It's such an odd feeling being alone with your grief. Most of the time there are others who feel just as bad, if not worse than how you feel, but they may not be anywhere close to you, so at least you can bond in that way...
Just a tad over a year now, I lost my dearest friend. I work so far away that I could not even attend the funeral. I was demolished, maybe I still am; I just don't talk too much about it. There was nobody around me that would even know him; it was just me.
Soon enough, while drowning in despair, I realized the last time we spent time together was February 2023. I had lost a connecting flight, so I called him around 9 AM. He was out of town, in the countryside with his partner, just enjoying a day out of the city. He couldn't believe I missed the flight, joked for a bit, and gave me instructions on how to get to where he was from the airport, about a 6-hour trip.
I got there, and this place was the closest thing to heaven. I had an amazing weekend (missed the flight early Saturday), and then on Monday we all went back to the city... Because of the nature of the flight, I was going to have to wait until next Saturday to take the flight again. And so we spent that whole week together, just going out for beers and joking around just as we always did... And that was the last week we had together. I know there are a lot of atheists in this community, and that's OK, but in my head, forever, I will always thank God for that week, that so many other people did not have.
Professional help is often stigmatized, but I think completely appropriate, if you want to reach for it. I am not trying to tell you what to do, nor make any statement about whether it would or would not help you personally to deal with the loss. I merely want to state, that no one should feel bad about reaching out to professional help in these kind of situations.
This is good advice. And don't let your first experience(s) write off professional help. "Shop" around if you have to, it took me a while to find a psychologist that I felt I was clicking with.
Just a tad over a year now, I lost my dearest friend. I work so far away that I could not even attend the funeral. I was demolished, maybe I still am; I just don't talk too much about it. There was nobody around me that would even know him; it was just me.
Soon enough, while drowning in despair, I realized the last time we spent time together was February 2023. I had lost a connecting flight, so I called him around 9 AM. He was out of town, in the countryside with his partner, just enjoying a day out of the city. He couldn't believe I missed the flight, joked for a bit, and gave me instructions on how to get to where he was from the airport, about a 6-hour trip.
I got there, and this place was the closest thing to heaven. I had an amazing weekend (missed the flight early Saturday), and then on Monday we all went back to the city... Because of the nature of the flight, I was going to have to wait until next Saturday to take the flight again. And so we spent that whole week together, just going out for beers and joking around just as we always did... And that was the last week we had together. I know there are a lot of atheists in this community, and that's OK, but in my head, forever, I will always thank God for that week, that so many other people did not have.