Psychiatrists to brand grief lasting longer than two weeks a mental illness

[winter is coming]

63. This is ridiculously simplistic.

Our relationships aren't one-size-fits-all, so why should our grief be? Two weeks after the sudden death of someone close to me, I was no longer crying constantly, but was still pretty close to tears most of the time. It took me far less time to stop crying constantly when I lost someone else equally dear to me, but I'd been mourning her, intensely but intermittently, throughout a harrowing decline.

When I lost yet another person, a friend I had conflicting feelings about, I wasn't very weepy or sad at the time, nor at the funeral service (which described this person in terms so unlike him that I felt like checking the program to see if I was in the right church), yet I do miss him deeply, perhaps more now than I did at first. I don't think I truly started mourning him until months after his death, after having a dream where he behaved not like the paragon portrayed at his funeral, but like the jerk he sometimes was.

Also, it's not like we grieve for X amount of time and then it's done. We occasionally stumble across it again and fall into a hole nearly as intense as the initial loss, but the feelings don't last nearly so long. And what we do to get through grief is also individual. I've known people who derived great comfort from funerals and others who felt they were a gauntlet.