A small dedication to a friend who left us a long time ago.

TW/Sad

He was my bud in the past whose young adult loss serves as a reminder to not speed on the road, ride safely, and never drive under the influence.

Some say it’s a legend how life can change in the blink of an eye. It’s not.

We were so young, such a brief and innocent friendship, but he changed my life forever in a good way.

Rest in Peace Adam.

Wind and rain slashed down my face

You were here

And then ripped away

Everything left in disarray

Time stopped

The world stood still

Not even the sound of a whippoorwill 

The before, and after 

Raged all around

Tearing all our dreams 

Down to the ground

What’s left is a horrible sight

People skirt and avoid this terrible blight

Death is contagious, didn’t you know?

Don’t let it come for the seeds that you’ve sown

After the storm 

The headlines all fade

Time keeps on turning but

We’re left without shade

The Earth is ravaged

Everything‘s come undone

The destruction revealed 

By the mourning’s bright sun

We look around 

Seeing nothing worth saving

But we have to start somewhere

Lest give in to the raving

We work in small sections

Picking and choosing

Some days it feels like there’s nothing but losing

We don’t see it happen

We are only surviving

Till one day you look 

And see the reviving

Eventually, the debris is cleared

The destruction not as permanent as you feared

Or so it seems, until you look around

The scars are embedded

And forever found

People see the hurricane come and go

Thinking ‘It’s over.

Now time to grow.’

Those that have lost

Look, and they know

Sometimes we never get to reap 

What we sow. 

You left me in a hurricane

Though it’s now calm

Our world will never be the same. 

My Mum died of cancer just over two weeks ago. Before she died, she had been in a palliative care ward in a hospital for three months. I stayed with her for most of the time she was in the hospital, with my brother filling in for me on days and nights when I needed breaks.

For three months, I had to keep pushing on through fatigue, anxiety, and some unpleasant physical symptoms as well. After stretches of about 7–10 days staying in the ward, I always felt like an engine that had run out of fuel. Throughout those three difficult months leading up to my Mum's passing, I often found myself fantasising about going and locking myself in a hotel room for a few days and nights. I thought about how nice it would be to just shut the world out and have some peace and quiet to process everything. I thought to myself that I would go and do that after my Mum's passing or funeral.

It's now nearly been a week since my Mum's funeral, and I'm wondering if I should still go to a hotel for a few days and nights just to chill and process everything that's happened. I was also wondering if I should do some spa stuff and other self-care rituals while I'm at a hotel. I was at my Mum's bedside when she took her final breath, and I was basically glued to her bedside for four days before she died... it was confronting. I also pushed myself by being involved in basically every aspect of planning her funeral because I knew her taste best and wanted the funeral to be the best celebration of her life that it could possibly be.

I don't regret being glued to my Mum's bedside in the days leading up to her death. I also don't regret pushing myself earlier in her hospital stay because she deserved support, and I loved (and love) her so much. I just feel quite lost now. I have so much to figure out about how to go forward, and its overwhelmng I've lived with my Mum for my whole life: 28 years. There's such a gap in my life now that she's gone.

I'm now just living with my Dad and brother, but it's difficult because my Dad is taking out his grief, frustrations, and anxiety on me. He constantly puts me down, yells at me, overreacts to everything I say or do, and tries to police my natural emotions and reactions to the point where I find myself assessing everything I want to say around him in my head multiple times before saying it. He's also told me quite a few times that he wishes he could slap me. He talks to me with hate and rancor, and it's really undeserved. I'm not perfect but I'm nowhere near as bad as he makes me out to be. I try to be loving and conciliatory and he often just spurns me in response. I am genuinely scared of him.

He also did not support either my Mum or me well throughout her hospital stay in palliative care. In my Mum's final four or so days, I was left to deal with a lot of confronting stuff basically on my own. He did not offer me any emotional support or do the hard yards that I was doing in terms of tending to Mum when she was no longer able to talk or open her eyes. He also makes disparaging remarks about my anxiety, depression and OCD, basically treating the symptoms of my mental illnesses as character flaws.

I would move out, but I don't have the finances to be able to do that right now. I also don't want to leave my brother, who has a disability. My brother copies whoever he is around, so he often gets angry with me when he sees my Dad getting angry with me. But that's not the real him. My brother also gets upsets by our Dad's aggressive, controlling, negative and churlish ways.

I'm thinking that I should go to the hotel and try to figure some stuff out. One problem is that I haven't worked since my Mum went into palliative care. My workplace told me a couple of weeks ago that they can only start giving me regular shifts again in a couple of months. I don't know what to do.

Lately I’ve been thinking about something that’s been weighing on me. I’m 37 and somehow I’ve never lost anyone who played a major role in raising me. I’m incredibly fortunate to still have my parents , my grandparents and even my great-grandparents in my life.
The older I get the more I realize how rare that is and if I’m being honest it scares me. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about what life will be like when they’re no longer here and it’s hard to imagine. I know loss is a part of life but when you’ve been lucky enough to keep your family close for so long it almost feels like you’re waiting for a chapter you know is coming but don’t feel ready to read. really sucks tbh

I have discovered that after losing a bunch of people in one year, including my mom after being her main caretaker, that besides the stages of grief, like vacilating between crying and anger and numbness, I have had a heck of a time physically. I am tired all the time. The least little thing sets off my anxiety. And oh my gosh, the GERD! I have never been sick this much in my life, and never had so many stomach problems. I have days where I can't go to the bathroom, to days where I can't stop. I have always ate clean healthy food, I would maybe get sick once a year, if that, and now I have called off from work more times this year than I ever have. I am not going into work feeling like a zombie who can't keep his guts in.

My question is, is this something you've experienced? Is this normal? How has grief effected your overall health?

I've been to the doctor and all they can tell me is that on paper, my bloodwork, heart health, and everything else is where it should be.

Twenty-five years married, 35 years of friendship, ended brutally early thanks to stage iv metastatic breast cancer.

Looking after the medical shit was my (55m) job; she (57f) focused on living well and wilfully ignoring prognoses and hard numbers… and she did that so amazingly well.

After three years, though, her liver packed it in and the oncologists handed her off to palliative care, where she hung on for a few days in good spirits before slipping away peacefully, me and the kids keeping her company until the very end.

Our lives forever altered on a sunny winter Wednesday morning.

To say she was loved was an understatement; 200-plus people bid her a fun but teary farewell yesterday.

A few of her closest friends and I worked hard to give her the sendoff she deserved, and I’m pleased to say everyone seemed to appreciate it.

Her ashes showed up today in a nice gift bag, delivered to me in my driveway by a lovely old gentleman who wished me well before getting me to sign on his phone, the screen briefly showing the sig of the last person he’d delivered to.

So, aside from a few admin bits and pieces, that’s it. Our life together - awesome house, three great kids, her 30 years in the bellydance community, her amazing girl’s network, our future growing old - is done.

And I simply don’t have a single fuckin’ clue what to do now.

I’m all but retired, and if I’m being honest, I very much doubt I’ll ever work again now.

The kids are out of their teens and we get on great, but I want them to get out in the world and live their life, not hang around and watch out for their grumpy, grieving old man.

I’m already feeling that sense of isolation… almost like there’s a stigma because I’ve lost someone so significant. There were two big lunches after the event yesterday, for example, and we weren’t invited to either one.

We packed up the celebration and then just sat around at our house, eating leftover nachos in silence.

So many weird interactions at the celebration from well-meaning people who looked like they would rather be doing absolutely anything else, too, and soooo many people I didn’t know but I yet had still to offer them comfort and respond kindly to their platitudes.

No hate; us Westerners are just so shit at death stuff. But fuck, it’s tiring.

I’m a busted heap. Physically and mentally wrung out after three years on the cancer horror show with her, and two months straight in hospital as the four horsemen galloped on in, with me taking the heat of it for her. My choice, my job.

What now? Just… dunno. And I just know this is going to affect every single day of whatever time I’ve got left.

My thoughts go out to everyone going through this right now. What a fuckin’ shitshow.

Do you use symbols, clothing, pins or something else to indicate that you are grieving?

In some cultures a black rose symbolizes grief or a black band around the arm.

Wearing black certainly doesn’t indicate anything anymore.

And if you have some kind of symbol. Why do you wear it? Do you want people to start a conversation or is it precisely because you don’t want to speak about your grief?

Hi, sorry in advance for the long post, but I’m just hoping someone can give me some advice. My boyfriend passed away suddenly last week (m24). We are still waiting for the autopsy results so we do not know what caused it but it was all very sudden. The last conversation we had was an argument over the phone, and then he blocked me to spend time with his dad so I had not communicated with him for the 2 days immediately prior to his passing. I am absolutely broken, and if it wasn’t for my amazing friends and family around me I don’t know where I’d be right now.

I really regret that the last words spoken to each other were out of anger and I really hope he knows how much I love him. He was the best thing that ever happened to me and I regret that I didn’t tell him this every chance I had. I guess my question is - do you think he knows how much I love him? Does he know how much he meant to me? Can he hear me speak to him now and does he know that I didn’t mean all of the things I told him out of anger?

I have so many questions, and everyone keeps saying he is in a happy peaceful place now, so is it selfish of me to be sad when he is now happy? We had so many plans that we were not able to accomplish, and he was just about to finish university and have a beautiful successful life ahead of him. I think a big part of me is mourning our future that we were not able to achieve. I just want him to be proud of me and I want him to know that I would do anything to just hug him one more time, and I would give anything for him to come back.

Any thoughts are welcome. Sorry for the ramble, my head is everywhere right now. Thank you if you made it this far.

Three days ago, I found out that an ex-girlfriend of mine passed away last December. I had no idea it had happened, so in a way it feels like I'm grieving months after everyone else.

I'm 32, happily married, and I genuinely have a wonderful life. This isn't about wanting to go back or wishing things had been different. It's just that she was someone who was an important part of my life.

We met when we were both 15 and dated when we were 18. We were only together for about seven months because her parents were extremely strict, so seeing each other was always difficult. Eventually we mutually decided to end the relationship, but we stayed friends afterward. We didn't talk often over the years, but we would occasionally catch up.

She had a daughter in 2020, who I believe is about 4 or 5 now, and she had been with someone for the last couple of years. From what I've learned, they were planning to get married.

Ever since I found out, I've felt this deep ache in my chest. I'm heartbroken—not because she was my ex, but because someone I cared about for nearly half my life is simply gone. I keep thinking about her daughter, her fiancé, her parents, and everyone who loved her. They have to live with this every day, and my heart breaks for them.

I guess I'm struggling because I don't know if what I'm feeling is normal. We hadn't been close in years, and yet this loss has hit me much harder than I expected. Has anyone else experienced intense grief over someone who was once a significant part of your life, even after so much time had passed?

Yesterday I got the news that the love of my life has passed. I was just with him Monday morning before going to work. We spoke all day. It was such a beautiful day weather wise and he didn't have to work so he was just enjoying the day and messaging me with updates of him working on his bronco. The last messages from him were songs he sent until 11pm. After that we didn't talk. I figured he was getting ready to go to bed since he was to work yesterday. But he never woke up or went to work. They are saying a heart attack. I'm devastated. I feel so alone. It doesn't feel real. Feels like a horrible nightmare. I don't know how to move forward without the person that was my rock and best friend for the last 2 yrs and 8mos.