What have you learned from losing someone?

There's no amount of preparation or bracing yourself that can prepare yourself for the 'post-X' phase of losing someone. I learnt that the hard way.

And another interesting thing was having their digital life locked away behind their iPhone, iPad, etc and learning to let go of those memories. I feel like families having an iCloud stream or something to share photos would be ideal. I've also made efforts in making sure my financials, account details etc can be accessed by immediate family if anything were to happen to me.

Also, coming to terms with realizing that while my world had stopped, the rest of the world was still marching on; and while I felt that was cruel, all I could do was get my world marching back in lockstep with the real world.

If anyone's going through a loss right now, I recommend this piece of writing that was instrumental in my healing process: https://www.reddit.com/r/garysully1986/comments/6g3brt/gsnow_on_grief/

I've learned the hard way that you should let people know what they mean to you. This was something difficult for me to learn, as I never express my feelings out loud. In fact, I try to do the exact opposite. I hide them.

But if you don't let people know that you love them, you'll live the rest of your life with feelings about them that are impossible to express when they're gone. The two people in my life that I'm talking about died very suddenly. And perhaps because of that, it feels as though time has "frozen" for me when it comes to them. I catch myself thinking that I'll see them again "soon," or can text them, and that I'll finally say it all to them. Then, I'll remember that I can't.

There is never, ever, as much time as you think.

No everyone grows the same way. I have a friend who at one point in my teens/20s was my best friend. A few of us hit a rough patch in college - academics vs social life - and it feels like he is trapped in that period. Of the 4 of us that got kicked out of University, he was the only one that never went back and finished. Everyone else moved into on to careers/relationships/full lives and he stayed put. It's sad because he was probably the smartest of the group but he also had the worst support network at home. As we got older he never evolved from the the things we found cool at 19/20: getting really drunk, smoking pot, and honestly just being an asshole. We still catch up but mostly it's him reminiscing about things we did over a decade ago and how much better that period in life was. I don't think anyone else feels that way. He'll always be special to me but I find it really hard to hang out now.

• You should work on a support network and coping skills before you need them. If you don't, you'll discover what you use to cope when it becomes load bearing. For me that was numbness. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is a good book on a compassionate view of addiction/harm reduction, mentioning many people abuse substances as a cost-effective and flawed therapy/coping strategy.
• Other people may also be experiencing loss. They might not be handling it well, either, so take it easy on others and yourself.
• You can't ever perfectly know what people will do in extreme situations. They may not leave a note, and they may not give any tells of what they're dealing with. People you know very well know you just as well, and if they care about you sometimes that comes out by them expertly masking until they can't.
• Look at--but not only-- the situation to assess what someone is going through. Rabbits will sometimes die with little sign because they've evolved to learn weakness or movement is a death sentence. Some people learned that from their environment. "Call me if you need to talk" isn't going to work with some people (and it won't be needed/wanted by others), but a "want to watch a movie [because your pet died]" might.
• Problems can involve a threshold, balance, or accumulation. A threshold can be a boundary someone has, "You do X and I'm gone." A balance is a scale that tilts with tolerance, "You do 39% of the chores and my kidney can't keep up". An accumulation is like heavy metal poisoning, something that doesn't work its way out of your system and will be a problem eventually, "I want kids and you don't."
  • Some people encounter this sort of slow wisdom and think it's special or applies where it doesn't. Often people get confident in their heuristics when they should be learning what questions are important to ask.
• Sometimes you can't fix people / things. A friend from college ended up going back to do another undergrad where a family friend 7(?) years his junior went, for a sort of religious study. Over a couple years I'd get calls that were increasingly worrying, which didn't lead to any improvement. He started stalking her, becoming very possessive. He told me he was going to make a farm [based off some biblical thing] and needed me for the required [list of ethnicities]. I'd get unhinged 2am calls. He got arrested and later briefly institutionalized. I told him I wasn't in a place I could help anymore and stopped answering calls when that didn't work. I heard he died a couple years back.
• Long distance relationships suck. Trust is hard to maintain when the other person is the only one that gets to hold the camera. A hug is better than being on the phone for hours when someone is afraid of losing a parent to withdrawal. Roots get planted and at most one set gets to be permanent.
• Sometimes "good" matters less than consistent, sustainable, or growing. My internal representation is an arch with a keystone... up until the point you can place that keystone what you've been building is a bigger collapse. You can have great qualities that keep someone in a relationship that's wrong for them.
  • If you can see a collapse coming, it's probably right to address it quickly. Hard to do when there's missing information (maybe a penguin stole your brick or the brick deliverer isn't doing his route today). It's not always fair to just present the information and let someone choose.

• A lot of things are just bad without anyone involved being to blame, especially when one or both of the people have very serious issues.
• People are often very different in not at all obvious ways, which can cause very hard to solve, or even notice, problems.
• Be a bit more explicit/clear then you might feel comfortable with, because EVERYONE misunderstands/misreads/misinterprets/has hidden insecurities. As a personal example, I always used to self-deprecatingly laugh when people asked if I was in a serious relationship, because I had crippling insecurities around my romantic value and just generally hated myself. I learned earlier this year that a lot of people interpreted that as me being kind of a fuck boy and that I was laughing at the concept of a serious relationship.
• The absolute only thing you have any control over is yourself; you can hope/pray that someone will act a certain way, do a certain thing, but they will make that decision themselves.
• What people say they want is the wants they wish they wanted; what people do is what they actually want.