o.k i've been told i'm not very good or clear at expressing myself in text but as this is an important issue i'll try to break it up to be more understandable.


in 1997 my brother drowned in our dam. my mother was supossed to be watching him but as she ran softedge computing at the time was on the phone when he fell in. as a result of this i get the feeling that she halfway blames herself.


i have asspurgers syndrome which is a form of autism. because of this i frequently have difficulty understanding emotions and i mostly feel emotions of my own through triggering. as a result of this i often offend people who are upset or grieving because i try to find out exactly how they're feeling and why in order to better understand emotions and human nature.





my mother to this day insists on celebrating my brothers birthday every year. and she gets all mopey on january 10th which is the day he died.

what i don't understand is why she does these things if they make her sad. after all it's been years and she claims to think about my brother everyday which is odd in my opinion because i go months without remembering i had another brother and i didn't like him when he was alive.
furthermore she claims she would have liked to see him get older. reality is if he had lived he would have had to have surgery to correct his legs which were growing at different speeds.
also more recently if he had lived he would have been a teenager and probably gone through the same difficult stage i went through and my brother is currentlly going through at 13. my mother claims that when i did this she all most had a nervous breakdown but somehow it is somthing she would have liked to see my brother go through. this . is . insane .


i'm asking if other people feel this way or understand why a person would feel this way.
do you think about people close to you even months and years after they die?

My best friend died 5 years ago, I still celebrate her birthday and I still go to the crash site on the anniversary.
People heal and deal with things at different speeds. For me it was loosing someone who was a best friend/ ex girl friend. I had extremely deep feelings for her and I never want to forget her and what a positive influence she was in my life. I still think of her everyday. Remembering is a way of keeping someone alive in your heart.

For your mother, she lost a son. A child she carried in her womb for 9 months. A bond between a mother and child is a very strong thing. It is completely natural for your mother to celebrate his birthdays and so forth. If anything I would be worried if she didn’t.

She probably wholly blames herself.
Things you said or did in your past that hurt others will not go away in your head.
The ones that do go away can return totally unexpectedly when you could most do without them.
They are like a glass wall of time behind which the event unfolds and plays beyond your reach to change for ever and ever and ever.
Your mother will be living with what she sees as her dereliction all her days and yet it is only the same lapse of attention that in other siruations means you forgot to put the rubbish bin out.
That's one of the reasons grownups get annoyed when children say, "I forgot"


I do not know anything of your condition but try to imagine the worst thing that could happen to you personally then imagine if it could happen every week and then think if it was caused solely by yourself. The people who mope are playing a game called "If Only" in their heads They blame themselves even if they are not directly responsible for the event.
You can think, "If I grounded him/her when he/she forgot the garbage would he have stolen that car 10 years later?"
It's called guilt and we all carry it.

my mother to this day insists on celebrating my brothers birthday every year. and she gets all mopey on january 10th which is the day he died.
what i don't understand is why she does these things if they make her sad. after all it's been years and she claims to think about my brother everyday which is odd in my opinion because i go months without remembering i had another brother and i didn't like him when he was alive.

You were young when it happened and you rightly own no responsibility for his death.
Your mother does.
There are parts of yourself that you can and some that you cannot control.
For instance you can hold your breath but not, by an effort of will, stop your heart from beating.
When a person has had a bad thing happen to them it goes round and round in their head like a heart beating.. with time, if you are lucky, it dies away. Sometimes it does not. That could be what your mother is suffering.

I would guess that the fact that your dead brother was not perfect, as you admit to being, does not alter the case. The case is that he is entitled to have people mourne his passing

My son was electrocuted when he was 14. Faulty battery charger on the car.
I knew what to do because the Royal Air Force insisted I learn about high voltages and a guy in the British Sub Aqua Club made us all learn about resuscitation.
I hate to think of the results of that summer day if, years before, I had neglected those lessons. The guilt would have been awful.

There is no such comfort for your mother.


No it is not insane, it is to be human.

All parents go through this:-

Daddy's little girl becomes an insane megabitch
The boy becomes a self opinionated little git who "forgets" to take the garbage out.


i'm asking if other people feel this way or understand why a person would feel this way.
Oh mate! It is the human condition. If you knew tha answer you would be a millionare psychiatrist

do you think about people close to you even months and years after they die?
YES.

A close friend of over 40 years, he was our best man, will find out this month if he has cancer or not. I do not know what to say about it. Just because you are old does not make life less precious.

However I have begun to ramble and could at any moment use "In my day"
So will stop now.

Good luck - I hope this is of some help - I know much of it is Oldspeak

Misty Rain

i wasn't so young it happened 8 days before my 9th birthday and i was old for my age.
why should a person continue to torture themselves about things which can not be changed. from what i've read this sort of thing should harm the healing process.

my mother knew C.P.R and performed it. the autopsy however sugested that he may have had a heart attack when he hit the water so really he may have died anyway with time.

the only thing that haunts me about the day is that when i came home and saw my brother he was being shocked and all i saw was his hand all limp and floppy and i thought that my mothe had cut her hand off as she was sitting near by crying and also because she had tryed to cut her wrists the week before.

i bring the topic up because we're about due for this years mopeing

When people die, their loved ones tend to perfect them in their memories. They still remember the bad stuff, but they gloss over it in their minds and bring the good stuff to the fore. In your mother's mind, your brother is the perfect child she lost because of her own incompetence. She'll never rationally sit down and think about how awful he would have been during puberty, or how difficult the surgery (and most likely surgeries) on his legs would have been. She'll never reminesce about how he (hypothetically) threw temper tantrums every day, how he never listened to what she said or did what she asked, how he had a habit of breaking things for fun, or how he liked to kick the family cat (once again, hypothetically).

And also, when she says that she would have liked to see him get older, she's probably thinking farther than puberty. She probably imagines around when he would be in his early 20's, about the time when he would be in college, would be bringing home a girlfriend to meet the family, would possibly be starting a new family of his own and giving her grandkids....

And yes, you are one of the older siblings, so hypothetically you would be bringing home the in-law to be and starting a family around the same time, but she won't be thinking about that for you. In her mind you'll always be young, childish, and rash while your brother will grow into maturity and wisdom without needing a single extra life experience. Isn't the human mind ironic?

it's flipping iritating her going on. you know that she actually gos on about how good he would have been about him surgery and how he allways dealt so well with his physio.
if i want to be really bitter i can say that she was in hospital with him from the time i was 16 months old and that because of his physical problems i lived with my gran for pretty close to a year after he was born and that i got dumped with her whenever he needed to go to doctors out of town.
and that while she visited and stayed with him when ever he was in hospital she never came to visit me when i burned my arm and was in hospital for 3 days.
or when i was put in a closed psych ward for pre-adolesents for 16 months she saw me maybe a dozen times and she didn't care that i was druged to the eyeballs and diagnosed with everything under the sun while she spent time streaching my brothers legs.
how can she go on about my dead brothers potential and then look at me her first born and say why can't you just do somehing normal with your time.
it's sick


still anyone care to say if they have the greiving in vain years later thing going on

Yes, I grieve for my first son Jamie.
I had him when I was 16, he died when he was born.
He would be 14 this coming september.
Although time, and the birth of my other son Ethan has helped to numb the pain, it still hurts. Sometimes when I look at Ethan, watch him grow and develop his own little personality I think "Would Jamie have supported Manchester United like Ethan?"
"Would he have had blue eyes like Ethan?"
Outliving your own child is something no parent should ever have to go through. The worst thing is thinking of the potential that child could have had, the future that you could have shared with them but you can't because they have been taken away from you.
I really feel for your mum, she must have so many thoughts running round her head, guilt, loss, and maybe when she looks at you she sees what she could have had with your brother.
I really feel for you too, you seem to have been through so much.
Has your mum had counselling?
I reallly really hope in time things get better for you both. I know 7 years must seem like time enough for your mother to move on and try to get over it, but believe me, the pain never ever goes. It lessens, but it never goes completely.
Like I said, my first son would be 14 this year, and not a day goes by where I don't think of how things could have been. And yes, I celebrate his birthday, It gets very hard for me around September time, and Christmasses are hard as well.
I really hope you can try to understand why your mum is behaving the way she does, and I hope you can get some inner peace somehow.
Hugs.

I wonder how much of your disgust for your mother’s morning actually comes from jealous over the attention your brother received both while alive and dead?
Do you think your attitude toward grieving would be different if it was someone you loved greatly who died?

Grief issues briefly aside, my younger sister has asperger's syndrome.

It can be very difficult to live with. The thing with autistic individuals is that they don't, like DLCP said, empathise. I'm quiet and I express a lot with my eyes, and it made our relationship very difficult because she can't read facial expression. She also doesn't understand that people's don't feel the same way she does; she's unable to think outside of her own emotions. Her inability to understand other people's feelings makes it difficult sometimes to realise that she is still very sensitive herself.

We live down the street from a cemetary. Very often we get stuck in our car behind a local man who goes there to visit his wife's grave about three times a day. My sister asked why he didn't just get over it. No matter how I tried to explain it, she still couldn't understand his grief.

It's hard on people when someone who's close to them doesn't understand what they're going through. It's natural to rely on those close to you for empathy. I understand your confusion, DLCP, but the best you can do is be supportive of your mother even if you can't quite understand her actions.

My cousin suffers from aspergers and, although I am aware that this type of autism can differ immensely from person to person, I do have a little bit of an understanding of the condition. It is very difficult to understand what another human being is going through anyway. No one can ever say that they know how you feel. Your mother's feelings may seem completely illogical to you, and they are illogical, but they are still her feelings. Parents often choose to remember the good bits of their child's life because they know that the bad bits would make things a whole lot worse if they remembered them. I doubt your mother will ever say "I suppose he may be better off wherever he is" It may not be in her nature to do that. Mother's instinctively want to protect their children and she can't protect him any more

I don't know whether you have had any pets before but my cousin was only able to undertsand the loss that we all felt when my grandfather died when his pet hamster died. Now I'm not suggesting that the death of animal IS going to help you understand your mother's feelings but when you do eventually loose something/ someone that relies on you totally (and you will one day) you will understand her more

my diagnosis has been helpfull in the way that i read up alot about it and try to be more aware of other peoples feelings. i have even had a profesional say that i am less autistic these days then i was 3 years ago. but i still shick myself with things i didn't realise other people thought or felt like i din't realise that some people have listened to placebos music but don't like it and that some people who like the music find brian molko very irritating. i was untill recentlly totally unaware that some people were like this.
do average people have trouble understanding the emotions of others or do you understand through having felt a simmilar way yourself

I guess everyone has trouble understanding emotions they haven't experienced before, no matter whether or not you're "normal". Most people only fully understand an emotion when they've been through something similar themselves. Like when my best friends mother died in the summer of 2003 I didn't really understand his pain specifically but I could understand superficially what he was going through and that his unusual behaviour was part of the grieving process. But when I lost someone close to me I felt more able to understand what he went through and thus I now appreciate what it feels like to lose someone.

I don't know anyone with Asperger's (possibly one of my friend's sisters though as she seems to have a lot in common with you and I know she has a form of autism) and I don't honestly know much about the condition but I guess it maybe affects the ability to - I don't want to get this wrong and sound offensive so excuse me if I do, I'm sorry - empathise ( ?) with others in an abstract way. Like, if someone I know was diagnosed with cancer I feel pity or empathy of some sort cause I think to myself "Well what if I had cancer? How would I feel?" but I guess it's harder to do that if you're more literal minded, cause then those pesky "But it isn't happening to me, how the heck do I know?" thoughts get in the way? I don't know really, only you can be sure. But almost everyone I know has admitted to having problems relating to emotions they haven't experinced themselves and anyone who says they have always been able to empathise no matter what it almost certainly lying to you.

Note* Moving this to the new Personal concerns forum.

Holy carp man, I also have Asperger's Syndrome... too bad everyone around here thinks I made it up, or I would get more sympathy.

Your brother's death reminds me strongly of a classmate's brother's drowning in a pool in Mexico. Sucked into an uncovered pipe... nothing anyone could do about it. There one moment, then gone, according to his mother.

This doesn't really have point... so I'll cut it short. *snip*

i got aspurgers syndrome. my dad has it too. death is hard..a good friend of mine died about 3 months ago. Anyhow..just try to be happy somehow...your wasteing your life by moping and mourning. i'm not trying to be mean or inconsiderate..but you should truly get out and do something.

DLCP isn't moping and mourning, she's wondering why her mum is moping and mourning.

Helloo. DLCP, do you ever wonder "what if?". Do you ever look back on something and wonder if it could of been different, for the better? Have you ever lost or broken something, anything, that was precious or important to you in some way? A toy, a book, anything at all? If you have then the feeling associated with that loss is kinda like losing a loved one, only losing someone very close to you is infinatly worse and theres a sense of emptiness that will never be fully filled because that person (that toy, book) has gone forever and you can never see them (it) again.
People continue to grieve not out of wanting but out of helplessness, its nigh on impossible to not grieve for someone who you loved very deeply who has gone from your life forever. Your mum is probably still 'moping' about cos she feels responsible for the way he died. Imagine if you accidently stood on your pet hamster cos it was hiding under a rug and it died a horrible death just because you didnt realise it was there, can you imagine how that would feel? well your mums still trying to cope with that accident and the result its caused. I dont know much about autism in any form and hope i havent caused any offense in any way.