To ask if you have ever grieved for someone who’s passed away who you have never met?

[Acapulco12]

It seems strange, I know. I don’t think this has ever happened to me before, but at the moment, I think I’m feeling all the usual stages of ‘grief’ for someone whose death I read about in the news and who I’ve never met. It’s very strange and unexpected. I just wondered if anyone else has ever had anything like that.

It does sound like you have never lost someone very close, which is something to be very thankful for if this is the case. When my Dad passed the emotions I felt were physically devastating. If you have to question what the feeling is then perhaps it’s not grief. You didn’t know this man so you can’t really feel a personal sense of loss for the man, you can mourn for the loss, as you say, of his ideals, and the sad state of the world which the way it is could feel very profound indeed. There’s so much shit going on it’s easy to become immune but occasionally something happens that stops me in my tracks and I feel quite deeply about it. But then it all becomes overwhelming and I have to move on. Personal grief is different for everyone but I think to say that you are feeling it for a stranger, slightly belittles the devastating nature of losing someone close to you.

Gosh that’s depressing to hear, @StopTheBusINeedAWeeWeeAWeeWeeBagOChips. I really don’t like that either. I always find that quite performative as it’s so public.

I’m sure those people felt a sense of loss and sadness at his death, but I really don’t like it when people seem like they’re trying to get sympathy from the loved ones of someone who’s died.

I guess that people were posting under usernames rather than their real name, so they were anonymous, but still.

It’s a very, very different feeling to losing a loved one, of course. I realise that and I think that’s why I’m just trying to make sense of this feeling if I can, because I've never felt this particular feeling for someone I don’t know and have never met.

When I was a teenager, I lost a close friend in really horrible circumstances, and I have never ever known grief like that. It was really, really difficult, intensified by the fact she was so young - 18/19 - and it was so sudden and in terrible circumstances.

Now, I can think about her without getting immediately emotional, but it took a couple of years. I still miss her. Again, I completely understand that any feelings of sadness and grief are in no way comparable to what her family felt and continue to feel.

More recently, I have lost a relative and that was very very painful. It was very very sad, but it was and is comforting to know that he’d had a long and good life and was surrounded by his family when he passed away.

I think the whole reason why I have posted this thread is because I’m trying to make sense of a feeling of sadness that has come suddenly and hit me much deeper than I was expecting.

I’m not at all trying to say that it’s at all equal to the feeling of losing a loved one, although I can understand how this has come across in my posts, because it feels in some ways like that.

I’m not sure it was grief exactly but when Matthew Perry died, it hit me hard. I was crying watching TikToks of him. I grew up with him and just the fact that he’d struggled so much to get clean and then it’s all just snuffed out. I felt the sadness throughout my whole body and it really affected me. I felt really down for a few days.

I think that's such a lovely way of putting it into words 💖
For me it was Queen Elizabeth as she's all I've known I felt, and definitely Matthew Perry.

Robin Williams

Chester Bennington 😭 Still.

I totally understand how you feel OP.

For me it was David Bowie, took me completely by surprise but I just cried for days, I literally never cry. Once a year maybe tops? It completely winded me and my reaction baffled me, there was nothing horrible going on in my life either. God knows what that was all about. It happened a few years later too when my DS's schoolfriend had his whole family wiped out in a helicopter crash, I had to stop in a field as I was sobbing so badly I couldn't even drive. Just weird, I'd never even met them. They are the only two times I've felt irrational grief (or whatever) over strangers, our minds are fascinating. Oh and no searching for 'likes' or sympathy, I almost felt embarrassed tbh that I'd reacted so strongly.

Not grief especially but my Grandmothers father died when she was 6 and we have this lovely portrait of him and I look at it sometimes and feel sad. He lost his farm in the depression and ended up dying in a mental institution.

I've thought it was sad when various celebs have died or there's been a news report of a child's death or one in awful circumstances but I've never grieved or cried

I think the shots you see of people lining the streets in floods of tears, having to be held up, at the funeral of a celebrity are embarrassing.

I found people's behaviour after Diana died absolutely bewildering

I think I read about this and if it's the case I'm thinking of he had disabilities similar to my child and yes it was very sad 😔

I am still very upset about Chester Bennington. It was just so unbearable, pointless and tragic. LP songs just sounds so different now, and there's so much pain in his voice. He was put through hell in his childhood and tried so hard to fight his demons.

I was and still am quite surprised at how upset it makes me, as normally I'm far more blasé about these things.

Yes,

Terry Pratchett.

IMO the man was a genius and I am beyond sad that all those stories he had yet to write died with him.

Spoiler alert! 😥

I haven't been able to read that book yet 😥

I was very sad and shed a tear or two when I heard Dave Myers had died, but no, it's not grief.

I felt a great deal of sadness about Navalny, but want to support all of the other opposition leaders / dissidents who are still in prison / exile who are still talking about that awful regime. As I remember, Navalny always said that there were numerous people who would step forward if anything was to happen to him

I didn’t cry at his death , but I sure did have a few tears in reading what Si said about his death- it really was beautiful and unbearably sad.

I had a very short interaction with Terry Pratchett in the 90s as a junior reporter. He was such a lovely, gracious man. Felt very sad when he died as I knew he was beloved of so many people

It's not grieving the person, because you didn't know them.

You are grieving what they represented and brought to the world, maybe even how they died.

The Queen for example, we mourn the loss of a generation with her, something that made this country great ( which is a very rare thing now ). If you are a certain age you think of the relatives no longer with us that loved the Royal Family and especially The Queen.

It's a sense of loss and sadness which feels very much like grief.

I've felt sadness or shock wouldn't say I've grieved

Dartwarbler it was truly moving x

I grieved for the victims 7/7 I was working as a teacher in a secondary school at the time - looking after these kids while they desperately tried to contacts their families just in case they weren't ok was horrific. The stories of the fellow Londons and it being London felt very close to home.

Others including The Queen, George Micheal, Victoria Wood, Jeremy Hardy, George Alagiah all hit hard because I associate them with my deceased parents, so grief by proxy.

Finding the strangest thing about this thread is the people who are telling others what they do or don't feel. The emotion police!

I hope there are lots of people there to take his place.

I don’t know a great deal about who is there to step up to carry on with the opposition, but I think most of those people are in jail (e.g. Ilya Yashin or Vladimir Kara-Murza) or outside Russia (Navalny’s own family and his supporters).

I hope that those people who are in jail will be released and also that Navalny’s family and supporters can do something outside Russia to galvanise support for the opposition.

Im currently experiencing a deep sadness of someone passing that I have followed for a long time. I never knew them personally but feel that I have lost them. This feeling is really unexpected.

Not anyone famous. I was very affected by Baby P’s death as I had recently become a mum.