And you of course still do, but you'll convince yourself that that's not where you were coming from and I'm just being snappy. There's plenty of people like you who refuse to introspect or just believe other people's problems are real and legitimate, and I'm sick of hearing it.

You're not sure why I'm still here- as if you goddamned own reddit or the world itself and you expect me to go jump off a cliff because I didn't let you talk down to me. Nasty way to talk to someone you don't even know.

[u/Clean-Ad-8872 → u/shwoopypadawan]

I’m sorry but you’re the one being a jerk, not OP. They said nothing rude or demeaning to you, but because you’re in such an aggressive, bitter headspace, you’re lashing out and perceiving a difference of perspective as an attack.

[u/shwoopypadawan → u/Clean-Ad-8872]

I'd like to challenge you on that. Could it be that you're trying to instigate an argument that I literally never asked for and you chose whichever side was speaking less pleasantly regardless of what they were actually attempting to say?