Now, I may only be a fairly young person - but I've had more than my fair share of pain and death. Okay you want me to tel you a bit? this is about 8% of my share.

So, when I was 5, my nan had a fall trying to get chocolate and broke her hip - then she was diagnosed with dementia. We had to move house and take her with us, to where we are now. Until may 2007, we had to cope with her. She hit us, shouted at us, hallucinated, Fell, was double incontinent and so much more. My childhood was just wrecked I can't say anything else because it was. Then she suddenyl died. Juts like that. In the night. It was actualy scary. Her skin was yellow. She had been sposed to die for a year before that. But she hadn't. And it evern had to be investigated because apparently she hadnt been 'predicted to die recently' yeah like! She was 94 years old and my family has Von Willlie Brans Dieiease which is like hemaphillia but like 10x worse - so barely any of us seme to live to that age.

So my dad had a nervous breakdown. Blah. and I still get shouted at every night. But I am just saying by putting this. I am sure even though this is 8% of what has happened to me death wise - that people have had worse. And that when you read this after coping with a death, you'll think 'oh, im not the only one'. People aren't alone in this. That took me long enough to find out.

It was so brave of you to share your deep, personal experience with the rest of us. And words like, 'you're not alone on this one...' really do make the difference to others.

Although pain and suffering are similar in foundation--that we all feel guilty and connected to misfortunes, that somehow it is my own fault that bad things are happening--the duration and remorse can be quite high voltage to each of us. What I mean is that even though your experience and someone else's experience may be similar with one another, the pain you feel while you're going through this tough times are quite real and the intensity can be overwhelming. And so, what you describe only the 8% of the pain, to you it's 100% pain. But for some it may not even be 1% pain.

To cope with tremendous suffering it would be a defensive way to think, "I'm not the only one with this suffering" but it's also important to recognize that you are going through a real pain. Once you recognize the pain you can then decide to dwell or move-on. When you establish an exit plan (to get along with your life) you can decide to live with the pain or exchange with another emotion.

It sucks what happened with your childhood. To be honest, I have something similar to that but I'm sure my experience was 10x less worse then yours. I had to quickly put a stop to it, and it did help I was middle child, so my older sibling sorta helped me put a stop, but anyways, people always die close to you, last year my best friend was killed in a driveby, and a couple months before that my friend commited suicide.

From all that, I think that men, not so much as women, take deaths worse then women, but in a different way. You see a girl at a funeral, balling her eyes out, and you see a man, sitting there in the corner, wanting to be alone to think things over. I'm not trying to be a sexist, but its pretty much true, and it goes for me too. I'm sure your dad is just taking her death in a different way, he'll eventually get over it, but he will never get over the death, and not many people do.

People look at that dead body and say oh its just another person on the street dead, but people who actually knew that person say wow, this person may have been mean, but we knew this person, and we will never see this person again. In that respect I think it just takes time for people to keep going on with their life, but the thought is always there.

There are always people you can go and actually see and talk to to help you out, my brother in law does it everyday, hes a therapist for kids, and I remember going in to his office one day, when some kid, only 12 years old told me the worse story I would ever imagine, this dude had to put up with so much, and even though I wasn't him, like Buffalo said, I couldn't help to feel bad and think it was my own fault..