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.

They sound like absolutely lovely friends. And yes, unfortunately, the “funeral security” job often rests on the shoulders of friends and extended family when they’re grief stricken themselves. Perhaps telling them about the concept of a grief vulture may help them understand and identify behavior they see in the future, and it sounds like they know how to deal with it! ♥️

I remember someone commenting once that they knew exactly what someone who lost their mum in their 20s went through because they had a housemate who had the same experience. And I thought, no you don't, you know what it's like to support someone who went through it. You only know what it's like if you experienced it yourself. And even then the circumstances, grieving process and family dynamics will be different.

I agree - my dad didn’t technically die until I was 39, but his accident when I was 18 was so bad that I essentially grieved then as if he HAD died. He was in a near-vegetative state for 21 years after his accident with catastrophic brain damage. Everything that made him “my father” WAS gone the day of his accident, though his body was left behind.

My friends at the time were of course around my own age, with a few of them a couple of years younger (16 or so.) Most of them had no idea what to say or do, and of course none had lost a parent. A few did tell me they understood because they’d lost a grandparent. I wasn’t offended and I didn’t think they were grief vultures, they were just trying to make a connection and comfort me during a time that none of them knew how to deal with.

One friend (who was 16) did express utter disbelief and horror when she learned my family was going to be taking care of my dad at home and not placing him in a facility, after he came out of hospital 6 months after his accident. She said “I’d NEVER take care of MY parents like that!” At the time it hurt me badly, because I was still in shock, pain, and grief, and the only thing I still DID have left of my father was the fact that his body was still alive and needed to be cared for. But my friend was young, had never experienced any kind of loss or grief, and she didn’t mean to be cruel. 25 years later, I know she didn’t mean to hurt me, she just couldn’t understand it at the time.

The tl;dr is that sometimes people try to say something to one who is hurt and grieving because they feel badly for the person who is grieving. They are trying to comfort that person. Sometimes what they say comes out wrong or sounds like they are trying to “show off” their own experiences with grief and loss. It doesn’t make them a horrible person or a selfish a-hole, it makes them a normal human being.

Agree with the last part, not the rest though. It's ironic that OP gets criticized for establishing a "hierarchy of grief" when they were the one taking issue with others comparing their experiences to the daughter's.

FWIW, I think we would all agree that the loss of a parent at the age of 10 or so is incomparable to the loss of a parent at the age of 50 - which means there is a hierarchy of sorts. I think it's due to the fairly advanced age of the daughter that we think comparisons permissible.

It really doesn't matter if same had been said to the 23 y/o herself as far as OP's issue with the reaction to a third party is concerned. It does beg the question though whether they would also project their own experience onto the loss of her parent to the daughter's face.

If they don't, then that would imply the speaker knows it would be wrong to tell her this in person - which is interesting IMO.

It implies there's both a social and a "moral" dimension to empathy. In the absence of a personal history of loss, how would we react and feel?

I think projection is a coping mechanism in the face of an untimely death. I'd love to read a follow-up by OP about how those same people ended up talking to the daughter about her loss.

The only grief vulture I see on this thread is the OP.

All the handwringing over a sad situation as if it was the greatest tragedy on earth, and making this thread to repeatedly accuse people of downplaying the situation by conversationally mentioning their own experience of grief to show they understand grief. Crossly ranking and downplaying their grief.

People hate talking about death, or cancer, in particular, but death is a very difficult topic for most people and most people don't handle it especially well.

And this is all in the office! It's bizarre behaviour on behalf of the OP.

My husband lost his dad at 23 suddenly. It was so traumatic it changed his entire personality, gave him a sense of mortality that men don’t usually develop until their 50s. It result in a lot of risky, borderline suicidal behaviours for a bit until eventually he learned to handle his grief. It’s absolutely awful that your colleagues can’t sympathise here — might be a good time to reassess why you work in the team. I wouldn’t want to work with losers like that.

Thank you so much, l love your belief system and will try to adopt that. I am trying very hard to believe a robin that comes in my garden is my son, every time l get upset and am really struggling, it's uncanny how he pops up at that moment. Other strange things have happened, really uncanny.
It certainly does change everything. My DH ( not his dad but loved him like a son) said the other day , not in a selfish way, that he missed me, the old me , happy, funny and lovely (his words not mine ! ). I said l miss me too 😢Life will never be the same, we miss him so much.

Oh, love…

A mother losing her child is… different. There’s something about the process that no one can completely understand but losing a child that you raised and nurtured and sacrificed for is a pain that very few people ever get over. BUT a type of normalcy (a new normal) will return! You will be happy and funny and “lovely” (I’m sure you’re still lovely!) again; yes, it may always be a bit harder to be “you” when it feels like a piece of “you” is missing. I wish I could promise the pain goes away. Cannae, but I do promise that everyone who has told me about this experience (losing a child) says that it does change over time, sort of smoothing out the worst edges of it, making it not as sharp, and giving you the ability to remember happiness with the past without feeling sadness at the present.

Thank you once again, my grief counsellor told me this although she said many say ( including me) that they are sure they will never be happy again. But she said 'you' are still in there somewhere and bits of you will come back out over time. My DH she said is grieving for my son and for seeing me hurt and they call it secondary grief and he says things like that in the context of he feels useless and just wishes he could turn the clock back.