How do folks with aspergers deal with bereavement

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when my mom and dad died --i never shed a tear and i loved them dearly--
-- when my American Bulldog got diagnosed with osteosarcoma , i cried like a baby in the vets office. .....
...Then i did not cry anymore.

I think the same thing can be said for both Aspies/Autistics and Neurotypicals alike--everyone grieves in their own way.

However, a lot of it can also depend upon how close one was to the deceased, whether their death was sudden or expected, etc. I can speak from experience, having lost two family members recently.

WARNING: The rest of this post will be very long and seem more like rambling than a well-thought-out post...


When my Great-Grandmother died back in September, I cried a little on the day that I heard about it, but not after that. I was sad, sure, and the day of her funeral was an especially depressing one (and for those of you who have never been to a funeral, the people who have aren't joking when they say that the deceased looks different at the wake) but I never broke down or anything like that. She was 97 and 1/2 when she died, so everyone in the family--myself included-- had had many years to prepare for the day that they would hear that she was gone (that's not to say that tears weren't shed at her funeral, there were at least a few people who cried, although I can't say I blame them even though we all knew it was coming).

When I learned that my father died a couple of weeks ago, however, I was devastated. Absolutely crushed. What made it worse was that my grandmother and I had hoped to see him in June, when we will be attending the family reunion (mother's side).

I still cry about it, though not quite as much as I did on that first day. Sometimes I feel fine, other times the depression seems all-consuming. I've had no denial, but it sill hurts.

Here lately I've been thinking a lot about the last time I saw him, which was--ironically enough--when we went up North for my Great-Grandmother's aforementioned funeral. I can't seem to stop asking myself what I would have done with the time if I had known I would not see him again after that, even though logically I am aware that I did not know. I knew at the time that it would be a long while (he lived in another state), but I didn't know it would be the last time.

What is most painful for me, though, is all of the things he will miss and the things we will never do together. I will not be able to visit him during Spring and Summer breaks from college when I start attending up North. He won't get to see me graduate with my Master's. He won't be at my wedding, should I decide to marry, and he won't get to see his grandchildren, should I decide to become a mother.

Part of it is that his death was relatively unexpected. Logically, yes, I am aware that death is inevitable for us all, but it's more so a matter of when. I might have expected my father to pass away in his 70s or something, but not at the age of 44 due to a (very sudden) heart attack. That's why it's been so painful. It was a "one minute he was there, the next he wasn't" sort of thing.

This one's for him...

I wanted to find out if I was odd in this regard. I guess I am as odd as the next person. When my grandfather passed, I was one of his pallbearers. I loved him and admired him. My grandmother always told me I was so much like him in that I thought so differently from everyone else in the family. Knowing the way he was, I didn't feel that I could let my emotions run away with me and I didn't cry until I saw how utterly devastated my grandmother was. Then it struck me. The distant, funny, hardworking, stoic man that was my grandfather would never be able to instruct my brother and I with his brilliant ideas, his strange but hilarious sayings that I have never heard from anyone else, his sometimes harsh outlook, or his ability to find joy in backbreaking manual labor. My pain was intense but fleeting, I felt more pain as a reflection of my grandmothers broken heart. All I have left of him today are great memories, confounding sayings and a suspicion that Granddaddy may have been an Aspie.
My grandmother was the mother that I wished I had. She meant the world to me. My father and his brothers, have commented on my finding a wife that is so much like her, even though she and my wife never got to meet. I think the biggest part of the pain regarding my grandmother is regret. She went rather suddenly in mid-spring a dozen years ago, shortly after my wife and I agreed to come see her that summer. She had so much wanted to meet my wife and our kids. When my wife told me the news after getting off of the phone with my uncle, I completely lost control for the first time since I was a small child.
My father is dying. I have so many things left unsaid that it is pathetic. Unfortunately, I was raised in a conservative southern family in which the children don't question their parents. The prohibition against questioning my father is so firmly ingrained that I have difficulty correcting him even if he oversteps himself with my children, even though he lives in my house. This prohibition does not extend to my wife however and she keeps him in check and has questioned him narrowly about certain aspects of my childhood and the family's attitudes, specifically regarding me. One of my uncles intimated that he will be free to tell me what he knows, once my father passes, but not until (maybe they are afraid that I will turn him out of my home). I don't know how I will feel when he does pass, which bothers me a bit. Thanks for your attention. Sorry for the rant.

Poorly, in my personal experience. I tend to implode at inopportune times, because I can't always recognize and regulate emotions. I still have trouble feeling/sensing the loss from their absence even now....

So I'm resurrecting this thread since it already exists (so I don't feel I need to start a new one) and it's a big issue in my life that I've been putting off dealing with for about 8 years now, when this thread was started. And I'm hoping (fingers crossed) someone will respond. I'm shortly going to go into great detail discussing what it was like losing my parents (each of them), but first I want to put my main question(s) up front.

As I've said on other threads, I recently started CBT w/an ASD specialist therapist using the book "Living Well on the Spectrum" and so far it's going pretty well. What I'm wondering, however, is if anyone here has any suggestions as to something I could watch (like on YT) or read (articles, books, whatever) re: the issue of bereavement and ASD. I've done a little google searching and haven't found much thus far. I've just asked my therapist for leads and am waiting for a response, but I thought I'd try here too. I say this knowing that (at least re: books) the vast majority of self-help psychology books are written for women and maybe all of the ones about dealing with death unsurprisingly are written for NT's. There is only one book I know of, for example, that deals w/men and boys who have lost their fathers called "Fatherloss" which I've read and would highly recommend. And (to me surprisingly) there isn't a book I know of dealing with men and boys who have lost their mothers. Anyway, I'm all ears if anyone on WP has a suggestion on this issue b/c I would want to watch/read it and possibly incorporate it into my own therapy.

I lost my Dad in October 2006 basically due to old age. He was 86 and while he'd had a stroke 5 years before, that wasn't what caused his death. He was a Philosophy Professor at the local college where I grew up outside Philly and he'd had me when he was in his early 50s. He was also an immigrant from Lithuania and a WWII refugee so there were already significant differences between him and myself. He was almost always working even on holidays and doing work around the house when he wasn't doing things related to his job. I grew up kind of afraid of him since I was much closer to my mother, but he did love me and did the whole old school provider role in my life sending me to good schools straight through college and I was kind of raised w/the expectation of going into academia. Unfortunately when I was about 6 and got the first test results that I had some learning disabilities, he didn't take it too well and really didn't know how to handle it, partly b/c no one knew what ASD was circa 1980. When he finally went back to Lithuania in the late 90s for the first time in over 50 years he wanted me to go w/him, but I was already spending that summer w/my partner at the time in China and I didn't have much interest. Something (whether or not I'm being fair to myself) I've since regretted for a long time since he did find a couple surviving siblings on the trip and I've never met anyone on his side of the family.

Anyway about a year before his retirement, he had an appendectomy and would've died if he hadn't since his appendix had burst. Fortunately he recovered and finished the last year of teaching. But about a year later at the end of his last semester he had his stroke and only survived b/c my mom found him in time in the kitchen and was able to get him to the hospital. But he was never the same after that as his intellectual faculties gradually declined over the next 5 years and he was eventually institutionalized in a nursing home since my mom (more on her later) could no longer take care of him and I was living in NYC at the time. I used to visit them on major holidays and would spend lunch w/him and then read him the newspaper or from some book w/silly photos of animals while the book told some funny story to go along with them.

The last time I saw him was a day or two (I think) before he passed away. I remember seeing him there in his bed kind of shaking and w/fairly fast breathing and a part of me was afraid that it would be time to say goodbye. But I did give him a hug and say something, I can't remember what exactly. A day or 2 later my mom called to give me the bad news and I can't remember exactly what I felt other than a surreal feeling and that yes I was quite upset, sad, though I didn't really feel the need to cry. I was working as a part time research assistant to a professor (the last job I've had to date) and I decided to take a week off, but in retrospect, I probably should've taken longer. The job wasn't going great as is, but more on that shortly. I went to visit my mom that week and also got together w/my half sister (same Dad) whom I've never been very close with. I remember my mom inviting me to get involved in planning Dad's memorial, but I wasn't really interested in doing so at the time I think partly b/c I felt I had to focus on my job and (hopefully) working on PhD applications for that Fall. Anyway within a month after coming back to NYC, I quit my job due to a combination of things including issues around losing my Dad and my own executive functioning problems, along w/the professor's very capricious, arbitrary and unclear expectations. I should add that at the memorial service, which my mom had at her church, she invited mostly people she knew. There were a few people from my Dad's school, but considering that he had taught for 30 years, there should've been alot more people from his life there, so I felt anyway. I then proceeded to yell at my mom as I drove her from the memorial to a restaurant where several of us (mostly her, my sister and I and other family) had dinner. I can't remember what exactly it was about, but this was a combination of my own anger management issues, my being upset at alot of crazy decisions my mom was making and obviously issues around losing my Dad.

I didn't end up applying for PhD programs that Fall and didn't get around to applying to grad school for several more years (more on that later). I have alot of regrets regarding my dad: that I never saw him teach, that I didn't go on that trip with him, that I didn't get to know his own fascinating life story better while he was alive, that I never read his dissertation, that I never recorded him talking about his life story and alot of other stuff. I still have a big box or two of his research papers and alot of other stuff including photos, diplomas and other things. I'm only starting to begin to deal w/the fallout from losing him now, 13 years later. I would like to turn his dissertation into a book some day, but my own life is in too much of a mess right now to do anything about that at least for the next several years.

I'm going to stop here today and post about losing my mom probably tomorrow.

My dad's health has deteriated over the past 5 years or so and just recently he was in hospital for 3 weeks. He is now home and recovering but when he was first in hospital I did have to think about the possibility he may not recover, and one of my brothers also mentioned this possibility to me.

For some reason I don't get upset and teary about it. I just see the logic in someone getting old and unwell and death meaning it is over and the struggle ends. I do then get a little worked up at the fact I don't respond in a 'normal' way and I wonder what is wrong with me. That usually ends with me feeling down.

My dad is a difficult person to be with sometimes, and much of my childhood was spent keeping away from him as I found him too much to be around (says something about me too I guess). But now I am older and wiser I see that he is a good person, I think he always tried his best and he worked incredibly hard, harder than I ever did, but we were in a difficult situation as a family when I was young and we didn't have much, and he just did what he had to do to help us all. He also had a strange upbrining himself and so I think he struggled a little to put in place a conventional upbringing for us. He let his frustrations out at home and I think judging him on that was not fair. I actually think if he was young now he could well be diagnosed with ASD as he is quite like me but I have an awareness which he seems to lack. He is introverted, struggles with change, likes being on his own and explodes into frustration and anger quickly when things upset him.

About 4 months ago he came to my house and gave me £100 cash which he had been saving for ages for something he wanted. He knew me and my wife were in a difficult position so said we should have it instead. I think that is who he really is, he means well but rarely knows how to express it. I still have the £100 in a drawer as nothing I could buy feels like it would be equal to the gesture he made by giving it to me.

My father died when I was 18 and my mother at 20. I was semi-close to them, although I hadn't seen my father for about 4 years before he passed.

It's difficult to describe what that grieving process was like except to say that it was unusual. I cannot receive support from others without shutting down. I will not want to cry with you or hold each other. I definitely don't want to talk about it in an emotionally engaging way. Trying to have a shared experience reminiscing about how much they loved me is going to make me feel extremely awkward. It's something dealt with in private.

I really wish people could have understood to not be offended by my stone faced response, but I know they were.

I would struggle mentally after these events, although I wouldn't necessarily be able to recognize that I was dealing with death related trauma. After my father's death I went kind of Schizoid for about 4-5 months until I started having emotional outbursts involving minor self harm.

I've never really processed it all. I sometimes wonder if I carry some kind of PTSD from it all combined with other negative experiences I've endured.

We all grieve differently. Some wale, some become subdued, some have a complete breakdown that lasts months. I tend to put my 'masque' on but when alone fall apart. There is no right or wrong way to grieve, though I do suggest doing it sooner rather than later

So this is Part 2 of my post re: losing my mom. This was much harder on me than losing my dad b/c I was always much closer to her from the time I was little. And I still 8 years on am only now starting to deal w/the emotional fallout of losing her since before that I felt I really didn't have the time. But I realize now that if I don't deal w/these issues, it'll continue to f**k up my own life.

My mom was, until she had me, a primary school teacher and also a very musical person, that was always her art form. And she may've been the most generous person I've ever known, including w/money, sometimes extravagantly so. More on that shortly. And she was a hopeless romantic, especially re: movies and romance novels. God did I have to chuck 100s or more of those when I cleaned out her house! She was also involved for a long time in support groups, spirituality and religion which she studied in college. Before she met my Dad, she had an intense marriage w/her first husband who passed away at 30 from a heart condition. She told me alot about that marriage (too much actually) and her trip around Europe after he passed away.

Her marriage w/my Dad was a strange one b/c while it started out very romantically and ended romantically over the last 10 years or so, the middle part felt to me growing up that there wasn't really any love between my parents. My dad was somewhat emotionally abusive and that just fed my mom's own anxiety. I believe she was on the spectrum b/c of her own emotional intensity and refusal to learn emotional regulation. Her anxiety resulted in acts of self mutilation to her limbs and in the most extreme incidents, panic attacks where she had to be hospitalized. And b/c her marriage for about 20 years was at best mediocre, she spoiled me. I got every star wars toy I wanted as a kid (especially around Xmas and birthdays) and alot of others, something that went on for years. She basically took her own frustration w/her marriage and smothered me for the next 35 years or so of my life, including financially. For someone who didn't know he had ASD, this wasn't the best parenting method obviously and to this day probably has played some role in my own inability to get, let alone hold down, work.

The one relationship I had in which I was abused by my partner (between the ages of 24-27), to a large extent b/c I wouldn't let her go, in that relationship my mom didn't like my partner at the time. But it wasn't just what my partner was doing to me that was the issue. It was the fact that my partner was Asian, was not wealthy and was not pretty enough for my mom's liking. I think my mom probably would've given anyone I'd dated a hard time, but she was particularly at best fake w/my partner and I detected some at least racially insensitive feelings from my mom, which I abhored. We got into fights about this several times.

My mom had smoked back in college for about 5 years and had grown up around my grandfather who also used to smoke. Even though she's stopped decades before, she ended up contracting lung cancer when she about 60. The last 13 years or so of her life which she lived through were on the one hand, according to her doctors, an exceptional achievement b/c they had barely heard of anyone who lived so long. But about 6 years after the cancer was diagnosed, I had my first real glimpse of her mortality when she had a heart attack. It happened while she was in the hospital so after being put into an induced coma for a few days, she revived and ultimately recovered. But I remember those few days and it was the first time I worried she would pass away. A year later began her long decline during which she has surgery maybe 10 or so times, I don't really remember. She did take a trip to Ireland during this period which was maybe the last major highlight of her life. But some years it seemed like she was in and out the hospital at least every few months, if not more frequently.

Through all this, I'm embarrassed to admit she continued to support me financially, including my taking several graduate level courses here in NYC. But she didn't only support me, she paid in some cases imo crazy amounts of money on her friends one of whom worked for her as a sort of surrogate best friend/personal assistant. And my mom was at best a middle class woman, not wealthy at all.

The beginning of the end finally came in 2010 when her cancer metastasized from her lungs to her spine. At that point she was told she had less than a year to live and she basically said she was ready to cut me off financially due to my age and inability to find work (again I was only diagnosed 2 years ago). At that point, I finally did apply and was accepted into a Masters program here in NYC. There were times, however, when I wonder if I contributed to my mom's passing earlier than she should have b/c we one, for example, had a fight over her laptop which I ended up taking w/me back to NYC and replaced for her w/an older computer. I remember her heavy breathing and fatigue after that fight.

A few months before she died I had to move her out of her house and into a nursing home and I remember one time when she was upset (sort of despairing/crying) that I wanted to leave she said "I wish your father was still here". That showed she felt I wasn't being supportive enough I guess. Another time I had to run some errand for her to retrieve some piece of medical equipment from her house and bring it to the nursing home and she didn't trust me to do the job. I said to her "this is like the time when you saw grandpa couldn't take care of himself any more and you asserted your will and took him to the hospital. It's my turn now, mom". But she wouldn't respect my authority in this matter even though she clearly needed my help, I think it took a nurse to finally convince her. Over the last few months she was alive I did, however, do what I had wished I'd done w/my dad and twice recorded an audio biography interview w/her. We stopped at the point right before I was born and never got to finish, which I also regret.

After I had started grad school, I finally got a call from a friend of hers that she didn't had much time left and that I needed to come back to the Philly area to see her, which I did. She was clearly no longer herself mentally or emotionally and the nurses and her doctor basically told me she was letting go of everything as part of the process of dying. I then took her to a local hospice where she spent her last night. It seemed very peaceful, but I knew she didn't have much time left. The next morning I got THE CALL and was told she'd passed away. I'll never forget that sh***y rainy day. I guess I was in some sort of emotional shock b/c the whole day felt surreal: going to the hospice to retrieve her belongings, turning in my stats homework for that class, calling my half sister, my mom's lawyer and a bunch of other people. Right away I immediately moved into something I've read ASD people do in dealing w/grief: a routine mode. I had to handle all her affairs as executor of her estate and I basically had to do so alone.

The rest of that spring of 2011 was a mess (but it gets worse when we get to the summer). After a meeting between the lawyer and her financial associate w/me and my sister, I remember them asking my sister if she'd want me at her wedding and she said something like "if he pays for it". A day or two later my sister and I were having some argument on the phone. A week after that she and her fiance were yelling at me on the phone b/c they didn't like how I was handling my mom's estate and saying they wanted more control of it. On my lawyer's advice, I changed the locks on my mom's house and then put her affairs on ice for the next 2.5 months while I finished my semester up in NYC.

Then came the summer of 2011, the summer from Hell I like to call it. I came back and immediately was faced w/the issue of needing to sell my mom's house within a fairly short period of time b/c of a reverse mortgage she'd gotten on the house. That company had been calling the lawyer's office for weeks incessantly and then they proceeded to start harassing me. This was all while my sister was off getting married, I had to plan some kind of memorial service, I had to go through her and my dad's house full of possessions and keep myself together while doing it all. I totally wasn't up to it and I ended up reluctantly contacting my ex (the abusive one) who promptly forced herself on me w/the whole thing. The short version is that w/o her direction as well as the help of another college friend (and a neighbor w/some moving), I wouldn'tve got the house sold. But was that worth the cost of my having to put up w/her (resumed) verbal abuse calling me a moron, an idiot, someone who could only do things if I was told what to do? Was it worth the trauma and all the money I had to pay her to do so? I really don't know, not to this day. But I do know I never wanna see or hear from her ever again.

I'll interrupt this part of the story briefly to say all the calls and errands I had to run did result in a lovely memorial service we had for my mom in late May 2011. The weather was perfect and we basically formed a circle of about 3 dozen people under a tree that overlooked the grave stone. And we proceeded to go around and share memories of her. I went last and spent about 20 minutes or so giving a mini oral biography of her life. My uncle told me that my story was nice but not very personal, which I suppose was true. But again, I had to organize and run everything myself, there didn't seem to be time to mourn or grieve.

The rest of that summer I ended up enduring my ex's abuse, dealing w/pressure from the reverse mortgage company, the lawyer's realtor who sold the house, the lawyer's house junk removers/cleaners/painters and the lawyer herself who more than once threatened to drop me as a client and didn't understand why it took me (working w/just 2 other people) more than a week or 2 to clean out a house full of crap. Some of it literal, as in the mouse crap we had to work through in cleaning my mom's study out. All this went on for about 6 weeks until we put the house on the market and quickly found a buyer, whose offer I was compelled to take by the lawyer. We probably could've gotten 10s of thousands more for the house if we'd waited a little longer, but I was forced to agree to the price offered.

At the end of all this crap, I was completely burnt out. My college friend and I took day trips to Valley Forge and Gettysburg. I took an additional one alone to Washington DC. And those were all great. I had about a month after that before my Fall term was supposed to start and I totally just vegged out w/games, movies and I forget what all else.

I proceeded to go back to school, where I had yet to really make any friends. I did make some that Fall and my classes were great. But I had various problems involving completing the coursework, making friends, falling very hard romantically for a woman classmate who was married at the time and then crossing her boundaries emotionally on more than one occasion. I took several incompletes while I was at that school and b/c of it my application to my department's PhD program was rejected. I saw it coming and just emotionally couldn't get the work done in time. I was devastated and just basically felt I never fit in there. My emotional outbursts in class once led a professor to threaten to throw me out of her class if I didn't quiet down, which I did. I did eventually make a few friends, but the ones I stayed in contact with were almost all foreigners, all of whom have since left the country.

The roughly 5 years since then have not gone terribly well. I've lived w/2 elderly roommates, the former of whom has since died herself. We ended up in frequent fighting matches the last year I lived there b/c I was no longer able to pay the rent so she would often threaten to throw me and my stuff out while I yelled at her. I applied to PhD programs two more times, w/o success and the second Masters program I entered, b/c of all this emotional baggage combined w/my own ASD issues, I've since been kicked out of that program. I've had some attempts at making friends at this second school, but for the most part it didn't lead anywhere. Being a very political person, I've also gotten involved in some leftist political groups and even presented talks at conferences. There was another girl in one of those groups I fell for, but again it turned out she was a psycho and she ended up stealing a book from my mom I had lent her while her bf threatened me at one point. All of this has basically left my life a mess. As I've said, hopefully the CBT I've started recently will help me begin to deal w/these long standing bereavement issues as I hope it helps me to deal w/other areas of my life.