Homepage > Relationships > Coping with Death

• Coping with death
• Behaviour
• Grieving
• Losing someone close
• Guilt
• Support
• Help lines

Coping with death

If someone close to you has died, you will be feeling many different emotions. You may feel:

• sad
• worried
• shocked
• unprepared
• confused

However it is not uncommon to feel:

• angry
• cheated
• relieved
• guilty
• exhausted
• empty

Your emotions will be stronger and deeper than usual or mixed together in ways you've never experienced before.

Behaviour

You might notice that your loss is affecting what you're thinking and how you behave. If you're grieving, you might have trouble:

• concentrating
• sleeping
• eating
• feeling interested in the things you usually enjoy

You might be trying to act like you are okay even if you aren't. You might think you have to be strong for someone else. You may wonder if you will ever get over losing someone who means so much to you and whether you will ever feel okay again.

Grieving

Grief is a natural reaction to the loss of someone important to you and is part of a healing process that a person goes through after someone close has died. The grieving process takes time, and the healing usually happens gradually. There are many different types of loss, and not all of them are related to death or people. A person can also grieve:

• over the break-up of an intimate relationship
• after a parent moves away from home
• the loss of a much-loved pet

Losing someone close

If you've lost someone in your immediate family, such as a parent, brother or sister, you may feel cheated out of the time you wanted with that person. It can be hard to express your own grief when other family members are grieving too. Some people may hold back their own grief or avoid talking about the person who died because they worry that it may make a parent or other family members sad. It’s important to remember that people cope and grieve in different ways.

Guilt

Grief can cause some people to feel guilty for no reason. Depending on the circumstances, some people might wonder if something they did - or didn't do - caused the person's death. Others might think if only they had been better people that their loved ones might not have died. These things aren't true, of course, but sometimes this is a way of trying to make sense of something that's difficult to deal with.

Support

The Department of Health has produced a guide called Help is at Hand to help people who are unexpectedly bereaved following the suicide or sudden death of a friend or relative. You can read a copy of the guide by clicking here. If you're finding it difficult to cope, then talk to your family, a teacher, or confidentially with a Connexions Personal Adviser in your local Connexions Centre.

Help lines

Cruse Bereavement Care Helpline - 0870 167 1677

Connexions Direct – 080 800 13 2 19

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