Too far removed to grieve?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was thinking about an old friend of mine today. I was wondering how he was doing… it has been over 10 years since I heard anything about him. We lost touch after he graduated. Since he had a very unique name (his first name was Kon) I decided to google it to see if I could find anything.

There was exactly one hit.

It was a poem written in tribute to him.

He was stabbed to death in 1994.

I’ve been thinking about this all day. It makes me sad. But I haven’t cried, and I don’t feel grief. It is a very strange feeling.

2

Being reminded of people you used to know can make you feel strange things, even if you don’t know that they’ve come to a tragic end.

I had a dream a couple of weeks ago about a friend I had in middle school: apparently we were at our high school graduation and he asked me to save him a seat. Then he never showed up.

I haven’t seen him since 9th grade (91-92’) and I woke up very sad since I realized that I probably haven’t thought about him in nearly as long. He moved over the summer between 9th and 10th grade, and I never gave him a second thought. I don’t even know if I noticed he wasn’t in school any more, since we drifted apart that first year of high school- we only had PE together that year, and most of the year we didn’t even play sports against the boys- and I know that I never wondered where he moved to.

It made me feel bad, even slightly anxious, that I was so “out of sight, out of mind” with this person. I can’t remember how to spell his last name, so I probably won’t even discover even one hit on google about him.

For what it’s worth, I’m sorry your friend is gone. If you do feel grief eventually, well, there’s no satute of limitation on that sort of thing.

3

There’s no rule that says you must feel this or that, even when someone you know dies. If you don’t feel like crying, then don’t cry. If you don’t get overly upset about it, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.

I think because our culture now expects mass outpourings of grief when someone dies, people think there’s something wrong with them if they’re not wailing and gnashing their teeth. But really, why would you? It’s sad that this person died and in such a horrible way, but you haven’t seen him for 10 years. You were already seperated from him - his death makes this seperation permanent but it’s unlikely you would’ve ever seen him again any way.

I don’t mean that to sound callous. I simply mean that waiting for some emotion that is expected of you is meaningless. Just feel what you want to feel about it.

4

I had a very similar experience not long ago. I work at the Memphis newspaper, posting the content to the Web site (www.gomemphis.com if anyone is interested). We post “paid notices” in the obituary section. Usually they’re along the lines of “Dad, you’ve been gone ten years, we miss you,” that sort of thing, usually with a photo.

About a year ago I was posting these one night, and the name on one of them caught my eye. I thought, “How do I know that name?” (It was a pretty common name.) I stared at the photo, but it was a high school picture and didn’t look familiar to me. The guy had been dead for five years as of that day, killed by a drunk driver it said. Finally, after some clues such as the birthdate and such sank in, I realized.

It was my college roommate, from UGA.

I hadn’t heard from him in about six years. We’d been best buddies for a year or so, doing everything together and living one of those buddy-montages you see in stupid movies. Then we’d drifted apart, he moved in with his girlfriend and they got married, and I’d just lost touch. And now here he was, dead and posted on my Web site. And like OpalCat, I sort of felt like it had been to long to grieve, really. Shoot, I hadn’t even thought about him in months.

I thought about looking up his mother–I hadn’t even known she was in Memphis–but I couldn’t remember her first name, and the last name was Smith, so there would be thousands of listings. I didn’t know at all how to find anyone.

What I finally did was this: I got a bottle of tequila and some of the margarita mix he and I always drank, and I collected a bunch of our favorite CDs we used to listen to all the time, and I sat on the back porch and I drank margaritas and listened to our music and for one long night I thought about every single thing I could remember about him. The nights we snuck into the hidden graveyard on top of a mountain in the middle of Atlanta and recited poetry at the top of our lungs; the Jimmy Buffett concert we went to; the big fights we had as roommates; the time he saved my ass from getting beat up because I was mouthing off to someone I shouldn’t; the few times after he’d moved out when we got together for a beer; the French class we took together, where we met; and, of course, the last time I’d seen him. And all the other times too; everything. And at the end of the night, I put on our favorite song, and I said goodbye to him, and I shed a tear or two, and that was it.

I don’t know if that helps you, OpalCat, but it helped me a lot.

Scott Allen Smith, R.I.P.

5

I’m not thinking that I “should” feel a certain way, or feeling wrong for not feeling a certain way…

…I’m just saying that the feeling that I do have is rather strange. Closer to regret than grief. It’s a rather unique feeling for me.

6

Opal, I know that feeling. About six months ago I found out a friend, someone I was close to in college but had lost contact with, died last November.

The feeling is closer to regret - regret that I didn’t make more of an effort to stay in touch with him, that we both let life get in the way of staying in touch. I know it wasn’t intentional on the part of either of us, but it was difficult to grieve with the distance that had developed over the years.

7

I found out that a guy in my high school who I’d taken calculus with and who I saw every couple of months at univ. had died, which was a very bizarre feeling for me as well.

8

Not directly comparable to your own losses, but years after reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I bought a more recent edition. A new afterword explains that his son Chris, a prominent part of the book, was murdered recently. It was an odd feeling to know that.

9

We grieve for people when we know that we have lost them Opal.

There’s nothing at all unusual about your feelings, and he is no less honoured or loved or missed by those feelings happening “now” as opposed to “then”.

There’s an appropriate way to grieve for every single loss in our lives - I’ve been around this place long enough to know that you’ll find the most appropriate way to express your feelings about this one.

You take care - m’kay?

10

OpalCat - I’ve had the very surreal experience when I found out that my very first “real boyfriend” died (“real boyfriend” as in he was actually old enough to drive me to the highschool dance and we actually went on dates!).

Like most relationships between 16 and 17 yr-old, ours was very short-lived. We went to different highschools so we rarely bumped in to each other, but when we did, we both seemed to delight in trying to drive the other crazy. He was probably 19 the last time I saw him.

He was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was 23. Typical Kevin, he was smart enough to put on a helmet, but stupid enough to be the passenger when both he and the driver of the motorbike were too drunk to walk straight. A friend of mine saw a newspaper article about it, that’s how I found out.

It was a truly bizarre and somewhat surreal feeling. He was important to me once, but hadn’t come to mind in the slightest way in 5 years. I also felt some regret (though I don’t really know why). I felt bad for his family, and I thought “Gee, what a shame. He was a really decent person (when he wasn’t being a putz).”

I think part of what makes it so strange is that we worry about leaving this earth and being forgotten when we die, and yet here was someone I’d forgotten about entirely while he was still alive. That kind of made me sad. I felt no sense of personal loss and I didn’t grieve for him, but it’s still a sad, sad thing.

11

One of my uncles died last year. Now, I’d seen this guy like once in the past 15 years, so we weren’t close. So I felt sad that a member of my family was gone, but it was kind of an abstract sadness, since it didn’t leave a hole in my life. I felt sad for his kids, and my other uncle, who are going to really miss him, but I didn’t feel like crying or anything like that. It’s a pretty normal reaction when somebody dies who you knew but weren’t close to.

12

How timely. Last night we attended a visitation for Mr. S’s friend’s brother. He died on Sunday, but we didn’t know about it until I read the article about it in the local weekly rag yesterday, recognized the last name, and went to ask Mr. S if he knew the guy. The brother and his fiancee (ages 47 and 48) were killed by a hit-and-run driver who ran a stop sign at an intersection near our house. No one reported the accident; an EMS team found the scene on their way to another incident. At press time, all they had was the vehicle and were searching for the driver, but at the visitation we learned that some people were in custody and that (big surprise) drinking and/drugs had been involved. So awful to think that lives might have been saved if someone had called 911 instead of running.

I never met either of these people, but I just felt sick all day. It was worse at the funeral home, seeing all the family members who have to deal with not only the death, but the extra burden of the circumstances.

:frowning:

Scarlett, noting that the funeral service will begin in a few minutes

13

Elfkin477, try looking up his last name in an old yearbook.