Grief

(as an aside to start with, I just have to let you know, it took me three tries to spell that title correctly, I think it's correct now?)

Our birds died the other day. Not just your average budgies, but two hand tame 9 year old cockatiels. They should have lived for around another 5 years or so, and we are very upset. We don't know what happened, something strange for them both to go at the same time. This situation highlighted to me that I am not good at grief.

I did the same thing when my Grandmother died. I'm not sure what the stages of grief are supposed to me, I'll look them up one day, but the one I go for first is self blame. In fact, I don't even know if that is a stage!

With Nana i blamed myself for not visiting often enough, for not praying enough, for her being alone when she died, I felt guilty for not enjoying our visits enough and for not telling her how much I loved her enough. I still feel somewhat this way, especially when there's an episode of some show with a person dying surrounded by thier loving family. I mean, Nana had a loving family, and we visited her, but at the actual moment, she was alone.

Then when the birds died, I blamed myself for neglecting them, for not checking on them often enough, for not letting them out of thier cage enough etc etc. I can't even greive (so seriously cannot spell that word) for them properly because of the huge ball of guilt in my stomach.

Another part of my problem is I think I over attach. I still cry about my dog that died 9 years ago. I guess it's better than being detached, but it hurts more.

I just did a bit of web browsing and found quite a helpfull article. Here's the link

www.counselingforloss.com/article8.htm
this one's good too.
www.mentalhealth.asn.au/resources/grief_and_loss.htm

Hey, the web is actually a usefull tool, I feel better after reading those. I'm not as disfunctional as i thought! perhaps a bit heavy on the guilt and attachment, but not too crazy!