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Death versus divorce/breakup


fzald

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This is more just a post for me to organize some thoughts and see if anyone else has anything to add.

At this point in my life, I have been through the grieving of both a bad breakup (with someone at the time I expected to spend my life with) and the death of a girlfriend (only barely a month into that one). I have also experienced brief "breaks" with the girl who I just lost to death, where I wondered if we had broken up or would, and had begun "grieving" but was able to abort that because we resolved our issues quickly. But the feelings were there even if only for a day or two, so I can still discuss. I've already come to notice a few similarities and differences in the two scenarios. This might also apply to people who divorce.

Similar

  • You grieve the loss of the person in your daily life. Your routine becomes completely shattered and nothing makes sense anymore.
  • Places you shared - restaurants, local attractions, the grocery store, whatever - become very hard to visit after the loss
  • You replay your last moments, or maybe your last happy moments, together. Over and over.
  • You spend a lot of time thinking about the last time you were together and happy. You might replay the last moments of the relationship over and over as well. 
  • You will have physical effects: trouble eating, trouble sleeping, low energy, panic attacks, etc. 
  • You grieve the loss of physical intimacy. Unless you're the type who can do casual intimacy, you may wonder if you'll ever get to experience sex and intimacy again, and even if you think you will, how long from now and with whom.
  • If you had long-term plans together, you grieve the loss of the future. You find it hard to think ahead even more than an hour or two. You have no clue where you're going.
  • Songs, movies, books, TV shows, foods, etc. that you shared or that your partner liked become hard to impossible to listen to, watch, read, eat...
  • You feel guilty, wondering what you could have done differently to prevent the loss.
  • Looking at photos of you two together, reading love letters, remembering specific happy moments, etc. will make you immensely sad for a while. 

Different

  • When someone dies, there are usually few "hard feelings" as compared to a breakup. The relationship is often going great at the time. Even if someone dies due to prolonged illness, you are often doing well as a couple even throughout that illness; it may even have brought you closer together as you took on a caretaker role. Sudden deaths are even worse, because you likely went from seeing them happy and alive to them being gone within a very short time period. A relationship breakup, on the other hand, often carries with it very negative feelings. Someone chose to end the relationship because they were unable to cope with the situation as it stood. This means the breakup is surrounded in negativity, and things like "honor their memory" are irrelevant.
  • When someone dies, you must immediately face finality. There is no force on Earth that can bring the person back from the dead. In contrast, in a relationship breakup, you can hang on to hope for a while that the relationship may still be salvageable, or that you may get back together someday in the future. Sometimes people even do reconcile and resume a relationship, meaning that you are aware of at least one known way that is possible (even if difficult, unlikely, etc.) that you can end your grieving. In death, that option does not exist; you're not given any choice but to go forward through the grief.
  • When someone dies, you may have to deal with things like funeral arrangements, sorting through their belongings, etc. They may have had last wishes you need to support, or perhaps (this happened in my case) you are unable to honor some of their wishes and this brings additional pain. In contrast, a breakup or divorce has different issues. The other person will usually take care of their own loose ends, but you may have shared issues to resolve: pets, shared belongings, or even children.
  • When someone dies, you do not have to, nor should you, stop loving them. Your grieving may be prolonged or may even last forever. In a breakup, even though you may have shared your life for a time, there is a need to "move on" or "get over" the person, because they themselves have ended the relationship, of their own choice. in death, the person dying almost certainly did not choose to die, much less end the relationship. This means that you, as the bereaved, do not have to choose to end the relationship and the love either. 
  • Dating after a breakup tends to be easier. Most people have experienced a breakup. Not everyone, in particular young people, have experienced death of a partner. It's expected that when you date someone that they may have had previous partners, but you also generally do not expect them to hold any especially strong emotional ties to those people. With someone who lost someone to death, they likely will still have emotional ties to the person who died, and you cannot expect them to sever those ties for you. Some people become very jealous and feel they are not getting "all of someone's love" because part of them still loves and is still "with" their departed love. This can complicate dating quite heavily.
  • Grieving a death might include honoring the person, donating things in their name, and any number of other charitable acts that remember the person positively. Grieving a breakup is often more about "seeing their faults" and "keeping things in perspective" so you don't pine and long for something that was "broken". Advice for people grieving a breakup or divorce is extremely different from those grieving a death. Sometimes people say that breakups happened for a reason - something was badly broken and wasn't being fixed. On the other hand, a death, especially one that was unexpected or sudden, doesn't carry that same knowledge. Unless your spiritual beliefs tell you that everything has a reason, you can't get much comfort from the death of someone because you have no "perspective" to put the situation in.
  • Depending on your life circumstances, in a breakup you may run the risk of running into your ex, seeing them on Facebook, etc. Especially if they find another partner and you become aware of this, it can be like repeated stabs of pain every time you become aware of something related to them. In death, once the person has passed, that's the last news you'll ever hear about them. (This isn't necessarily absolute; there are sometimes stories of people who discover horrible, heartbreaking secrets about their loved ones in death...)

When I was grieving the loss of a relationship (but not to death), I sought out help on the Internet and found a lot of resources. Most of them rang with the same theme: work hard to forget your past and look to your future. Make active steps to try to avoid the person if possible. Unfriend them or block them on Facebook and Twitter, etc. Remove their number from your phone. Remove any songs you shared from your playlists. Put items that provoke memories in a box and put them out of reach. If you have no choice but to see them, conduct yourself in a business-like fashion. Never let your ex know you're sad. Choose to go out and do different activities than you shared on purpose. In other words, the advice and techniques are designed specifically to help you move on. You're supposed to get over the person. You're supposed to reach a point where you can think of them without longing, just like in a death, but the ways you proactively work towards that are very different. While you still do need to process your grief, there's a lot more reasons not to "wallow" in sadness, or to not let yourself feel all the deep emotions of loss. There's a lot of reasons to pick yourself up quickly and move forward. 

In grieving a loss of a partner to death, almost all of the above do nothing to help you, and in fact might hurt you. Because I had studied grief from the perspective of a breakup sufferer before, I was trying to use these techniques in the first couple of days after my girlfriend died. I put all our shared stuff away. I immediately removed her from all my online chat profiles. Etc. And in the end I almost feel guilty. I feel like I was trying to erase her from my mind. This would have been somewhat appropriate had we broken up. But the fact is, we did not break up. We were happily in love. Our relationship was at its strongest ever when she passed. I have no reason to try to deny the relationship we shared, or to even try to devalue it now. Trying to act like we had not dated, or that our relationship didn't have all that much meaning, is honestly an insult to her and to us. Our relationship did have meaning. A lot of it. We were discussing our long-term life plans, and working to implement them slowly. There were no hard feelings other than typical relationship banter that every couple faces from time to time. And her death was so sudden that I never even had a chance to prepare for it or to see it coming. 

It doesn't make sense to try to say which grief is easier or harder, or which causes more anguish. Each grief has "silver linings" (e.g. in a breakup, there's some hope for their return; in a death, you shared happiness till the end and can do things to honor their life), and each grief has plenty of bad things to bring you down. For me, I honestly do feel that loss to death is harder, but that may be bias because of what I'm living through right now. I used to think about the times when I was in depression from grieving my relationship and wonder "How is it I was so sad?" I'm now suddenly thrust back into that same world, but with different parameters. The coping strategies I used to get me through last time do nothing to help me now. The finality is a constant sting, every day, even many times a day, I once again face the truth - that she is gone, never to return, no matter how much anyone wishes for it. Some feel this may help grieving because you can't hold onto false hope, but I'm not sure. 

Anyway, thanks for reading all my rambling thoughts. If anyone has anything to add, feel free. 

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Hello, what you said about grieving a breakup with the person who died resonates with me. We broke up for a few months last spring, and it was definitely sad and awful, but he was still there, living his life, and I always felt he'd come back to me, which he did. The pain of the loss now, so final and absolute, is a horror I wouldn't wish on anyone. Coping? I'm still not sure what that means today, three months in. The effort of pushing through the day when it feels like there's a current of heavy darkness pushing back is exhausting. Never felt that way during the breakup, I can promise you that. Why? Because I had hope for his return. Now there is no hope, not even the slightest chance I'll see him, feel him, hear him, ever again. Very different for me. 

Thanks for posting, take gentle care of yourself for now. 

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I understand that feeling well. My girlfriend and I had gone on a "break" for a while back in 2013. We only talked maybe once a week or less and even then very, very briefly, basically just "i am ok." I always hoped she would come back and want to resume our relationship. And she did a couple months later. The feeling was pure euphoria. I was sort of "anticipatory grieving" the relationship, but I also had hope she would decide not to end things. When we talked and agreed we were still together, I might as well have been high on drugs. I was full of happiness. I could not stop smiling. I didn't have to grieve. I could be HAPPY again!!!!!

Now, there is no hope for that ever again with her. She is gone. That feeling of elation when you get back together? Never gonna happen for me. That alone is depressing. It's amazing how easy grief can be averted if it's actually possible for it to happen. But for us we all know it will never happen. We have no hope. None.

All of our situations just suck. Nobody should have to live through this. This kind of sadness, desperation, anguish... It shouldn't even be possible to feel this. 

You take care of yourself too, and keep posting. Thanks.

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Solomon'sGirl

This is actually my first post on here. I just signed up today after googling something about death of a boyfriend. I've googled so much that I can't remember what my last search was. But it brought me here. I've actually been comparing/contrasting between death and breakups. Sometimes it feels like a breakup depending on the memories I'm having at the moment. My boyfriend died in a car accident almost a month ago. I had texted him to see if he had made it to his destination. One of the first things I did after I found out he had died, was delete our texts. It was instinct. It was too hard to see his name. Thankfully, I have an iPhone and a Macbook and Messenger is linked on both. I've read back as far as I can, which in some ways is good and bad. I've sat at the computer for hours reading and reliving. I just wanted to share that since you had mentioned removing your girlfriend from online chats. I've wondered if my actions and feelings have been "normal" so it's good in a way to see that at least I'm not alone in doing certain things. 

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For the first couple of days after my girlfriend died I spent hours reading conversations we'd had even just recently. It was too hard for me to even begin to take in that she was gone forever. Reading the conversations reassured me that she had been real, her personality came through so clearly. But now I find, about a month in, that reading just makes it harder. I haven't deleted anything, I hope that someday I will be able to read our conversations and smile, remembering the amazing person she was to me and to everyone around her. 

When I was going through a breakup, I never removed her contacts or anything from my phone or whatever, because she was still alive - why would I do that? The decision as to whether, or when, to remove my girl from my phone is weighing heavily on me now. She is gone, someday her number will be reassigned. At some point there will be no point in having her contact info. In fact there's already no point. 

 

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Solomon'sGirl, Welcome to finding this forum. I hope you will find comfort, encouragement and friends here. I am sorry for the tragic loss of your beloved. All of your emotions, thoughts, actions, are completely in the norm. We all grieve in our own unique ways. We all do whatever we need to. One moment, one hour, day by day. No rules, no time table. Our grieving and how we handle it is of our choosing.  You are definitely not alone here. Keep posting, cry, vent, let it out. We are a very understanding club. Prayers of peace and comfort.

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Interesting, I responded to this but my post isn't here.  Not the first time!

Solomon's Girl,

I'm sorry for your loss.  I think pretty much anything/everything is "normal" grief response.  Some delete, some savor, both are common responses.

fzald, 

We were under AT&T contract and I couldn't afford George's line after he died so my daughter took it over.  That phone and that account are long gone by now but she still has his old phone number.

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