How do folks with aspergers deal with bereavement

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I've been crying off and on, since some well known British base player from the 60s passed away. If I would have gotten much needed emotional support on the family front, I would have been over it, a lot sooner. I plan to save up all my money until the anniversary date of his passing, June 23rd and than I'll order $100 worth of Kinks merchandise. Damn! I gave myself away.

I have yet to face a real death in my life that really means something to me, but if and when I do, I'll cry and cry until I can't anymore. I find just letting it all pour out works best.

In the past year two of my grandparents died -- a grandmother on one side and a grandfather on the other. Other than that I've had a lot of people I know die but nobody I was especially close to. The two grandparents who died were one's I had complex relationships with. Both had done me harm as well as good, one had done to others one of the few things in the world I have trouble forgiving, and I hadn't seen either in a long time (one of them by choice).

I have to say that the grandparent I am the most upset about is one who died when I was very young (neither of the recent two). He had a chance to meet me and decided not to. Then he died. I grew up hearing my brothers tell me how cool he was. I saw a painting of him once and thought it was my dad, they looked so alike. And I never got to meet him. I am still more upset about that than the deaths of two people I did get the chance to meet and at least got to decide whether I liked them or not (or both as the case may be). 

I have a lot of fairly standard reactions to death, but there's two that are pretty nonstandard. Just bear in mind that these are not about religious views, and may not even be because I'm autistic (if they are, they're certainly not shared by most autistic people I know, especially the second one, although expressions of autism can differ a lot so you never know. 

Anyway I'm going to quote directly from a blog post written after my grandfather died:

***BEGIN QUOTE***

For one thing, my memories of people who have died do not do that peculiar transformation I see in other people’s minds. That is, I remember the people the exact same way I remembered them in life. They don’t transform into saints, the bad memories don’t go away, I do not suddenly see them as all good and no bad. I know that this steps on a massive taboo. I did not know how massive until I saw people judging my entire character on the fact that when a particular person died a while back I did not suddenly cease to criticize the dead person’s actions (even though the dead person had called for dreadful things to happen to people like me, and even though the dead person continued after death to have the level of influence that would make those bad things more likely).

Whereas I find it incredibly disturbing that when people I know die, even people I mostly like, suddenly they are transformed in eulogies into people who never existed. Sometimes the eulogies even turned those people into the opposite of who they were in life — a total gossip will be described as never having an unkind word to say about anyone. This strikes me as frightening, disturbing, and disrespectful, but then my way seems to strike most people the same way. (Hint: If I were really the monster some people have made me into for viewing things this way, I would not care about how disturbing I find it to disrespect the dead by turning them into people they never were.)

So that was thing number one about my reaction to death that seems to be weird.

Thing number two is related but different. This is that not only does my memory not suddenly change the person into someone they weren’t, but that my memory does not change at all. The person is still there as far as I am concerned. I continue to use the present tense, not just by habit but because as far as I am concerned the person still exists even when I am fully aware of the fact of their death. I have heard of something superficially similar happening during denial but this is not denial. It happens whether I am grieving a good deal or grieving not at all. I simply don’t see the person as gone. I don’t see people who died thousands of years ago as gone either, I just see them as… temporally inaccessible or something. I grieve for our inability to inhabit the same time-area as each other anymore, but I don’t grieve for their nonexistence because they seem to exist, just somewhere (or rather somewhen) I can’t share with them now.

The first thing makes me into a terrible person in some people’s eyes. The second just seems to make me strange. But both of them are just how I am, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be otherwise. I mean I won’t go to a funeral and talk about how much I can’t stand the dead person, but I see nothing wrong with discussing their faults somewhere else (and I see a good deal wrong with actually changing descriptions of who the person is and what they have done just because they are dead — it’s one thing to refrain from talking about the bad points with people who are grieving, but actively claiming the opposite? Just… no, that erases the person more than death ever could).

And as for the second thing (which I find more interesting by far)… what is it about me that doesn’t respond the same way most people seem to when death occurs? I have talked to a lot of people and very few respond the way I do, or even understand my response. And I don’t understand theirs either. Why is it that most people process death so differently? Why does death seem to me almost as if it didn’t happen? Is there something about death I just don’t understand?

[... next part of quote is from my next blog post ...]

Again, regardless of my current religious beliefs at any given time — I am not talking about heaven hell or purgatory, not talking about ghosts, and not talking about living on in my heart. I mean the literal assumption that they are still living. Except possibly in another time period that I have no personal access to. But I process other time periods as "now" instinctively too, so it all gets very confusing and not conducive to the English language.

***END QUOTE***

So, aside from that, I think I grieve pretty normally. At least, I don't know if there's one normal way to grieve.  But I think I have the same depth of feeling about missing the person as anyone else does. That's what I meant by normal. 

The other unusual thing I forgot to mention is that who I grieve for is different in some ways.  In general my attachments to cats are stronger than all but a few human beings (but my attachment to those humans is equal to cats, not stronger). 

I once helped out with a project for helping kids deal with grief. And one of the people who dealt with grief professionally, told everyone that it's not the same depth of grieving when an animal dies as when a human dies. I wanted to smack her. I am closer to my cat than I am to anyone else on the planet.  I cry if I even think of her dying, and I can't say that about even my closest human friends. She relates to me on an emotionally intimate level that most humans are not capable of.  There is nothing that makes me happier than seeing her happy, and curling around each other and purring. (We're doing that now.) And I will mourn more when she dies than I have about anyone.  The idea that it's not as intense because she is an animal is insulting.

Like a lot of autistic people I've met, I not only relate to other animals without putting them in a hierarchy below humans, I also relate to plants and "inanimate" objects without treating them as if they are... dead, flat, unreal somehow. I am not talking about anthropomorphizing. I'm talking about a certain kind of instinctive respect and connection to things as they are, not as they would be if they resembled humans in most ways.  There's a common stereotype that runs that since autistic people spend so much time relating to objects, then we must spend our lives in a world that is empty, lifeless, dry, grey, and cold somehow (and that we must even view humans this way). But I (and a large number of other autistic people I know, though certainly not all) relate to the entire world, objects included, in a way that is vibrant, colorful, and full of life everywhere. We just don't happen to restrict this experience to humans, or even to animals, or even to living things. And so, as usual, people assume the very opposite. 

Oh and the thing about dead people still existing, just not being accessible to me, I have the same thing about places and objects. I wrote a blog post called Right here, right now about it, where I speculated that it was due to my very strange perception of time. I basically seem to perceive all time as "now", it's just there's a lot of now I can't get to and a lot of now I don't remember. It's hard to put it in words for obvious reasons. 

I don't really grieve, or if I do, it's very mild. People keep trying to fit my experience into some form of grief that happens to be a little nonstandard like "the five stages don't have to all happen or happen in that order" (after I described the strange process of completely coming to terms with my grandfather's death in a couple of hours-- he died at... oh, around 6 pm in the spring, and by the time it was dark I was over it-- by feeling very strange with my thoughts, emotions and body, but only one at a time-- so calm and thinking about it, thinking normally but feeling sad, then neither thinking about it nor feeling anything but my body doing what it usually does when you feel sad) or recounting a story of someone not feeling grief for a while and then grieving normally after a time delay.

But I came closest to grief for my grandfather. It upset me for a while. At least, for a human. I grieved a whole day for a certain cat I loved. (Loved my grandpa just as much. More.) But the cat I just felt an uncomplicated sadness and nostalgia for. Then it was over. That's all. (Wasn't even my cat.)

Grieving is about processing what's happened and how it makes you feel.

I really felt nothing when my mom's father died. I was a very young child.

When my dad's mom passed, I felt nothing because it was more of a novel experience to see a funeral home....touching a dead body for the first time.

When my mom's mom passed, it was odd. We knew she was dying, so there was time to process what was going to happen. The funeral was stressful because I could perceive the emotions of everyone there. When we got home, the whole family got ill for a week...the stress catching up with us.

I lost a friend a few years back (1995, actually). At first, it was shock, and the funeral got no response. As I processed that he was gone, I went through issues of anger, guilt, etc.

I had my better friend and interest partner, die a few years ago from a firearm accident. He often liked to experiment with making his own bullets and expressed how dangerous packing carterages are (cateriages=bullets), some went off, so I have no doubt in my mind this is what likely happened. Oddly enough, at his funeral I didn't feel any pain, as his friends however were crying, I go and make an innaprorate A.H. of myself, at his wake, thinking that it was the best way to honour his drunken fun spirit.. I only disgraced his memory, and the accomplishment of what could be the cloest thing to a best bud experience I had, if not in a long long time. I rarely find friends, and when I do. I'm part and have niche of being the wacky freaky guy. Ron accepted this, and encouraged it and for a short time I had geniune likeness mutualism. I was very disappointed with myself I still feel numb, and "regular".

Then With my Grandma, a funeral which I actually did see the lowering of the coffin, and the last time, before the closing of the open casket funeral... I did the unholy of thinking god this Buddhist ceremony (lots and lots and lots of repetitive chanting, for every last praise, even more repetition of chanting. Ie Boudhi sawa, Bodudhi Sava, cross the Puchin river" xmany times, then boudi sawa bhouday Sava, purified the Puchin river with his foot". x many times. Like this was my grandma! a progenitor that made ME! and I pull these immature ungreatful like sentiments?! !?!??! !!? and I also didn' t cry at the funeral. I just though this was taking long, (because again Boudhi Sava Forded the river"). Like what the hell is wrong with me? Why am I such an S?

I had attended numerous funerals since I was quite young. Most of the deceased I barely knew, including all four of my grand parents who all passed in a short span of time...18 months I think. Others I had known fairly well, aunts & cousins, or friends of my parents. In any case, my mom just passed away last Nov. I've never witnessed a human pass away before. Pets, yes, I have seen them die first hand, as I was the one who usually had to take them to the vet when they were sick. My mom had just dropped one of our dogs once & left her there to be put to sleep by the vet. No known family member to reassure her it was for the best. I resolved never to do that to another pet no matter how difficult the situation. The only time I got emotional about the pets is when it was a young sick animal who had a fatal illness. Those who were older, I accepted their departure. It was difficult to watch my mother linger for days before she took her final breath. My husband was a bit taken back that I wasn't very emotional. But mom had been in so much pain, I felt relief at her passing. She's in a much better place, no pain & no more suffering. Though in some respects I am still processing her death...hard to believe that she's not around anymore. I think even for NTs that processing death is an individual thing.

I think I'm uniquely qualified to answer this, as I just lost my husband of 15 years two months ago, of a sudden cardiac arrest. He was only 42 years old, and we did NOT see this coming, at all.

I've been able to compare myself to other widows from the beginning, since I joined a young widow's support forum right after he died. There's no doubt about it: I'm grieving differently.

I'm not normally a crier, but I did cry a lot right after, and most of the first day. After that, each day I cried a little less, and on the day of the funeral, I only cried when they were actually lowering his casket into the ground. That was rough. They were playing one of his favorite songs, and our 8-year-old son started to cry too.

But since then, I've been pretty much okay. I miss him terribly, but I'm able to think about him and talk about him and look at pictures at this point, and only feel a little sadness. Just a little ache in my chest. After the funeral, I got right back into my regular routine with no problems. People kept offering to bring food, and I was like, why would I need food? I haven't lost my ability to cook.

The morning after he died, I had to do a load of laundry and started to cry seeing all his clothes in the basket, but less than a week later, I was able to bag up almost all of his things with no problem.

By contrast, there are widows on the forum whose husbands died months ago and they still break down every time they open the closet. A lot of them are still wearing their rings several years later, or saying they'll never marry again. I'm much more pragmatic than that. My perspective is that a lot of the women on that board are wallowing in grief, but maybe they're the normal ones, and I'm not.

My feeling is basically: He died, it really hurts and really sucks, but I'm still alive. I've still got a life to live and a child to raise, and it will do me absolutely no good to remain mired in grief. FWIW, he always told me that I was cold-hearted about death, because I never cried at funerals and because if I heard someone died, I would be very matter-of-fact about it. Everybody dies, it's a fact of life. It's shocking and tragic when it happens to someone so young (especially someone with a small child), but it happens. I never thought it would happen to us, but it did. My job is to move on and keep living.

Now, two months later, I feel pretty much back to my old self. I got through Christmas and New Year's fine, actually enjoyed some of it. A few times I've acted sadder than I really am, because people seem to expect me to be miserable. For instance, somebody will ask me with that look of pity in their eyes, "How are you holding up?" and my impulse is to tell the truth and say "good" but I have a feeling that wouldn't go over too well, so I play it down and say something like, "Well, I made it through the holidays..."

Some of the people close to me say that I must still be in shock, or in denial, but I know in my heart I'm not. I think I'm just rebounding more quickly than most people would. And I think that's a good thing.

It does not tend to affect me much at all,even on the rare occasions that it does, I'm over it within a day.

The last few family/ friends I've had that died were really old and were going downhill in the end, so I expected them to die eventually so it wasn't earth-shattering for me.

I don't know how I'd react if someone relatively younger that I'm close with died suddenly.

Queenofswords, I had to do a double-take when I read your post. I thought I had spaced out and written it at some point in time and had forgotten about it (then I came to my senses and saw your screen name). The similarities are startling.

My husband, who was 42, passed away two months ago (November 27th) of a sudden cardiac arrest. We have a little boy who just turned six (diagnosed with Asperger's when he was 3). I myself am undiagnosed. I also joined a young widow's support group (I'm 38) and through reading the posts have discerned that I'm different than everyone else. Truthfully, I forgot I was a member of this forum until I did a search on "I can separate myself from emotion" and WP came up in the search results.

I did the search because it almost seems like I can separate myself from all emotion, like I can see it, but I can't reach it. I've always been like that, but it's intensified over the years. I compartmentalize everything into a neat little box. My husband died ? Yes, grief. I was terribly sad for a while, but there is no doubt about it.....it is much less so now. People keep saying to me that I'm so strong (I was comforting the people who were coming through the receiving line at the wake who were crying) but it has nothing to do with strength and more to do with how I process my emotions.

I'm terribly tired right now and probably not making much sense, but I will be back. It seems I'm going to get more from WP than a widow's group.

Well, there. I just realized after I hit 'post' that I joined over 2 years ago and that was my first post.

Mostly I was lurking to find information for my son, but, I think I'll stick around for me. Which is unusual because I rarely do things for myself

I have a very hard time dealing with death. I've only had one family member, my grandpa, die and four pets. My rabbit died a few months ago and I very much shut down and took it very hard. I was very emotional when he first died and there was lots of crying and melt downs, but as the weeks went on I pretty much withdrew. My grandpa died when I was 10 and I still cry about it frequently. Death is something that's very hard for me to accept.

I think it differs according to the situation.

When both of my respective grandparents died, I felt very uncomfortable because I had to watch my mom and dad crying and upset. And my mom wanted me to hug her and I just sort of stood there. I never cried over my grandparents' deaths and we were fairly close. With my grandmother, I mostly felt a lack of closure. My folks had taken me and my brothers to the hospital to basically see her as she was dying, yet I didn't actually see her die. So it was like her life just got kind of cut for me. After her death I wrote some poems about her.

On the other hand though, my 1 1/2 yr. old cat died of cardiomyopathy and I was beside myself with grief for a long time, sobbing and lying on the couch alone. I became obsessed with seeing her dead body. Since I was working at the animal hospital she died at, I used to go down in the basement and feel her through her trash bag in the freezer. I told my mom I was doing this and she got really upset and picked my cat up from the vet's and buried her by herself in our yard.

My mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour earlier this year and has been told it is very unlikely she is to live much longer than a year. She has only just turned 50 and has no record of bad health, so this has come as a surprise to us all.

I have responded to this in quite a matter of fact manner, which my mother seems to appreciate in some respects as she feels I am the only one she can talk to about the practical details of her immenent death without upsetting them. The rest of my family however, seem quite unsettled by my emotional detachment at this time.

My problem is this, I find regular contact with my family stifling and go into mild states of panic when they contact with me too often. When I restrict my contact I feel much better able to cope with the situation and help them when need be. Rather than sadness (which I'm sure I feel on some level, I just struggle to discern its manifestation), most times I'm overwhelmed by a combination of guilt for not being there for my family and resentment towards them for being demanding of me when there is nothing I can do practically to help the situation. I know that the company of others alone can be a source of relief for others, yet I don't quite "understand" its function.

My solution thus far has been to just be there when I can however, it feelings of being socially/emotionally overloaded is proving unbearable at times.

Note: My family are aware of what I am like socially but don't really have an understanding of the aspergers condition, despite my father being diagnosed and my younger sister having traits.