Hello all hows everything in hyperspace today?

So to start off i have recently been trying to come to terms with the death of my cousin, death all in all is nothing new to me I have lost many people in my life weather they be family, friends, teachers, co-workers. This time it seems different maybe I didn't process things all the way in the past maybe I did not sure anymore.

My cousin committed suicide a few months back I always looked up to him and thought he had a good life, He was married had a child a farm house all the things they tell you that you "need" in life to keep you happy and healthy.
When I last saw him he seemed happy we were at another of our cousins weddings seated at the same table he was his normal joking sarcastic self full of life big smile the whole time... but that was just an act I guess because a few weeks later he try to kill himself was hospitalized and brain dead he had been an organ donor so at this point they were just waiting to find people that needed his heart, lungs, liver etc.

This all seemed so strange like it wasn't real or it was a lie... it's not the first time a friend has left this world in this fashion but it was the first time a family member had and it didn't/doesn't make sense to me and doesn't feel "real" I still ache everyday when I remember he is gone but I don't have emotions about it i can't seem to come to terms with it and don't understand how to "deal" or even properly feel about this on any proper emotional level. it is like I have repressed the anguish I am supposed to have and think that it is doing more damage to me the longer I go without coming to terms with or integrating the whole situation

So I guess my question is have any of you had experience with repressed emotions after a death or other similar situations of grief and how did you get past it or did you get past it

anyways much love to you all

P.S. I am well and overall happy but I worry that I may be doing damage by not properly experiencing the grief I know I should have

I want to share a collection of mildly unrelated thoughts and opinions I have heard/read/thought about this topic:

-Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse Five about how the whole timeline of our universe already exists within the fourth dimension and everything that has ever happened or will ever happen is already laid out. This does not mean it is accessible to us as third dimensional creatures, but presumably fourth dimensional creatures can act as time travelers in the same way that we can physically traverse the Earth. I remember Vonnegut writing about how even when someone dies, they are still alive in some other part of existence, and even when we are alive, we are dead in some other part. This idea had a big effect on me as a youth when I initially read it, and it continued to have this effect as I learned more about multiverses and various dimensions. (tl;dr Everyone is always alive somewhere in the uni/multiverse and our perception is just limited to our space)

-I tend to believe that we are all the same consciousness or at least all stem from the same conscious source. What seems to differentiate human beings is the subjective and egotistical faces that we develop and wear. But I like to think that through reducing the ego, we can break those down to an irreducible point where we are just seemingly-isolated-but-not-really awarenesses floating through the universe. If this is the case, then all humans and really any conscious beings are really just the same organism/source, in which case everyone is really alive all of the time by being the same thing.

-Sadness about death seems like an evolutionary habit, like many of our behaviors. It makes sense that monkeys felt sadness about those close to them dying and that this sadness inspires a fear of one's own mortality. Organisms that were not afraid of death when reminded of it were probably not selected for as much because they may have taken more risks, not taken death as seriously, etc. However, in our modern world, we do not need to worry as much about dying randomly. We have the luxury of expecting to die of natural causes in our old age, meaning that it is not as necessary for us to fear death in the same way our ancestors had to in order to survive. Also, just because something is a natural tendency does not mean it is the correct, proper, or moral behavior to undertake.

-Death is inevitable. For every person you have ever met, you will either be alive while they die or they will be alive when you die. Depending on what you believe about the meaning of life, this fact can become even more depressing if you get into the thought-loop that life is meaningless. However, I find all of this freeing. There is no permanence in our universe, which can be initially sad to the monkey mind, but it is actually quite freeing. With no ascribed meaning and no permanence, we can literally do whatever we want without universal consequences. Obviously we need to consider the effects of our actions on other humans in the context of our society, but it might be good to work on thinking about death and impermanence as freeing rather than restricting.

-I have been extremely fortunate so far with people in my life staying alive. Only one of my grandparents has died, and I only cried once after his death when thinking about how I would never get to have another conversation with him. I was also not particularly close with him, and he lived his life to the fullest extent possible, which ease the burden. Still, I felt worse for the effects on my family than for my actual grandfather. Once you're dead, you're gone, baby. No more worries, concerns, or suffering, which classifies so much of the human experience. It's probably quite nice to die while experiencing horrible pains. The sad part is really what death does to those left behind and the fact that they can never interact with you again.

Does any of this resonate with you?

Also, the exact Vonnegut quote from Slaughterhouse is as follows (Tralfamadorians are fourth dimensional aliens for reference):



Maybe a tough pill to swallow as we are stuck in a third dimensional universe?

First and foremost i'm sorry for your loss. Hope youre doing okay.

His happiness wasnt necessarily fake. IME ones mental state can change pretty rapidly from happy to depressed with suicidal thoughts within a manner of minutes. Since you cant look into peoples head its impossible to know how they feel when theyre alone and not around people who make them happy. If anything the fact that he was happy around you means that you were a positive influence in his live.

Thanks Ram and Dogbark your comments are very helpful.

Ram I do see your view on this and think I may actually vibe with it more so but at the same time it is this type of view I feel that is preventing me from properly grieving so I find myself in a catch 22 situation.

And dogbark thanks your viewpoint helps bring some clarity to the situation on a whole and makes more sense as to why I never saw the pain he was in

Thanks again everyone in the Nexus you always seem to be a source of understanding for me in this long strange trip we call life

Hey dmt, I'm really sorry to hear about the death of your cousin.

I hope you and everyone is coping the best that they can - suicide is such a painful, shocking thing that those left behind must confront.

My best friend committed suicide a few years ago. It was devastating; shocking; incomprehensible - but it happened, and all of us left behind had to deal with it.

I felt sad, completely shocked, but mostly sad for him. How desperate, alone, and hopeless he must have felt in order to do this, to not tell anyone of his plans, to do this despite the affect it would have on those around him; his partner, family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, everyone he met, everyone he had connected with in the past; everyone who would remember him.

After all of this, after the funeral, as life started to settle back into its routine, I felt desperate to seek solitude, some privacy, a place to think, and place where I could be 'self-concerned' without discharging my focus into the wellbeing of others. I needed to look after myself, so I could integrate this new, horrible realisation that he was now gone. I decided to write him a letter, but I needed the solitude in order to write it.

I went camping alone. I drove to a spot in the middle of nowhere, near to where my friend and I had once camped before. A place I knew I would not be interrupted by anyone. There was, I admit, a certain terror present when confronted by the fact I was truly alone, and it was the first time I had been truly alone in many years.

I cooked a meal on the fire, cracked a beer, and put another beer in the empty chair beside me. I wore the shirt he had bought me for my birthday some years earlier. I thought of the good times, the bad, and the sad.

Next morning I had some cocoa, and a small amount of mushrooms with lemon juice (about half a gram of some strong P. subaeruginosa) and went for a walk along a hiking trail that led to some waterfalls. I brought with me a pen and paper as I had planned to write him a letter.

After and hour or so, and the mushrooms were working their magic, I stopped next to the river where some large boulders were in the water creating rapids and small waterfalls, and sat amongst the rocks meditating for a while.

Eventually I put pen to paper and still didn't even know what to write, and so I wrote: 'I don't even know how to begin this' -- and suddenly it all came pouring out: the suppressed emotion, the thoughts and feelings I didn't know I had, all poured out onto the page. I cried and cried, sobbed as I wrote, page after page, pure stream of consciousness - most notably, there was just so much anger that I held, that I didn't even know was there.

I finished my letter, and when I was ready I simply let it float downstream.

I stayed one more night, and drove back the next day. I really felt like I had opened myself up to the reality of my emotions, that I had found a way of discharging these bottled up feelings. Until I had written the letter, I had not experienced any anger at all, only sorrow.

I had another friend who was really struggling to come to terms with the impact of this suicide well over a year later, and I encouraged him to do the same thing. He went camping by himself over a weekend and he came back saying that he was feeling a lot better, and felt like he had worked through a lot of his emotions. I'm not sure whether he wrote a letter, but I think the solitude and the physical space from others gave him the security to really delve into his thoughts and feelings without distraction, without interruption.

I don't think a low dose of mushrooms are necessary, but in my case I can say they helped me purge some of the suppressed emotions, but more than anything, I think the solitude and privacy definitely helped the most.

I think the letter writing is a really important way to 'externalise' the emotion, put it on paper, get it out, and to help the flow of thought stay coherent and focused.

Love and strength to you, and I hope you find solace and clarity soon. Peace.

Thanks Lichen i think i am going to go for a camping trip in the spring

and also the part of writing the letter and throwing it in the stream really resonates i have a favorite quote from a local graffiti artist

"I had a memory I didn't want to keep so I wrote it in a note and threw it off a bridge"

I see this almost everyday on my walks it is pasted in a cpl places around town and it has really helped me get over some thoughts/Feelings in the past. I find it is very cathartic to put something on paper and then destroying/throwing it away.

I am sorry for your loss.

I know how you feel as I lost a beloved younger cousin several years ago (suicide). I obviously cannot go into more detail here but I think the important factor is that we shared a great time together before she had that fatal anxiety attack.

We were at peace after all our childhood fights and teasings and this somehow comforts me there is a "good karma". I would have a hard time forgiving myself if she were gone and we wouldn't be friends.

If you have any unexpressed emotions towards him, you can write a letter. You don't have to send it anywhere, just writing it helps. Or you can leave the envelope at the graveyard. It's all symbolic but it helps tremendously to sort out stuff in your head.

Sincere condolences to you and his family and loved ones. Those of us who choose to end our suffering by rescinding the life given to us end their pain, but they cannot see the gash they are cutting through the still beating hearts of the people that love, admire and respect. When we choose to end life, often we are blinded by pain to even take that into consideration, and tell ourselves that the love of other humans and the world doesn't exist. If he truly knew how much his decision hurts his family, I'd hope that he wouldn't have done it. Again, I'm terribly sorry and offer to you a big virtual hug and lots of love.

If you'd like,I'd share my view of what happens to him now, but that's not what you asked. I don't think you really want nor need to hear my existential world view. You want answers for the confusion you are experiencing.

The older I get, the more friends,family and acquaintances shove off their mortal coil. The circumstances are never the same, some make sense than others and the death of a person very close to me can have less impact upon my well being than someone less so.

There really is no rhyme to how the process goes. I'm sure you are familiar with the stages of grief and the concept is valid, you will experience all of them in your bereavement and healing process. What you don't often hear is that there is no system to it.

Over the last two years, my two closest and most loved and needed friends died, both accidentally- one by overdose the other by choking. Also,both my mother and father passed the veil, both naturally. If I could tell you a little about the grief process for these people it may help you understand your grief.

In the case of my friends, the one who ODed was not as messy, I think mainly because I knew how exhausted he was. He was alone in the world as far as truly intimate relationships go. He had lots of friends who loved him and was mutually respected by all of them, at the same time he had no family, no lover, nobody that truly understood him and his joys and pain. I understood his death.

I felt much the same as i hear you saying you do now. It's a strange feeling, a sort of guilt- "why am I not crying, what's wrong with me, am I a sociopath? No, not at all. I honestly don't know why, but it took months before it hit me. One night I was walking down the street and Bill entered my mind. I wanted to go hang out with him and it hit me that I never would again. I collapsed and cried out the hole in my heart. I still miss the living hell out of him and wish he was still here. His pain is gone, and all those who leave us are freed from their sufferation but ours has just begun.

Unless you ask, I'll spare all the details of the other deaths I referred to for the sake of TL,DR because Bill's is the most relevant here. Suicide fucking sucks. I hate that we can do it, I hate that people do it. It's the hardest thing in life for me to get, although I myself have made three attempts.

You are going through your deep and very personal process of loss. Reaching out to the community to help you grok it shows you are on a healing path looking for answers, there's nothing wrong with you friend. It sounds like the death of your cousin is senseless. He "had it all" he was "happy" to outside appearances. As said earlier we can get so far away from how it really feels inside, and cut out loved ones out of whatever we're going through so as to burden them them while inside it's a deep black pit. Especially with family.

That's will be hard to work through. Like I said the concept of the stages of grief is valid, but you may work in this for years. Upon the final loss of the four, my mom last summer, I entered into both group and individual therapy. I am lucky to have comprehensive health care coverage that pays for it thanks to the great socialist state of Oregon (much for cascadia), and I've found incredible relief in both modalities. In the groups, I am able to see that I'm not alone nor am I screwed up somehow in my reactions, in fact I'm pretty damn normal as are you. With individual talk therapy I'm able to unload the weight on my shoulders to a person willing to help me lift the burden. These have been indispensable and intrinsic to my healing process. I of course have no idea of your locale nor what is available to you in your financial status, but at the very very least I implore you to attend group meetings. And if individual therapy is available to you, DO IT!

I know that I would rather run into dream land, or across the seas, over snow capped mountain peaks to escape the pursuing spectre of grief and the pain it holds in wait for me, but as the great Pigpen McKernan said, "you ain't getting over it and you sure as hell ain't gonna get around it, you just gotta go right on through it". Grief is an opportunity to understand your place on this cold rock suited in a frail, soft, easily destroyed bag of flesh. We hunger, we scratch at the ground to ease that emptiness, but the love and kindness we truly need as sustenance to live and abide as opposed to just survive can be elusive. Some of us are too afraid to ask when we don't have it, and then we die inside and once that happens,while we may wear a smile to make things easier on us, the physical death is not far off without some intervention.

I fear I've rambled on too long, lost your interest and gave no real guidance, but I hope that you can see the TL, DR. That basically is, suicide fucking sucks and you are not abnormal in any way for your reaction. We often feel that since there are clearly defined stages that it should be straightforward- "okay,this week I'm pissed off, and the calendar says I'll be sad by next Friday...". That would be too damn easy. Anyway, I truly wish you peace and am glad you reached out to this community. I'm so glad we have one where we can talk about our lives with people who share our world view, but since this is a psychedelic group, I'll suggest to you a little micro dose regimen for a couple weeks would probably really help you achieve a state of neuro-homeostasis and more easily navigate your complex and confusing emotional process.

Suicide and its prevention as well as its aftermath is something I give a lot of consideration to, and unfortunately understand maybe more than most being both a survivor of loved ones who suicided as well as a multiple attempt fail. If I can help in any way, talking, helping navigate social services in your are to coordinate counseling and mental health care, please PM me, I'd be happy to be of any service. In the meantime, be good and true to you above all, and peace upon your beating heart.

Much for your loss, I hate that it happened and am sorry that the world does this shit. By the way, I wrote a story about both one of my attempts and the suicide of a friend's lover that may interest you, it's calledthe undefended and is on one of my online whining diaries linked in my sig, I'd be honored if you took a look at it..