Is it normal to feel relief, or nothing at all?

Two feelings after a death are so common and so rarely admitted that people who have them think they are alone. The first is relief. The second is nothing at all. Both are normal, both have plain explanations, and neither says anything whatever about how much you loved the person. This guide is for the people who feel one or both and have told no one.

Relief, after a long illness

If your loved one was ill for a long time, if you nursed them, sat in hospital car parks, took the night calls, watched a person you knew disappear into dementia or pain, then their death is also the end of all of that. The relief you feel is relief that the illness is over: that they are not suffering, that the watching is done, that the phone will not ring at three in the morning. It arrives at the same moment as the loss, and because it arrives at the same moment, it feels like relief that they are gone. It is not. You were carrying two things, and one has been put down.

Marie Curie and Sue Ryder both say it plainly: relief when someone dies, because they were suffering or because the relationship was hard, is a normal response for many people and takes nothing from the love, and the carers who feel it most are the ones who did the most. It is not a moral failing. It is your body and your mind registering that a long emergency has ended.

There is a second kind of relief, harder to say: relief at the end of a relationship that was difficult, a parent who was cruel, a partner who was controlling. That is normal too, and the grief that follows it is often complicated by the absence of the sadness other people expect you to have. When to get bereavement counselling is worth reading if that is yours, because this is the grief that is hardest to carry alone.

Nothing at all

Numbness, in the first days and weeks after a death, is close to universal. People describe it as watching themselves from outside, as making tea and dealing with the undertaker and feeling nothing at all, as wondering whether they are cold or broken. It is neither. Shock is protective: it lets a person do what has to be done in the first fortnight, the registration, the funeral, the calls, before the full weight arrives. It usually lifts over the weeks after the funeral, and what is under it arrives then, sometimes all at once.

Some people feel numb for longer, and that too is not a fault. If months have passed and you still feel nothing, and you are otherwise living, it may simply be your way. If you feel nothing and you are also not sleeping, not eating, not working, that is worth a conversation with your GP.

Why the shame

Because the story everyone tells about grief has one shape, sadness, and a person who feels relief or nothing does not fit it. Because relatives and friends expect tears and you have none, and you begin to perform them or to hide. Because the stages of grief, on the poster, do not include either; the stages of grief, and why yours will not follow the list explains why the poster leaves so much out.

The shame is usually heavier than the feeling it is about. It is also the part that lifts fastest when it is said out loud to someone who has heard it before.

What to do

Say it to one person. A friend who nursed a parent will understand at once; so will a bereavement counsellor, who has heard it many times and will not flinch. Do not perform a grief you do not feel for the benefit of people who expect it. And do not conclude anything about your love for the person from what you feel this week; the sadness, if it is coming, comes in its own time, and if it does not, the years of care were the love, and they were enough.

Coping with grief in the first weeks is written for the more familiar shape of grief and it applies here too, because relief and numbness are followed by the same weeks as everything else. When a death is expected is for the carers who are still in the illness, and who may be reading this ahead of time, wondering whether they will feel it. Probably. It is all right.