Quaestor
Redshirt
- Local time
- Today 12:04 PM
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2010
- Messages
- 2
I tend to be quite devastated and tearful when people close to me die.
A notable exception was the time when my grandfather died. I was thirteen, and when I was first told about his death, my initial reaction was one of suspicion - as if the announcement was a joke of some sort. At the funeral, I felt somewhat numb and detached. I'd had no prior experience with someone in my family dying, so my grandfather's passing seemed like an abstraction.
When I was 29, my father died. It was a sudden death, and I was living in another city at the time it happened. When my mother told me that he had died, the reality of it all didn't sink in for at least fifteen minutes, but it didn't seem like someone was playing a joke on me. Once the news really sunk in, I felt a heavy weight settle on my shoulders, a feeling I'd never experienced before.
It was a cold, wet, and grey early December day when my father's funeral was held. When a lone piper started playing a lament at his graveside, well, the tears burst forth from me like water from a broken dam. My reaction was mostly due to intense sadness that just when there was a thawing in the relationship we'd had with each other, he was gone.
For several years thereafter I experienced a kind of low-level grief that coloured all of my waking hours. Then one day, the greyness just lifted.
When my paternal grandmother died several years after Dad passed on, I cried for a good chunk of the afternoon on the day of the funeral, but recovered pretty quickly. She was always good to me, so that, I think, was a factor in how I responded to her death.
When my other grandmother died, I felt quite detached. She wasn't close, and wasn't really a regular fixture in my life when I was growing up.
But the death that hit me the hardest was the death of my mother. For at least a week after getting the news, I wandered around, just going through the motioins, in a complete haze of shock. The grief was intense, unlike anything I'd ever experienced before - like my soul had been shattered into a million pieces.
I remember even actually feeling for a moment that I didn't want to go to her funeral, the grief was that severe. For months and months afterward, I felt terrible.
Even though she's been gone seven years now, I still get the odd day where I miss her terribly and my eyes will get a little misty. Although the grief overall has diminished dramatically.
For me, anyway, my response to death depends on how close I was to the deceased and the nature and quality of the relationship we had.
I don't think my reaction to death is terribly un-INTP-like. In his description of INTP's, Joe Butt says that emotion for INTP's is an all-or-nothing thing. I think he's right. 90 percent of the time we're living inside our heads, but when something happens to draw us out of that inner world, we're as capable of emoting as anyone else, perhaps more so, because such events are so exceptional for us.
A notable exception was the time when my grandfather died. I was thirteen, and when I was first told about his death, my initial reaction was one of suspicion - as if the announcement was a joke of some sort. At the funeral, I felt somewhat numb and detached. I'd had no prior experience with someone in my family dying, so my grandfather's passing seemed like an abstraction.
When I was 29, my father died. It was a sudden death, and I was living in another city at the time it happened. When my mother told me that he had died, the reality of it all didn't sink in for at least fifteen minutes, but it didn't seem like someone was playing a joke on me. Once the news really sunk in, I felt a heavy weight settle on my shoulders, a feeling I'd never experienced before.
It was a cold, wet, and grey early December day when my father's funeral was held. When a lone piper started playing a lament at his graveside, well, the tears burst forth from me like water from a broken dam. My reaction was mostly due to intense sadness that just when there was a thawing in the relationship we'd had with each other, he was gone.
For several years thereafter I experienced a kind of low-level grief that coloured all of my waking hours. Then one day, the greyness just lifted.
When my paternal grandmother died several years after Dad passed on, I cried for a good chunk of the afternoon on the day of the funeral, but recovered pretty quickly. She was always good to me, so that, I think, was a factor in how I responded to her death.
When my other grandmother died, I felt quite detached. She wasn't close, and wasn't really a regular fixture in my life when I was growing up.
But the death that hit me the hardest was the death of my mother. For at least a week after getting the news, I wandered around, just going through the motioins, in a complete haze of shock. The grief was intense, unlike anything I'd ever experienced before - like my soul had been shattered into a million pieces.
I remember even actually feeling for a moment that I didn't want to go to her funeral, the grief was that severe. For months and months afterward, I felt terrible.
Even though she's been gone seven years now, I still get the odd day where I miss her terribly and my eyes will get a little misty. Although the grief overall has diminished dramatically.
For me, anyway, my response to death depends on how close I was to the deceased and the nature and quality of the relationship we had.
I don't think my reaction to death is terribly un-INTP-like. In his description of INTP's, Joe Butt says that emotion for INTP's is an all-or-nothing thing. I think he's right. 90 percent of the time we're living inside our heads, but when something happens to draw us out of that inner world, we're as capable of emoting as anyone else, perhaps more so, because such events are so exceptional for us.
