grandma & grief, pt 2: ugly crying and distance from one's own emotions

[cimorene]

I'm one of those people who doesn't cry easily.¹ Aside from when it's entirely due to hormones (which doesn't really count), usually I cry only at certain trigger topics, like book/movie/tv treatment of people's parents or pets dying (because I came close and because FURRY BABIES respectively) or people's close friend-mentors dying (because that's practically the only typical trauma I've actually experienced²).

Well, this has its downsides. I grew up quite close to my extended families on both sides, in the sense that my parents went to a lot of trouble to keep up the relationships with frequent visits, but not so close in the sense that I always lived on the other side of the country from them.³ Of a necessity this constrained how much emotional closeness I could feel to them, perhaps ultimately even more than things like common interests and opinions. In a sense, then, with both the grandparents that I've lost recently, I've found myself with a certain (though variable) numbness in among the loss, perhaps thinking I should feel more, and wondering if the loss didn't come a long time before their deaths - because my relationships with them were never as close as they could have been, and perhaps my loss is as much a missed opportunity as a vanished loved one...

Anyway, the point is, I only cried perhaps twice, and for a total of under five minutes, about my paternal grandfather's death (about a year and a half ago). He was a super cool dude - his coolness could not be overstated probably - and he was even quite a cool grandpa, after I got older. But he was kind of a bad host, and not a great houseguest, and bad with children, and however much affection I have for him, I just didn't have a strong, genuine emotional reaction of grief or loss. Every now and then I think it would be nice to ask him about something or talk to him about something - but still, I haven't been all that deeply or persistently sad about it. (In fact, I've been a great deal sadder thinking how sad my step-grandmother must be than about my own loss.)

So when I first heard that my maternal grandmother had died, and I was still too shocked for it to penetrate all the way, I suppose I assumed I might be equally unaffected. Her death was more surprising than his - he'd been in an at-risk group for a long time, and he was nearly ten years older. Also since adulthood I had found my paternal grandfather easier to relate to in many ways - he was into science and semantic arguments, and he went on the Internet and was even familiar with a fair number of memes, and for the most part our political views were the same, which made conversations with him a lot easier for me.

But on the contrary, once the shock started to wear off, I discovered I was a great deal sadder about the loss of my grandma. It makes sense, I think, because she played a nurturing role, and was more frequently present in my life, from a very young age, so that I have lots of mostly-forgotten memories that have only left behind a hazy glow of warmth and trust, and associations like safety and dangly earrings and her perfume and the angle of the shadows from her kitchen table when you're quite short and can't reach very high and she's at the stove cooking pancakes for you. My mom and I stayed in the upstairs flat at her house for a few months while my dad jobhunted when I was 4, and I think a lot of the memories come from then - taking Pop-Tarts and Fruit Roll-Ups from the kitchen cabinets, and other treats that my grandparents kept around just for the ever-growing horde of grandchildren (currently 12); the golden glow of the reading lamps on the sides of the sofa where my grandparents would habitually sit in front of the television, reading and watching the news simultaneously; the shelf of blue glass knick-knacks reaching the ceiling, and the wall completely covered in framed family pictures...

Even so, I haven't cried all that much, I think, compared to how my mom or some of my cousins - but then they grew up in the same city as my grandma, and saw her all the time. Of course this is one of those situations where I must acknowledge that intellectually I'm well aware I have no reason to feel guilty, and even if I did have feeling guilty wouldn't do anybody any good; but I can't help feeling a little guilty from time to time, and thinking perhaps I should cry more.



Footnotes

1. My therapist asked me once if it was because I was afraid to cry, and I think I've worked out that I go to some trouble to avoid it not precisely because I fear it, but because I dislike it. I'm an ugly crier, as the term goes. But it's not the ugly part that upsets me as much as the facts that
   
   
   • Once I start it's really hard to stop,
   
   
   • My face doesn't just turn red, it turns slightly swollen and tender and that's uncomfortable,
   
   
   • And there's like BUCKETS of snot and you're not always carrying appropriately gentle, expensive tissues with you in large quantities.
   
   
   And also, me crying used to sometimes trigger a mini, limited-symptom panic attack from Wax, which is probably even less pleasant for her than crying is for me, plus it ends up being more trouble for me, too, because it's harder for her to get over that than it is for me to stop crying. Tea or chocolate or squeezing a cat or something will usually work in a pinch.
   
   Of course, before that, it was always true that crying in any sort of public context, even surrounded by friends or extended family, was undesirable because I'm an introvert and it would draw way too much attention to me. Which is to say nothing of what happened to people who cried at school, who were often made fun of, even if it was more or less affectionately. Besides, I always felt that to seem to show weakness to the people around me at school - who, broadly speaking, were enemies by default - would be to forever undermine the efficacy of the Icy Death Glare and Sardonic Eyebrow Quirk which I was usually able to use to fend off things like people who wanted to talk to me when I (a) was trying to read or (b) thought they were tiresome and just wished they would go away.



2. And the other ones, like panic attacks and horrible-medication-side-effects and nervous-breakdowns-from-too-much-academic-over-achieving, are not often the subjects of media which I consume.



3. I also don't have too terribly much in common with my extended family on a quotidian basis - they don't go on the Internet! And my one cousin who I was able to lure into fantasy and science fiction reading from the beginning always had rather different tastes from me - apparently she's into Doctor Who now but one of the first things she said to me about it was that she had a hard time warming up to Eleven, which is just like, WHO ARE YOU AND ARE YOU EVEN MY FAVORITE COUSIN?

Comments

[foursweatervests]

And if you were crying a lot, you'd be feeling guilty and thinking maybe you should cry less because it's not productive - or something. The only thing I can really say is: don't try to guess how you should be reacting. It's only going to make you feel crappy, and the people who love you don't want that for you, ever. Though especially in reaction to the death of someone you loved.

You can't help how you feel or how you react (and this goes for the guilt, too), but talking with and spending time with your support system can help a lot. And you might find that a lot of them are having the exact same feelings, too.

I feel like this might be a bit incoherent, so I'll leave it here with an Internet-hug. ::HUGS::

[krait]

Oh, gosh. *pats*

I'm the opposite, sort of -- I cry at the drop of a hat and can't help it, even though all the things about snot and introversion apply. I hate it, but have had absolutely zero productivity at fighting it, so. *waves hands*

That said, I had a somewhat similar relationship with most of my extended family (maybe a bit less close). When my grandmother died, I didn't cry for a month; I started fear I wouldn't at all and felt sort of bad about it. (And then, after that month, I think I spent two or three weeks where I would cry myself to sleep 3-4 times a week.)

My aunt died a couple months ago, and as I was doing some caretaking in the months leading up to that (but she'd been sick for almost two years, some of which I was half a country away from), I wasn't sure how I would react... so far, I don't think I've cried at all. I've just spent a lot more time thinking vaguely that I should make a will (especially as regards fannish things), which... I'm not quite 30, so I have lately begun to suspect this is my brain channeling the crying elsewhere for once? I dunno.

ANYWAY. Sorry, I am longwinded. *sheepish*

All that rambling was my attempt to say: you're not doing it wrong. (Or if you are, you're not alone in having that response.) Guilt happens or doesn't, but trying to force it either way is silly. All you can really do is wait and see how you react as time passes.

Have some *hugs* too?