Reply to "Normal" reaction to loss of parent, what is typical?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This feels pretty typical to me, but there is no “normal”. I remember when I was 14 and my aunt died—I cried nonstop for a week, couldn’t go to school, and still felt pretty normal after—but losing an aunt is different from losing a parent.[/quote]
Was Your aunt your caretaker or was it a gruesome or sudden tragic death?

Often children and teens don’t know how to grieve or process big emotions so they copy movies or what they then they should be doing- bawling, crying, heaving, suffering, lying around, not functioning. 
There is also peer pressure to show sadness, at that age. My high school class lost a girl to cancer- she showed up in 9th grade and died in 10th grade. The entire school was at the funeral and kids who didn’t even know her from her sports or honor classes were loudly crying the whole time. Were they truly very sad? Did they want to appear very sad to be socially acceptable? Were they projecting doomsday on themselves? Did they have other connections or deaths recently and triggered? Unlikely. Just peer pressure. [/quote]

Her death was unexpected and in a way that’s still hard for me to say here. It happened right after we’d returned from vacationing together over the holidays. We were a close family. This wasn’t my first experience with grief, but it was the one that hit the hardest as a kid. My grandfather had died when I was 11; he was very elderly and sick (still had mostly the same reaction), and while I cried and struggled then too, it wasn’t as intense and was easier to process because of the circumstances.

Losing my aunt — someone young and close to me was very different, and as a teenage girl (especially a more naive & “young for X age” one) the way she died was frightening and destabilizing. It suddenly made the world feel unpredictable and unsafe in a way I hadn’t experienced before. She was about to turn 30, healthy, and had very small children: a 1 year-old girl  and 3 year old boy. I spent a lot of time with them and babysat sometimes just because even though she didn’t need it, because I loved babies/toddlers, and part of my grief was for her kids as well. I loved my own mom deeply, often had nightmares about losing her, so the thought of her children growing up without their wonderful mom was incomprehensible me.

My mom was a mess , which did play a role; she wasn’t cooking, wasn’t going to work, wasn’t enforcing routines, and wasn’t emotionally there in the way she normally was. I barely ate or went to school that week and lost weight as a result.  I didn’t use any of the new gifts my aunt had given me because I couldn’t bear to look at them, and put away all the items she ever gave me for months (8-10) because it was just to painful to use/see. After that week, there was still a looming feeling of sadness & grief, and my mom hasn’t been the same since. Even now, every couple of months, something will trigger it and I still feel a wave of grief, it’s certainly a complex thing to deal with.[/quote]
Not sure why the post got removed. You're referring to an overdose or suicide, right?[/quote]
No, a pretty gruesome freak accident, too much to write here.[/quote]

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