Ever Grieving SIL

This.

I’ve just remembered about a girl I knew years ago, we’ve lost contact now. She was really upset on the anniversary of a grandparents death and I sat listening and talking to her about it and saying how they had all these lovely memories and that kind of thing. She mentioned it was the 25th anniversary, we were only 20. I was comforting her over someone she hadn’t actually met.

I had to delete someone on fb who seemed to be performance grieving about 20 people; her parents, her grandparents (she’s in her late 50s so her grandparents died a long time ago), her husbands parents, friends, neighbours, ex colleagues. If the person has died and she met them, she goes on about them on FB. Every fucking day it was some grief anniversary or other. She also regularly posts photos of herself crying.

I have every sympathy for people who are grieving and I agree there is absolutely no time limit on grief. However I have no sympathy for performance grieving.

My cousin is like this. It's ridiculous. Her sister laughs at her. She's a competitive griever at funerals.

It’s nearly twice that since my parent died and I still have moments. I don’t share that on social media like FB, but I’m sharing it on this social media just as you’re sharing your feelings on this social media.

I work with dying people and so meet a lot of grieving people and my perspective on ppl who post online about their grief really shifted when someone explained to me that there’s a big difference in how extraverts and introverts grieve. I see that in FB posts now.

Social media means different things to different people. For some, it is their main interaction with their wider network of friends and family. A forum for people they know and love. When they post things like your SIL posts, it seems to me they are saying "Hi family and friends, this (the loss) hurts, please care about the fact that it hurts".

For other people it's more like a scrapbook or diary, and they use it to catalogue their own thoughts and experiences for themselves mostly.

There is, of course, also the use of social media for attention and likes, and a bereavement gives them a way to get this.

I would assume that people have a mix of these things going on rather than being purely one type or another. In any case, it's fine for her to post, and it's fine for it to irk you and cause you to mute her.

Grief hits everyone differently, I couldn't imagine feeling anything but empathy for someone grieving. If I was bothered by this I'd probably reflect on what it triggers in me.

Quite. There IS a hierarchy of loss. Losing a child, losing a parent, losing a grandparent… your individual relationship with these figures in your life may vary but symbolically we all know and understand the hierarchy of loss and those expectations play a huge role in grief. If your SIL tried to make your grandfather's death all about her then that’s a reason to totally disengage. But don’t kid yourself that your stoic response to your grandparent dying should be an example to someone else who’s not even your sibling about how they should be grieving for their parent.

It isn't a disorder at all to suffer years down the line. What that label does is make the OP more comfortable and saying her grief has a time limit and we want you to shut up.

Losing a grandparent is not the equivalent of losing a parent, sorry OP it just isn’t. And I say that as someone who has lost both a beloved parent and grandparents. What age was her dad when he died? As life goes on I think of everything my parent missed that they should have seen and maybe she is processing that online.
She expresses grief and love differently than you. I wouldn’t post this sort of stuff on SM regularly either, but she’s harming no one and writing to express emotions can be really helpful to process.

My sil lost her husband 3 years ago
..and he's become a saint, not the drunken bum who emotionally abused hervand spunked all their money away. Not the twat who made no effort to see his mum for 10 years but gladly emptied her house of anything valuable before his sister moved her into care.
The same woman who made a joke about her widowed mother getting a boyfriend and then got upset when her brother suggested she go on grinder( he meant tinder but it was funnier). Yes I don't like her.
Why .... Here's one example she booked the same church as us to get married an hour later than us...

hope ur ok hen.

I get why it grates but rather than dislike for her surely a more normal reaction would be sadness, empathy, pity even. But distain? Stop looking and block her from your timeline you nosey crow.

You see I agree with Ernest Hemingway so posting little reminders of my sister who died (aged 31), thirty years ago is my way of keeping her memory alive.

Obviously her children will remember bits of her after I have died but she died when they were 6 and 4 so don't have real memories of who she was as a person. My BIL, her husband died 12 years after she did so he won't be able to remember her. My mum and dad are dead too. So all those people most affected by her death ( excluding her children) who actually knew her well are almost all gone

When I and my other sister have died, there will be very few people left who even know who she was. Until I die, I want to go on remembering her to keep here with us just a bit longer Not every day or anything but at key times and I want to share that memory. For me it is not grief in the sense that I am saying look how much I lost but more my sister was brilliant and I don't want ther memory of who she was as person to fade completely just yet. Despite it being 30 years since she died .

Oh wow! I could tell you some stories about death and Facebook. Brothers ex girlfriend announced his death within minutes of finding out. Close family hadn’t even been told. Obscene photos added to Facebook. She disgusts me.

My mum suffered from complicated grief after my father died. A friend told me recently that she been gobsmacked that he’d died ten years before she met us as the way my mum spoke about it she’d first knew us made it seem like he’d died that year.

Nobody could suffer like she did. We ended up cut off from his family as she couldn’t accept they were suffering too. She never thought about counselling for me as she thought I was too young to be upset and would never accept I’d had a traumatic childhood as a result of what happened. Nor would she ever consider that her behaviour had any impact on me.

I have no advice but I do feel the behaviour is selfish to some extent. I think people can build their whole identity around their grief and, in a way, not want to change this and that is their choice.

I dont find any benefit for me to post outpouring of grief on Facebook. However everyone is different and others do.

Worse case scenario it is for attention, then I sympathise with her for that too. Either way she is not doing any harm and struggling so give her a break.

Genuine question, have you ever lost someone extremely close to you? Answer sincerely.

This has just reminded me.....

I posted about my fathers older brother above, and when he passed a member of the "drama llama" branch of the family posted about it on facebook before one of his own grandchildren knew.

Its what they do and it disgusts me.

Why should people suffer for many years in silence if they don't want to? If posting about it helps then they should go ahead, it's their social media and they can share what they like. Again, it is super easy to mute someone if you don't want to see what they are posting.

As you said, it's personal. Some people will prefer to be private about it but others don't, neither are wrong because there's no wrong way to grieve.

Yanbu. Grief may never go away, but that does not mean we all want to read about it 50x per year on Facebook. I have lost loved ones, I just don’t write about my grief online. But of course SIL can post whatever she likes … so I would just mute her. Easiest and friendly solution.