Cornell Memorial Inc.

Danbury CT ~ Brookfield CT
www.cornellmemorial.com

Grief Support Library: My Hands Are Tied

by Deb Sims, MS,RNCS,LCSW

Dear Deb,

At the edge of December 1998 I made a very good online friend. She was the best friend, online or off, that I have ever had. On June 10, 1999, she passed away. Quite frankly, I have lost good friends that I knew offline that didn't hurt me in the way that this did. My friend had a webpage at GeoCities that I visit every 3 weeks to keep it up. It had gotten to the place that it was easier to go to that page every three weeks than it was for a long time. My friend lived about 40 miles from me and, to make a long story short, she had a childhood that was full of mental, physical, and sexual abuse.

It's also worth mentioning that she told me that she was planning on divorcing her husband. After her death I ordered a back issue of the local paper to find out, from her obituary, where she was buried so that I could visit her grave. Her obituary said that burial would be private. I was finally able to find out where she was buried in late April 2000, through some online detective work.

When I got to the cemetery where her cremated remains are buried, I found out that her family still hasn't bothered to get a marker for her grave. I know that I reached her grave because she was cremated and the cemetery was very small; the man at the funeral home, who spoke to me, told me where she was buried. The man at the funeral home, who handled her, was very nice and frankly he's the reason that I was able to find her grave in the first place. Words can't tell you how much this hurt me. Seeing her buried in an unmarked grave, and finding out that my hands are totally tied because I'm not family, has hurt me deeper than I've ever been hurt and I feel so useless. It is a slap in the face to me to know that my friend's online friends (several people made tribute webpages to her) actually cared about her more than her family. I'm a 32 year old man and seeing that her grave was unmarked after almost a year hurt me so bad that I spent the whole day, after visiting her grave, home alone, on a crying jig. I cried all the next day about that.

Do you have any suggestions for the way I feel? My offline friernds, and even a few that are online, don't understand how I could feel this way toward someone online whom I never met.

Dear Reader:

I am so sorry for the loss of your friend. Just because you never met personally does not mean your friendship was unimportant. Relationships of value are based on knowing the true essence of a person's soul, and it certainly sounds like you knew each other well. I can believe she was your best friend.

You are just approaching the year anniversary, and your grief will have been no less because you knew her only on line. Each significant anniversary of that first year is felt intensely: birthdays, special events and the hardest is the one year anniversary. It also sounds as if part of your difficulty is that her family seemingly valued her so little. A burial in April 2000 seems a long time to wait. I wonder if that isn't reopening the grief also.

There is nothing abnormal about your mourning her loss and your grief reaction. You had a close connection, and now you are deeply feeling the result of that loss. In olden times people had the wisdom to wear black for a year after someone died. They knew what we've forgotten: that it takes a minimum of a year and more like two to move through the stages of the grieving process.

I don't know your spiritual beliefs about what happens after death. If you'd like to write me back and share them, I'd be happy to talk a little more about this. But many people view death as a transition to a different existence, not finality. And one therapeutic technique is to write to the person who has died. Sometimes this will be a one time letter to say what was left unsaid; sometimes it is a poem or statement of tribute to the person, with the item placed for others to read such making a memorial page. Whatever you choose, I do have a suggestion for you. Is there a place that you know she liked very much or think she would like? Remember only her body is in the grave--not her soul or her spirit. If there is some place you know she'd like, there is no reason you can't designate that as the place of tribute to her. You can honor her with flowers there, or a bush in your yard, or plant a tree in honor of her. She was loved and she touched others' lives.

That's the essence of who she was and you were aware of that part of her. That her family wasn't, is their ignorance. But she lives on in others' memory. And while this is only my personal belief, there will be a time for meeting personally--just not now.

You are coming upon one of the hardest parts: the one year anniversary. It's okay to grieve. And it's okay to honor her in your own personal way. There are many people who would believe her soul would know that.

Again, I am so sorry for your loss and so glad she was so loved and cared about by others.

Blessings,

Deb