Today has been a weird and emotional day for me. A friend of my husband family passed away very suddenly. I had only met the man twice, yet I'm extremely sad and depressed about it. I feel so much for his wife, who I do know a little, but still is really nothing more than a friend of the family.
The reason I find it weird is I've always had a hard time relating to people who have had family members die. I've never been able to get emotionally worked up over someone who I don't really know dying. I know how it feels to lose loved ones. I had three of my grandparents die within a 10 month period. But when it was separated from me, I just didn't have anything there, other than the feeling of awkwardness of how to interact with this person who just told me something terrible.
I still remember, when I was younger, we were visiting my grandparents in Dallas when JFK's son died in the plane crash. I think it was '99, so I would have been 14. I remember how completely broken up my step-mother was about it. Over a person she had never even met before. Since we we're in Dallas, we made our way to the site where JFK was shot, and there was a sort of vigil going on.
I just couldn't wrap my head around it. He was just a guy. He wasn't part of our lives, he wasn't family, none of these people were good friends with him. So why get so worked up?
I've never been able to understand it, and I know that means that I'm not exactly normal when it comes to my emotional state of being.
So what does that make of me? Have I always been some heartless monster, who is only now realizing how I'm supposed to react to different situations? I know that I've always been a selfish individual, there's no doubt about that. Is it finally starting to crack? Am I finally starting to be more human?
Most people would be happy about something like that, but it scares me. I don't know how to handle them. When it was my own family I could grieve because I loved them and they were a big part of my life and I would miss them terribly. But that is not the case here. This is someone who I only met twice, was married to someone I had only met maybe three or four time. How can one person possibly handle emotions being thrown at you like this every time someone you met has passed.
Have I flipped the coin. Am I on the opposite side now? Where before I felt nothing, now I feel everything. That's not good either. While I'm sort of glad that I'm growing as a person, this isn't helping the anxiety at all. ((I'll make it a point to make a post about that eventually.))
So yeah, emotions are weird. I don't like them.
