mothers will, greedy sister

Mojisola

TBagpuss wrote: »

The reason I raised it was because I suddenly recalled a situation where I was on the sidelines - there was a lot of tension between the siblings involved and it suddenly dawned on me that a big part of the problem was that Sibling A's coping strategy / reaction to grief was to try to do AllTheThings right away, presumably as displacement activity, and felt that they couldn't really grieve properly until the practical issues were dealt with.

Sibling B was the opposite, and couldn't face the thought of disposing of anything until they had had time to mourn.

In that case, they were able to talk and agree a compromise but it did take some input from third parties because each of the siblings felt the other was being unreasonable, pushy/obstructive and insensitive.

I've seen this happen too. A son outraged his siblings when he put his father's car up for sale the day after the death and started clearing the house out immediately - it looked very disrespectful but the son was actually so distraught he couldn't cope with his feelings and was trying to ignore them by doing all the practical things.

When everyone's emotions are raw, different ways of handling the stress can cause lifelong rifts in families.