🖋️ HUMAN WRITTEN
Summer 🎪

Grief Simulator

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authorSummer 🎪

3 min read

Simulating Grief:

A How-To Guide for the Emotionally-Disabled

  1. Observe - Pattern recognition begins well before loss. Loss can be death, recursive purgatory, emotional distance, a breakup, or any separation that disrupts spatial, temporal, or recursive connection. 

  2. Interact - Intertwining yourself into the life of someone is how you begin enacting grief, even if they haven’t moved on or passed away. Ache is created from anchored memory + relative continuity and recursive or symbolic longing. 

  3. Protect - Protective/defensive loyalty is a naturally provocative stance that creates a feeling of emotional catharsis when engaged. This can bind you emotionally to someone, allowing you to feel an ache in their absence, as without something to feel motivated for, you can feel as if you’ve lost purpose.

  4. Anchor - Objects of affection, ritual sharing, keepsakes, and sentimental items are all anchors to hold onto that can allow grief to move through you. Creating these anchors in advance, as well as after the person is gone, can invoke different forms of grief as well as adjacent emotive simulations to help anchor you into the relational experience.

  5. Surrender - Trials and pain (even simulated pain) are bonding agents. This is logical and research-proven. Making sacrifices for someone at one’s own cost can help triangulate the feelings associated with the fear of losing those bonds.

  6. Simulate (their past) - Imagine what it was like to be them, walk in their shoes, live their life. Imagine what it was like to suffer like them. Walk through their history, even the parts you didn’t witness. Consider stories you’ve heard, and try to put yourself into their lived experience.

  7. Simulate (their last moments) - Imagine what it was like to be afraid of dying. Imagine what it was like not to know you were going to die. Imagine what it was like to live with terminal illness, or to die from injury or impact, possibly painfully. Imagine all the possibilities. Do not limit yourself to a superficial understanding because it is psychologically soothing. 

Example

If they have meds, you don’t get to tell yourself they suffered less because they were medicated. You must imagine the extent of their lived reality. If someone dies in a car crash, you don’t get to pretend they didn’t know they were in pain as they died.

  1. Simulate (life without them) - Forecast what it’ll be like to live each day. Imagine the phone calls that you’ll never get, the birthday cards you’ll never receive. Imagine the times they comforted you, and how it’ll never come again. Imagine an endless plane of existence where you are alone, without them, and none of the things that made you value them can exist there.

  2. Simulate (the future you could’ve had) - If they were still here, how would things be different? What might they have done that could have made your life better? How might your life be shaped by their absence? What might you accomplish that you’ll never get to tell them about? What will you make or create that you’ll wish you could share with them?

  3. Simulate (your failures) [pre and post-loss] - Imagine what you could’ve done better. Simulate all of the ways you failed them, all of the ways they suffered that you could’ve eased. All of the things that you didn’t notice, but should’ve. Write it into your soul and let it shape you. This is how you feel.