Loss part 2

[green dragon]

Here is a post in which I wanted to vent how I feel at this point during the grieving process following Mum's death, which happened 4 months ago.

So the first part of this journey of loss was getting used to the situation of having lost my Mum. It was a rough and confusing time but somehow, about a month ago, I started to find my place within this new reality. At least now I can function in the world - I go to work, interact with my friends, go out (although, for now, a lot less than I used to). At home I have a Mum-related routine I still follow because it has helped but there are still days when I feel quite emotional (today was one of them). The good news is I can manage these emotional times enough to get through the day without any drama (though, speaking of drama, my housemate and buddy has been going through a rough patch of depression of his own, so that has put its own kind of pressure on me).

But the thing is, I have a certain way I react to loss in particular and that is to isolate myself. I just feel drained emotionally by the end of the day from all the activities I have to do, especially the ones involving other people. I have always worked with people and have by and large managed very well, but the truth is, some of them are emotional vampires. You have to put up a lot of boundaries whilst at the same time being approachable. The last thing I want at the end of my work day is to negotiate any more boundaries.

Enter the rest of my family. Without going into a lot of detail, when I was a small child, my extended family was quite tight knit, though not big. Around the time I became a teenager things changed, with people moving countries and my parents splitting up (acrimoniously). I also moved countries a couple of times in the meanwhile. This splitting and moving to faraway places has inevitably put physical and emotional distance between us.

Here we are today: "these people" (mostly, my dad and my cousin), who have not been part of my life for various amounts of time (at the very least 15 years) suddenly wanting to be in touch with me more than I want to be in touch with them. Due to disagreements around the inheritance, I have reasons to be cautious regarding their reasons to all of a sudden be so buddy-buddy. I might be more paranoid than necessary and they could possibly be wanting to support me whilst at the same time having ulterior motives. You know how it is, life is never just black and white.

The thing is, I don't know just how much I should trust or not trust them specifically because I don't really know them as an adult. They also don't know me like my my Mum used to or how my friends do, so, if they try to be supportive, they are probably trying too hard (like they appeared to infer that my isolation could hide suicidal tendencies, which anyone who actually knows me would tell you is preposterous. But they don't know me, and although I told them not to worry about that, they still seem to fear it).

I have very little in common with my cousin, though I used to visit him and his parents quite often when I was at uni (we lived in the same country and about 1 hour's drive) but he was a teenager and didn't communicate with anyone, like teenagers do. As a result, we don't really know each other, even though we saw each other frequently back then. As adults we started to get know each other a bit within the past few years, during which time it became clear that though we are both civil to each other, mostly because we have similarly mild dispositions, our world views, values and interests are very different. If we weren't related we wouldn't even bump into each other on the street. With dad I do have things in common, but due to the bad history between him and my Mum and me being more or less in the middle for a long time, plus him trying his luck with the inheritance... well. I just don't trust him.

So they keep pestering me with texts and phone calls and I just want to be left alone. I don't mind the occasional chat but they are not in my life (we all live in different countries), they are not my friends and I don't have the emotional energy to make nice to them at the end of a long day/week. For a while there I even shut off my actual friends because, as I was  saying, this is how I deal with loss, and then I had to explain this to them. I imagine this shutting off of others is very confusing to those around me because I am normally very cheerful and approachable. The truth is I cannot deal with any more emotional interactions when I am going through a rough time. Even if people are trying to help and "be there for me" - I still cannot deal with it. I just need to be completely alone or with strangers for however long it takes. I have lost friends over this behaviour in the past (I was a lot more dramatic when younger); I can't help it. Some people understand. I have also become better at explaining the situation and giving hints as to what is going on. But I still need the isolation period.

I don't really feel like explaining all this in so much detail to "these people" (dad and cousin). It might sound rude and cold, but this is how I feel right now, especially due to the pestering (I hate being pestered; it makes me very stubborn). I don't want to act rude because it was drilled into me not to speak rudely, though perhaps my ignoring them comes off exactly as that... I just want them to back the f off and leave me alone to deal with my emotions for as long as I need to. Out of my entire family I did like my maternal grandparents and I truly loved Mum; everybody else is "other people" to me. They are no less "other people" now that Mum has left a love vacuum behind.

[Karena]

I can empathise with you wanting to retreat i am the same in a lot of ways, and i am not dealing with emotions at work the way you are but totally get that other people can sometimes be emotional vampires. I find not so much that it dont trust people but so many have gone -either died or left that i am afraid of emotional attachments and also have a need to now be self sufficient to know that i can cope without help - i know thats not necessarilly a healthy place to be but it is where i seem to end up.
I can also empathise with not knowing your dad i have only two memorys of mine as a child and didnt meet him again until i had a child of my own.In your case you have the mistrust through the inheritance thing - my mistrust was through a lifetime of being told he was not some-one i would want to meet but never being told why - so of course i imagined he might be a bad person who had done terrible things.

It could be genuine concern from your dad and your cousin -maybe a touch of guilt as well at those estranged years although in your cousins case it would have been more to do with the adults when you were younger, so maybe he is even feeling guilty on behalf of his parents attitude to you and your mum.

My dad certainly felt guilty - and to be fair it wasnt his fault, it was because of the way things were back in those days - he was Gay, married because thats what they did then, it was illegal to be gay and pressure to marry and be "normal" was massive. Then when it was legalised he "came out" and left us.
What i also didnt know at the time,  Community the church and some familly then decided that we were somehow tainted with his sins and so we were also treated like pariahs, my mum was asked to leave the church and was glad to go in some ways as the sermons about sins of the fathers seemed to be directed towards us - so allowing him to visit me allowing him to even see me wasnt something she wanted to do to make it worse -and he agreed, but it didnt stop him feeling guilty or me wondering why he gave in and didnt "bother" with me.
By the time i met him it was old history, but to get to my point the guilt for him and the missing years for both of us meant we wanted to get to know each other - most of the time it was by letter, we only met three times and the third time he was dying.You dad and you circumstances ae not the same but that doesnt mean the feelings around them are not the same.
For me the grief for him, was about what we could have had, not what we did,because we had so very little, but the lost chances were so painful to come to terms with -chance  to have some sort of relationship with a dad i had always wondered about but not been allowed to know.

I am not trying to put any kind of pressure on you at all, but it is something that you might think about in the future, perhaps if you can get over the mistrust a little -( but dont lose sight of what he did,)  and get to know each other over time then you might gain something i never can, and he might be thinking along the same lines - a mix of guilt at his absence and possibly what he did later, and lost opportunity which he wants to take while he can.

But thats for the future and the now is where you are
My only sugestion is that you take some headspace - meditation mindfullness or whatever you want to do for you, go for a walk, go out somewhere, go away somewhere, if its an hour or a day switch your phone off, if you go away warn them you will be incommunicado for the next however long -because you are going to this place and the signal is dodgy ( leave one of them an emergency number and be genuine about where you are going or the suicide fears will hit the roof)  and then the same again switch it off.

Some-one once told me a piece of rose quartz on your desk between yourself and emotional vampires protects you or deflects it away from you  - i cant say if it works in any scientific way or if its the placebo effect, maybe any object you focus on might do the same -although i think its a bit more than that - maybe because ts a beautiful object maybe because crystal does have some kind of communication properties ( remember crystal radios)  but i did it at the time and it helped and have repeated it in different situations since.