Defective

I don't even know where to begin. I have had a couple of weeks of massive waves of grief. I'm grieving a lot of secondary losses. I've been participating in my own grieving process and observing some others. While it is all very individual there are common threads.

Grieving people really need other people around them to help them process life. They need help with manual tasks, but mainly they need your presence. They need people around to listen. Some grieving people will not open up to people they are close to because those people might be grieving too; other's of us will only open to people we are close to. This can be a big problem when the people we are close to start pulling away.

Everyone eventually pulls away.

Talk to any grieving person and they will tell you they feel so alone. I've tried to see this from the other side. I understand that those of us who are grieving are not the best company to be around. Most people avoid a grieving person because they have no idea what to say.  I know we are depressing and if you listen to us venting our pain you might get sad. Why would anyone go through this much pain, by proxy, if they don't have to, right.

Alone is a horrible place to be. Alone = NO hope.

Sometimes we are lucky enough to have someone to listen. Eventually, our grief takes a toll on your friendship and we see that our grieving is killing that relationship too. Our grief kills every relationship we have; so we shut down and bottle it all up. There are times we have kept it inside so long that just being in the presence of other people makes us cry. We so badly want to talk it out, because talking actually makes us feel better, but we won't talk because we know you don't want to hear it.

People will think you are doing better because you are not crying all their shoulder all the time. If it's even possible you feel like even more of you is dying because now you have lost many of the other relationships in your life too.

I feel broken like I'm some kind of defective person now. I lost the only person in the world who made me feel whole. 

Next step is to pay someone to listen to me. At least I know the parameters; they don't care, but they won't pull away.  

Having a broken heart is like having broken ribs. On the outside you look fine, but every breath hurts! Greg Behrendt