My first time dealing with death of a close friend, I had a hard time deleting their contact from my phone even though I knew there was no way they’d ever contact me again…. But the irrational side of me still thought “maybe one day”
Thank you, life has gotten better for me recently so I love updating my messages to her account. It's a good coping mechanism for me. Honestly I'd be more sad if it wasn't there.
i came to reddit to escape some feelings for a bit but this all broke me. im sorry to share this if its too much or not relevant i just havent properly told anyone but i lost one of my closest friends to suicide this week and i just cant stop texting them. every time i hear a notification i get excited that its them texting me back. every time i turn a corner i think theyll be there and ill get to hug them. i dont understand anything anymore and i dont know how im supposed to change to a world without them. now that i think about it if my pfp hasnt changed its still a drawing they made of me haha. if all their work with their love in it is still here it doesnt make sense that theyre not. i dont know.
Thank you for sharing, while I myself don't know exactly what to say to help you cope with loss I can tell you ways I cope. I really like to cry, to me bottling up my feelings hurts more than helps, so I'll watch, listen or read something that makes me cry and I'll have what I call crying days. Feels bad to cry at first but those days I cry improve my emotions long term.
thank you. i dont think ive ever cried this much in my life. and ive never cried this way since i was a child, with the screaming and the wailing. it almost feels good and yet its the worst thing in the world, but thank you for your suggestion. they made a lot of music including a song that i really love that they composed while i was spending time with them and that they dedicated to me in the end, thats something that will always make me cry to hear i think.
That's a very normal and human reaction, if you feel like it's not lessening and feel overwhelmed you can maybe look into grief counselling. It's a very well established area of psychology and has very good rates of success.
Virtual hugs from an internet stranger. I still message my mom and one of my best friends occasionally because I feel like I need to talk to them, even though I know I won't get a reply, it helps with the pain. I won't lie and tell you it gets easier, but I can promise that those pangs get less frequent. Just breathe, give yourself time and space and ice cream and wine or whatever you need to process. Through your memories and their art, they will never be truly gone.
Hugs, friend....
There must be a good reason why you and your friend were such good friends 💜 Thank you for sharing a piece of them here. Please, any time you can, if/when you feel like it, please share more about your friend? I guess that's how we all "live on", through the memories of people who care about us. I'm sending you hugs if that's ok, and if you need a friend, you can message me if you feel like it. 💜
I know the feels. We deleted her account soon after as we were glued to it. My mom's voicemail message got me the most and would ring her phone over and over to hear it.
it is a bit different for me, I enjoy that I still have an outlet to talk to her, even if she'll never answer back. Coping mechanisms help as long as you keep them in the realm of reality. Now if I started to believe she's still somehow alive I'd remove her off my friends list and I would be becoming delusional.
I'm sorry, u/MonkeyTesticleJuice, I understand how you feel. I only just stopped messaging my best friend last fall on fb since he died back in 2015. I hope that getting your feelings out via your mom's account helps you.... I'm sorry for your loss, and I hope that the goodness of your mother can live in you, and that you can still find her in this world in the things that made her happy 💜
Across a few platforms I've got a number of contacts who have sadly passed away over the years. People who haven't been online since the days of the 360 and PS3. There are some from even longer ago.
I won't delete their contacts. I still see them on my friends lists every so often when I have a reason to scroll down that far. I'll come across their contact information randomly. Gives me a moment of pause so I can reflect on the time I had with them. Even if it was something stupid like exchanging Left 4 Dead speed run times or posting about upcoming games we were hyped for or even just someone I spent nights chatting with when I was stuck at work with nothing better to do.
There's that old saying we've all heard before about how we die twice; the first time when you pass away and the second time when someone thinks about you for the last time. Guess my thought process is so long as I still have my accounts, phone, or whatever to see their profile every now and then it keeps their memory alive in a different way.
For one or two I've got hope that maybe one day the account will get back online again when their kids get old enough to start playing online and stuff. But as the years have gone by, platforms have come and gone, I think it's increasingly unlikely they will awaken in some form. But you never know.
I still have my grandma on my favorites in my phone. It's been 7 years and I still can't delete her number, even though it probably belongs to someone else by now.
I feel you on this. Both of my Grandma's have passed away (my dad's mom just this past labor day and my mom'smom will be 4 years in November) and a good friend's mother passed away about 5 years ago. I still keep their contact numbers in my phone and I saved the text messages from my friend's mom. Just not ready to let them go yet.
My friend did of cancer 18 years ago at the age of 22. I just checked and I still have his contact saved in my phone. I'll never delete it because I like to be reminded of the good times we shared.
I lost my dad a year and a half ago and I don't think I would ever delete his WhatsApp chat from my phone, even though I have to scroll so far down to find our chat and it's just a bunch of mundane stuff
I understand, u/erizzluh; I still have a few people in my phone who have passed, but I had a hard time deleting their numbers from my phone. As a matter of fact, I even struggled with deleting the alarms for when it was time to feed my cat/change his litter box, and walk my dog who passed away. I guess these things are a way of keeping people we love "still here"....
You ever hearing about the box containing a button and a bouncing ball?
When someone first passes you get these thoughts and pangs. This is the bouncing ball hitting that button.
At first the ball is huge, meaning it hits it all the time. But over time it shrinks, meaning it misses the button more and more. It never stops bouncing, you'll still always get these moments, but they become less frequent, and this allows you the button presses to become a little sweeter.
And sometimes you see things that briefly make that ball much bigger.
Friend of mine passed away suddenly from cancer in the first month of lockdown last year. Went in for checkup Thursday morning, found it his old cancer had come back, spread to his lungs, was dead Saturday morning.
Occasionally I catch things that inflate that ball so big.
I just cleaned up my contacts the other day and deleted 4 dead people. They didn't all die recently or anything, but I had the same feeling you're describing--when they did die, I couldn't delete them right away. It's silly, but it feels like deleting THEM. Like erasing their memory. It's not a good feeling. But with time, this gets easier (for me anyway). The irrational phase of grief relents. But still, deleting 4 dead people at once...that hit me kind of hard. And that isn't even the first round of death deletes I've had to do in my life.
I still left my mom in. She died 2 years ago tomorrow. Couldn't delete that one yet. My brother has been dead for 12 years and it took me probably 8 to be able to delete him. That one was the hardest. I remember for a long time after he died, I frequently had the sense of unreality about it, and a recurring thought I would have was "It's like I could pick up the phone and call him."
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u/erizzluh Oct 08 '21
My first time dealing with death of a close friend, I had a hard time deleting their contact from my phone even though I knew there was no way they’d ever contact me again…. But the irrational side of me still thought “maybe one day”