Author Topic: A Jarring Reminder After Almost 12 Months  (Read 1444 times)

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Offline DottiePetite

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A Jarring Reminder After Almost 12 Months
« on: March 18, 2018, 11:20:38 PM »
Hi all,

My grandfather passed away on the 27th of March 2017. He was my best friend and he practically raised me; we spoke every single day, and I’m 23 years old so that’s an awful lot of conversations.

When he passed, I was just a couple of months into running my own business, so for my own mental health I was unable to take any sort of time to process my grief. I took the lead in organising the funeral, yet took no time off work and I’m yet to really process anything.

This evening I watched “Logan”, and Patrick Stewart’s story was incredibly jarring for me. I’ve been in tears since watching it, thinking about my grandfather and how I owe it to him to deal with my grief. It’s been almost exactly a year since his death, and I’ve spent the past 12 months feeling incredibly lonely.

I suppose I’m here mostly to ask how people tend to cope with this anniversary coming up, and whether anybody else has dealt with delayed grief like this. Any advice? I’m feeling rather lost.

Offline Karena

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Re: A Jarring Reminder After Almost 12 Months
« Reply #1 on: March 19, 2018, 12:17:22 PM »
Hi -welcome  too the forum.
It isnt unusual to react to grief by filling your time with something, -in your case of course a new business is very time consuming anyway -I used education in the same way  - so probably regardless of the business you would have done the same with something else - it even has a name -displacement activity- but the time does come when we need to move on from that -and something unexpected triggers feelings that knock us down after we have carefull avoided the triggers we thought might.
Everyone is different and everyone has a different process to go through -but they usually involve shock,displacement,guilt, anger,depression,and acceptance at some stage -so those are things everyone here will recognise to some degree.
I dont think you owe it too your grandfather to grieve -you have already been doing that  -just not recognised it as such -the thing with grief is it doesnt fit into a box like other things do -you keep shoving it in a filing cabinet and it keeps jumping back out in different formatts.

Some people try and ignore anniversarys -pretend it isnt the date, get busy again try and do the normal things  there isnt a right or wrong -i didnt know what to do with the first anniversary of my husbands death -i had no idea how i would feel or what i would want to do - so i booked the day off work and then left it to the day too decide - still going to work and pretending it wasnt the date was still a possability at that point but no-one would question it if i didnt turn up. On his birthday the previous october i had planted wild daffodils in his memory in a little woodland nearby and so in the end thats what i did -went for a walk down to look at his daffodils -and added a native sapling. I do something different every year -but it confirmed that the way forward for me was too affirm the date -and do something positive in memory of him and love of the natural world was something which we shared. For others it might be visiting a grave and taking flowers  - i dont have one -but whatever it is for you is what matters not what others might chose.