Why are people trying to downplay how awful this is?

[laughloseya]

We got the news a couple of weeks ago that a colleague’s wife is terminally ill. Their daughter is only 23. It is so awful and I can’t stop thinking about them.

I was talking to another colleague about the situation. We are all good friends as well as colleagues and have been for many years, so know the family well. The colleague I was speaking to agreed it was awful and said she knew how they felt because she’d lost her father in her 40s. I lost my mother in my 30s and I said it wasn’t the same as being 23, and that our parents had both died suddenly, we didn’t have to endure watching it happen slowly. She immediately said ‘my uncle died slowly in my 20s, I know exactly what they’re going through’.

And then another colleague mentioned yesterday that she also knew exactly what the family was going through because her grandad had cancer in his 70s.

I just don’t understand this attitude of trying to shoehorn your own experience into this family tragedy.

None of them has said this to the person, they have said it in general conversation among each other.

There is nothing to be proud about in trying to impose a hierarchy of grief on other humans. It's highly judgemental and not a little bit snide. Far more snide than ordinary people using their own experiences to relate to illness and death. Trying to relate in that way is people quite literally then trying to understand the perspective of someone else - something the OP is failing to do apart from with one specific person that she has decided is the top of the tree in her special grief hierarchy.

Come on to fuck and let people be the humans they are.

My mum died when I was in my 30s
My sons friend lost hers when she had just turned 16. Absolutely not the same or comparable at all.
I couldn't imagine losing my mum at such a young age. I sent her flowers & a card (shes been friends with ds since nursery)
She is 20 now & works at the vets where i take my dogs. She is a polite, beautiful, kind caring girl (always has been) and i'm glad she's doing what she always wanted to do in life.
Her mum would've been so proud of her. And her mum was lovely too. 23...same age my eldest son....doesn't bare thinking about poor girl xxx

I think its kind of gross that you're going out of your way to talk to people about it like a grief tourist and then accusing them of not really getting it because their tragedy isn't "as bad".

I lost my mum to cancer in my 20s, before I'd gotten married or had kids and i loved her, we were close. But I coped far better than my colleague who lost her mum suddenly last year in her late 40s. So does my experience qualify me to have a view?

I honestly think you need to butt out, particularly if you aren't supporting anyone and just causing arguments. You aren't helping anyone. You need to really examine why you're so invested.

And please don't reply to me because its creepy how empathetic you want to be to someone you barely know and I just gdont actually want to engage with you. Im only commenting because i wanted you to know that 20- something women who lose a parent aren't all one homogenous group who would appreciate you going to bat for them.

Thank you for the explanation. I read the blog post too. I do recall someone at my mother's funeral who could be a grief vulture - my mother's beautician. Previously my mother gave me a gift voucher to go to this beautician and we chatted quite a bit, she seemed nice. But then later she told my mother how we had become best friends and she emailed me etc. It was ....odd and I avoided her after that. At my mother's funeral, she was, according to close friends of my mother, talking to everyone about how close she was to my mother, and to me (!). My mother's friends bristled at this, they were so offended. This was a close village community, neighbours popping into to help with washing or chatting when someone was struggling, and the whole village attended the funerals. I had wondered whether it was because the beautician was from another village that my mother's friends were so irked by her. But I can see now it was because they thought she was claiming a closer relationship than there was and using it to elevate herself in some way and get attention.

I agree, that's obnoxious. Also, the story by another PP below of the guy who carried a framed photo of the deceased behind the coffin, and then did the same at a charity walkathon, yet he wasn't actually a close friend. I see the performativeness and him doing it to get attention, so yes, probably a grief vulture.

But in the OP scenario, it's a bunch of colleagues standing together, not in earshot of the colleague whose wife has a terminal disease, and they're talking among each other about their own experiences with grief. I see that as trying to empathise with the suffering of the colleague, not grief vulturing.

That is not the correct definition of empathy.

OP will be waking up this morning and wishing she'd not opened that second bottle. New level of beer fear - arguing with strangers on mumsnet over whether their grief is difficult enough for her.

Sounds like a macabre game of Top Trumps. My grief is worse than yours! No, my experience is even worse!

So distasteful.

No one can know exactly what someone is going through

It’s not the same, since we were that much older, but I don’t mind admitting that I almost envied a SiL whose parents died very suddenly in their 80s - one of a heart attack, the other of a massive stroke. Not to mention a friend, whose DM just died in her sleep at IIRC 92, without even being ill first.

Whereas my DF died in his early 70s of cancer, my DM at 97 after far too many years of the dreaded dementia.

"I know how she feels.." while maybe inappropriate, isn't a competitive statement. It's an attempt to engage with the emotion. People are putting themselves as closely as they can in the position of the bereaved drawing on their own life experiences of similar situations. It's a way of empathising that isn't quite correct, but the intention is there.

Ah, its never easy being the grief police is it @laughloseya ? Thank god that young woman's got you to tell other people how they should feel about her loss.

This!!

I know children who were aged 2 months,5 and 7 when their mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The older two were told that mummy would die. They understood enough to meant that she would not be coming back. She died 2 months before her youngest child turned 1. She was 37 years old.

Your colleagues are just trying to relate with their own stories of grief. It isn't your place or anyone else's to judge if it's less painful to watch a loved one go through a sudden or drawn out death. It isn't your place to judge if being older or younger makes dealing with the parents death easier or harder.

My dad died when I was 24. So what? It didn't make it more or less difficult than it happening at any other point in my adult life, grief is not a points-based system. My sibling a decade older found it much harder.

This is the crux of this thread. The colleague was talking to OP, not to the family involved. So there is in fact no possibility to express empathy or sympathy or anything to the family. OP seems to see herself as some sort of conduit to the family so whatever is expressed to her will somehow be intuited by the family. It won’t. I mean, talk about making it all about you!

Just support the family, all of you. Don't compare or make it about yourselves. Your all distorting the situation and making it about yourselves. Your all just as bad as each other.

And nor do you.
There is arrogance in presuming to grade people's grief based on your own experience. The people you have spoken to have expressed their sympathy for the girl; it doesn't matter how they arrived at that. You do not and cannot know how they feel or felt. Your experience is not universal. You also have no understanding of what the girl might be feeling or how she will ccope. Feel sympathy for her, of course, but acknowledge your assessment of her feelings now and in the future might be wide of the mark. That's all you can or should do with certainty. Forget about policing others.

@laughloseya there are loads of very sad posts on this thread, and not once have you shown an ounce of empathy or sympathy.

Errrr ... you've started a whole thread to talk about this with strangers. I'd definitely call that gossip.

I find this thread really distasteful.

empathy = you can understand exactly what the person is going through, having been through an IDENTICAL thing

@FFSToEverythingSince2020 that is NOT the definition of empathy. You do not have to have been through the identical thing to have empathy. You don't even have to have gone through a similar thing.

The Cambridge dictionary:
Empathy - the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation.

Yes, and it's natural that most people use their closest experience to help them emphasise.

Way to go to make it all about you OP
<slow handclap>

They're are all trying to make the event relatable to themselves because that helps them to empathise. I see that as a real positive.

The problem you’ve got is what you said and how you meant it is clear in YOUR mind but as you can see it is being interpreted differently by other people. That’s not all down to other people it’s also down to how you’ve said / explained it. You’re also saying they were attention seeking - we don’t know if they were or not as we don’t know the people.
I may have interpreted the same way as many on this thread and thought you were rude I’m not sure

Our only point of reference of things like this is our own experience. Losing a parent at any age is awful and the impact reverberates through the rest of your life however old you are when it happens.