This:
"Grief is not a competition and your grief is just as valid as theirs".
I'm shocked by some of the posters on this thread. I dislike the trend towards sanctifying people who have lost a child. The grief is hideous and all encompassing. However the fact of losing a child does not elevate every parent into a position of sainthood, of being untouchable and allowed to be as selfish and cruel and destructive as they want.
I do not mean to denigrate the loss of a child.
I know too well what grief is. And I will admit this thread has been very hard to read for me personally. I have experienced someone behaving awfully after a death, and I managed to forgive them once, saying to myself that the death of a child excuses such nasty behaviour. Except it happened again, when my family was then all gone, and this person behaved as badly all over again. And it dawned on me that sometimes, it's not the loss of a child that drives exceptionally raw and upsetting behaviour, it can just be the kind of person they are.
The death of a child is indescribably awful. But it doesn't mean it's acceptable to push aside everyone else's grief except the grief of a parent for a child.
There's enough pain and hurt to go around. There really, really, is. A person grieving for their partner, sister, brother, parent, love... they aren't stealing away something from the parents.
Their feelings and life changing hurt should not be belittled or disrespected. It's shocking that anyone would think that's an appropriate response to someone's misery and pain.
Grief can excuse a certain amount of 'not usual' acts. Acts formed from raw and uncensored emotion. But there is a limit.
And that limit normally comes from inside the grieving person themselves. I think that generally good people don't do these exceptionally cruel things to others. They don't go out of their way to put the boot in and to make someone hurt more than they have to.
Good people might hit out in their grief and madness after losing a child. But they don't insist on their right to be cruel to another person.
But nastier people give themselves liscence to carry on behaving nastily and allow themselves to behave without compassion or humanity even whilst they expect all the compassion to flow towards themselves.
OP, I hope you can find the space and time to grief fully for the person you loved and had planned to spend a lifetime with. I hope you can get some distance from these parents, who at best are unbalanced from the shock of the suicide, at worst are not nice people at their core.
They have not behaved kindly and it's not really excusable. However it is what it is and I'd think about protecting yourself from the way they are chiding to grieve. I'd make sure they dont have the opportunity to hit out at you again, to make your grieving more painful than it already is. Don't engage with them. Concentrate on your love and life and time with him. And yourself.
