[SteelSpine]

Anon's post resonated with me also; I have been experiencing a lot of unexpected grief this summer (the start of the the 4th year since BD) for many reasons -- some of which a lot of us share at this stage.

About 18 months ago I also lost my mother, which is a separate sorrow, but has also complicated and deepened the grief I feel for my marriage and family.

I found a book, "Resilient Grieving" helped a lot.

It is almost as though the grief seeps in now that the shock and disbelief have finally worn off. 

At least for me anyway, I cannot speak for anyone else.

[Treasur]

Terra, yes you and me have both found EMDR helpful I think. Interested in what you say about 'active' grief work...can you say a bit more about what that has entailed for you?

Have others found other kinds of therapy useful for grief?



I am so sorry, Steel, that you lost your mother. Is the new grief seeping in a different kind of grief? Do you cope with it differently?

I don't know if this 'grief return' is a bit disheartening for others, but it does seem to be not uncommon and tbh I find that reassuring to know I am not alone with that. Mine seems deeper and also lighter to carry if that is not an oxymoron. There was a time when grief felt like fear to me, as if I had no skin and everything hurt. As if I was in it and all I could do was be...but I was desparate for escape. This new type of grief now feels like more of a doing thing, as if it is slightly out of reach but important to look at and touch somehow. Hmm, words are difficult to find...not sure, but it feels different than before.

Have other people also had significant losses either in the couple of years pre BD or the couple of years after?

[Anjae]

Grief... where to start... At first I don't think I even knew about grief. Mr J left, my dad died seven days afterwards. I was too ill, depressed and already diving into my own MLC to be able to understand part of what I was dealing with was grief. Around Christmas, two days before my birthday my favourite maternal great aunt died. I didn't come home for Christmas that year, I spend it alone. The only year I ever spend Christmas alone.

I had family in the capital, as, of course, here, but the thought of dealing with questions about why Mr J wasn't coming was too much for me to handle. I said I had to work. I enjoyed spending 2006 Christmas on my onw. Mr J was still in his at times normal, at times monster and he was worried that I had stayed, so keep checking on me.

Things carried on, my Replay, Mr J's Replay getting worst and worst, then moving back home, then starting looking after grandmother.

I didn't deal with grief while having my Replay phase. Or I did in "all the wrong ways" that may had been the right ways. There wasn't much time to process, if any. First it was my own MLC, then it was looking after grandmother. Having a super clinger MLCer doesn't help, nor does it help when the super clinger I cut off for peace of mind kept doing nasty, hurtful things that keep reminding me of his existence for years on end.

Grief was dealt slowly, years after BD, when I had some time for myself. It may only had been fully sorted after grandmother died in late 2016. Interestingly, it was far easier to deal with grief from grandmother's death. She was suffering, very elderly and her death was expected. As her caregiver I was relieved she was finally in peace.

BD? MLC? The death and break of a life plan, because a marriage/relationship is a life plan, an idea for a joint future. That is another type of beast and one I don't want to face again.

Have other people also had significant losses either in the couple of years pre BD or the couple of years after?

As mentioned above, I lost my dad 7 days after BD and my favourite maternal great aunt two months afterwards. Since Mr J's MLC started I also lost my paternal aunt, one of my uncles (by marriege), my favourite paternal great aunt, my younger maternal great aunt, my maternal great uncles that were still alive in 2006, and my beloved maternal grandmother. And many friends, including several 10 or more years younger than myself.

And my aunt scared the hell out of us with cancer and a stroke in the last few years. My paternal grandmother has Alzheimer's. BD/MLC I also meant I lost my home, my social circle and life as I knew it.

On the other hand, I gained a nephew and a niece (that I hardly ever see because she lives in another country) and a few second counsins, of which I only tend to regularly see one. One of my brothers and one of my cousins moved abroad, so the family that is around is shrinking. My younger brother and his girlfriend may be moving early next year.

Family is important to me, so, this has been a bit peculiar.

Early on, after I come back home, I saw my friend who is a psychiatrist and got a GP here. I can't say the doctors in the capital were of much help. They meant well, but they didn't seem to understand what I was going throught. And, of course, Aside from my paternal grandmother, I told nothing to my family until February 2007 when my younger sister said she was going to come by our flat in the capital. 

I think I am a little better telling people about things, but not sure. I think most of my grief and pain come from the fact that I didn't dealt with BD/OW/divorce right away as I should, that is in a practical, logical manner. Becoming emotional didn't serve me well and caused much pain, damage and loss.

[Anon]

Mine seems deeper and also lighter to carry if that is not an oxymoron. There was a time when grief felt like fear to me, as if I had no skin and everything hurt. As if I was in it and all I could do was be...but I was desparate for escape. This new type of grief now feels like more of a doing thing, as if it is slightly out of reach but important to look at and touch somehow. Hmm, words are difficult to find...not sure, but it feels different than before.

Have other people also had significant losses either in the couple of years pre BD or the couple of years after?

I can relate so well.  The grief in the 1st year was like fear.   Fear that this wouldn’t be temporary.  Fear that he wouldn’t ever be back.   Fear that his new life would stick and I’d be shut out of his life forever.

The grief I feel now is the full realization that this is permanent for me, he’s never coming back because I’m done and will not let him come back, and very soon there will be no reason for contact and I will shut him out of my life completely. 

I feel this grief as painfully as I felt the grief in the early days.  What’s different is I am dealing with it differently.   Not trying to hang on for dear life in the midst of overwhelming grief until my old life was restored but accepting my past life is over.  My grief is more about permanent closure than hanging on through the temporary storm. 

The grief from the early days did lessen in intensity over time and I managed to live a pretty decent life.  But,,,I still had one foot in my old life by not making the difficult decision the fully let go and wrap up our joint affairs.  Now,,,selling the houses, closing joint accounts, getting rid of possessions.  By spring I expect to be living in a different locale, in my own house, with absolutely no reason for contact with h.    It really is good-bye and it hurts.  Boy does it hurt 😔

I suspect it will take awhile to get through to the other side where one day I’ve completed the closure in the same way we reach closure when a loved one dies.

To answer your other question ,,, my mother passed away 2 months before BD.  The year prior I was travelling frequently to visit her while she declined.  It was another crazy 3 weeks preparing and arranging for her memorial service.    I felt like an orphan.  All my immediate family was gone.  Grieving for her loss really hit after her memorial service.   I was BD’d 6 weeks later.   

[Treasur]

In my head I think of it as fresh grief and old grief....and they feel quite different to me.

I am so sorry, Anon, for the loss of your mother followed by BD. It must have been unimaginably hard to cope with both in a healthy way. Do you think BD affected how you coped with your mother's death? Or vice versa?

I had three big losses within 6 months; my father, then my husband, then my mother.
Only the loss of my father felt like a 'normal' kind of grief.

Looking back, I can see the 'phases' of a more traditional - albeit awful - grieving. The kind of denial that goes with the treatment of a terminal illness. The first punch of reality when I accepted he was about to die which didn't hit me until the last two days. The numb functioning. The role his funeral played and the significance of listening to others talk about him with love and the stories they told. Back to a kind of numb lost feeling for about three months followed by a kind of drip drip of acceptance. With sharp bursts of pain and yearning often triggered by small things that underpinned his absence. Probably took me about six months or so to reach a place where he sort of became my father again in my head rather than a source of grief if that makes sense. I missed him, I miss him now but there was nothing abnormal or damaging in the process of grieving. No unfinished business, no guilt...only love and good memories and the ability to carry him with me as a kind of legacy I suppose.

My husband and my mother were/are more complicated and more ambiguous to grieve. It was a much crazier and much more flaying and confusing kind of grief. Both of them are still physically alive but unrecognisable. Both are absent from my everyday life. Neither of them feel or behave towards me as they did, and I can't feel or behave towards them as I did...my h's depression/MLC and my m's dementia.

Having those three kinds of losses has often made me compare and contrast them. Tbh sometimes I have wondered if one was supposed to teach me something about another.... I read somewhere that loss is really about four things; safety, love, confidence and control. Losing my father was about the first two and perhaps that is part of why it wasn't the kind of grief that broke me. It wounded me but it didn't break me. But the circumstances with my h and my mother were both a 4/4 in different ways. Times 2. And the pain was so unbearable and so overwhelming that I think my brain knew I had two choices; to avoid it by suicide or to avoid it by PTSD. Fortunately for me, my brain and fate chose the latter. I suppose I see PTSD as being like a kind of five star avoidance strategy....that my system shut down to escape what I could not cope with. Which sucked on one level, but makes good sense now.

I have wondered sometimes - and no criticism to any stander here - whether some part of standing is also a kind of necessary denial for a little while. That it prevents us having to jump into divorce paperwork and selling houses and all the real stuff of severing those links you describe Anon until we are strong enough to do it. But it maybe delays a deeper kind of acceptance perhaps. Maybe some of those things are the equivalent of a funeral idk? Albeit a funeral without fellow mourners saying nice things lol. Maybe there is a denial kind of standing which is then replaced with a different kind of standing as reality and acceptance bite? A choice rather than a defence? Idk. For me, I think standing was a kind of grief reaction bc I didn't know what else to do...so I felt delayed grief when I let go. Actually that is probably what flipped me from 'normal' anxiety into PTSD perhaps.

And now post PTSD, and when the practical links are severed, as you say there is a different kind of grief bc there is a different kind of permanence. Just as you say. But, on a positive note although the return of grief has surprised me, it does feel like something I can work through as opposed to just hunkering down in a storm and hoping to survive. Again though, in my case, I have those two strange kinds of losses to work on simultaneously...my h and my mother.

What I feel...and it is a bit uncomfortable to say, but it is real so I'll say it....is that it has left me in a place where I am not yet committed to life. I am not suicidal; that's quite a different feeling. But I am uncommitted to living. Which is why I can't decide what to do about say getting a cat or whether I should move my mother to a facility nearer to me. I wrote on my own thread about Not Wants and Wants and I couldn't figure out what was stopping me seeing the Wants. I knew something was but I didn't know what. And this morning I realised it isbc I have not yet consciously decided to live. I chose to survive and to exist...but my jury is out on the living thing. Which is why I think my unfinished grief work is important.

I have never been a fan of the traditional Kubler-Ross DABDA thing. Partly bc it was based on people who were dying not those grieving for them. Mostly bc I think those emotions are more symptoms than stages. Flavours of grief. Fresh grief seems like a storm just as you describe, Anon. Older more complicated messier grief feels like it needs more than acknowledging the storm. So that is where I am at today. The good thing is that I am nervous but not afraid of it as I was 

[Treasur]

And in case it is useful to anyone else
https://whatsyourgrief.com/ambiguous-grief-grieving-someone-who-is-still-alive/
https://whatsyourgrief.com/ambiguous-grief-part-2/
https://whatsyourgrief.com/avoidance-in-grief/

[Ready2Transform]

Ready - there is something about almost making friends with our grief for a while isn't there? And seeing the balance between the more cognitive bits and the bits that are more intuitive or instinctive almost. People talk about stages and grief does seem to have a kind of flow and rhythm of its own, but with different flavours maybe? I have been a champion of avoidance ha ha (although to be fair PTSD saved me as well as stalled me for a while)...so sounds like I could learn a bit from your experience 

I am humbled by that, but rest assured, I am still very much a work in progress! I will be learning just as much from your experience. The beauty of a good support group is no one is really ahead of anyone else, so long as we are on our own paths.

My father lost his parents in '77 and '78, rounding out a ten year span of the worst events of his life. He had some army-related issues and lost two best friends and a son at the beginning of it, and I was born smack in the middle. So I grew up seeing one damaged person, who I loved very much but that I understood was not like other dads. When my parents divorced I got to see a freer, happier person, but he was still finding himself. His second marriage and divorce brought out another different person, and I believe he had a crisis after that. Just a big breakdown that was years in the making. Then xH drama, who was like the son he lost to him. Just now he's admitting that his entire adult life has been about finding how to navigate the grief. It's been booze at times, it's been anger, it's been a bit of dissociation. But mainly it's been about the loss of his mother and the inability to reconcile it. And that, my friends, is now over 40 years deep. He says he wished counseling had been a thing more people were encouraged to do, like they are now. Dealing with it on his own has altered so much. But I don't know that there ever would have been a way for it to be "fixed" upfront. I think this is just how it is. I try to not make myself something that is not fluid because of that, because I have seen that ebb and flow up close. I honestly don't think there's a "fix" for my xH either, or that he'll just roll back into an identity he had before. I know this has also changed me into a different person where this will always have happened. I just have to use my dad's example to not let it be the captain of the ship. It's something I'm still learning to navigate, but feels like it's at least easier than it was.

[OffRoad]

We all grieve differently,  for one thing. We all have past experiences that color our grief and how we grieve. And I also believe that grief is not a one and done. Everytime we see something tha reminds us of our lost loved one, we grieve again: that we will never experience that particular thing with them again. People don't really understand how those bittersweet memories contain grief.

My mother recently died, and mine is definitely not the standard grief. It's grief for what wasn't what can now never be. I also grieve for my sister who does miss our mother, and my niece who was practically raised by her, and for my other nephews and niece who were left out of the will and they have no understanding of why they weren't "good enough".  We grieve for our children's loss of innocence when the MLCER leaves,  even if they still have a relationship with their children, moreso, I think,  if they don't . Pets, included suffer, and we grieve for the emotional hurt they feel that we cannot explain to them.

Grief is not one dimensional, nor are any of the stages.  The more people involved, the more likely there are more layers to the grief.  Is it any wonder some might  have a harder time sorting it and working through?

[Treasur]

I apologise in advance if some of the questions I throw into the discussion don't 'fit' bc of course they are spinning out from where my head is right now.

Last night I found myself crying for my mother. A really deep sense of loss. I just wanted my mum. And I haven't felt that or done that since she disappeared into dementia. I have cried but more about her than about me if that makes sense. I think I have been afraid to look closely at what I have lost, at who my mother was before the shell she is now. I think that's bc my father's death was something I could grieve in a more normal way. And the loss of my h and all the hideous reality that went with that was so overwhelming it left no space for more grief.

I feel a need to DO something with some of my grief that I hadn't felt before. Can't explain it, not quite sure what I will do but it feels as if I have unfinished business. As if I needed to run from it or hunker down initially and now it feels like I need to turn around and look it in the eye. That it is necessary to be able to live after it all.

Which makes me wonder....is there a difference between grief and mourning? 

Is grief the feeling and mourning the things we do to recover a life after grief? Is grief the thing we felt as LBS while things were unravelling and the need to mourn the thing we feel much later when we can see the permanence of what has been unravelled? Is grief more about 'them' and mourning more about ourself?

And how does that affect those who choose to stand? Or those who don't?

And how do we know or measure when we are 'better'?

[Anjae]

Last night I found myself crying for my mother.

I'm so sorry, Treasur. I haven't lost my mum to Alzheimer's, but my paternal grandmother's one is getting worst. My mum has vascular dementia. Difference sources, but what we see is similar. Mum is not as bad, but who knows how things will go.

I want my paternal grandmother. I can't talk to her as I used to, I can't go out with her, we no longer can go for a coffee or to the hairdresser. I can't say she has dissappeared into herself. At least I don't see it that way. More like she is living in the past and I get to know things I didn't knew. I wrote a little about it in my thread.

Which makes me wonder....is there a difference between grief and mourning? 

In Portuguese there is. We say mourning for a marriage/relationship "fazer o luto" that is the same as mourning "fazer o luto" for a dead person or a person that has dememtia. Psychiatrists, psychologist, GP's etc. use "fazer o luto" = mourning.

Grief translates as sorrow, sadness, pain, heartache. It is more a feeling of sadness that doing something to aknowledge the end of a marriage/relationship, the death of a loved one or the loss of a loved the one to dementia. Fazer o luto is coming to terms with what happenned/is.

Fazer o luto (mourning) involves sadness, sorrow, hurt, pain, but it is an active thing towards healing.

And how do we know or measure when we are 'better'?

When we no long mourn/feel grief. It will be different for each of us.