i feel you. My mother died when i was 11 years old from an incurable disease. Yes, it was very hard for me. I would probably be a very different preson now, if she would have stayed alive. I maybe would have developed in a different way or something, since shes the exact opposite from my father. She was a successful doctor and also has written a book about a famous German serial killler, and also had an intimate relationship with the guy who invented "Tatort" (the most famous german crime thriller series) while my father works in a very low position. she was very loving, intelligent and caring. her partens kind of expect the same high standards that she reached. they very often showed me how good results my mother had while she was in school. it really made me sad that i couldn't live up to those high standards that my mother. my father often drank during that time and we had a lot of fights, (he still does, though), which made evrything worse. i had to get used to be alone since she wasnt there anymore, with my father having to work most of the time. It pretty much went downhill from there.

I haven't had much experience with death (not complaining), but at the time, I was already depressed anyway.

When my grandma died late last year, it didn't quite hit me for a while. It was like that with the deaths of my other grandparents too. I felt guilty that I couldn't be more emotive about it. I wasn't as close to them as I could have been since they lived in another country and I didn't know them as well as many people know their grandparents...the more I thought about this, the more it saddened me.

But the worst thing was seeing my mother cry. I never see her cry. I only saw her cry once after her mother died and that was when she told us. After she left the room, I sobbed too. It was so awful seeing her like that. That broke down my lack of empathy brought on by the depressive period.

And I didn't know what to say to her. It's not as bad when it's someone else, but my own mother? What am I meant to say?

I still wonder what my parents feel about the deaths of their parents. I can't imagine what it must be like. I am surprised that it hadn't occurred to me before last year.

Just now, I was informed by my brother, over Facebook no less, that my father's elder brother died yesterday. I don't know how to feel right now. He was in a different country too, but I keep thinking that we should've visited him more...

I hadn't thought about him in a long time until now.

I haven't had any significant family members die, and as such I don't really know how I would feel about the death of somebody I very much cared about. I have been depressed about somebodies death before but that had a happy ending when it turned out I misheard what was being told to me. My best friend Gemma hadn't died after all; she was only taking time from school because it was her father that had died. I had the weirdest conversation with a mutual friend whilst I still thought it was Gemma dead where this friend of Gemma's must've thought I was being melodramatic in how much the death of a man I had never met bothered me. I'm glad I was deliberately vague because at least nobody noticed the mistake I made.

I was melancholy for a few days and used it as an excuse not to go to school until the school rang our house to find out why I hadn't attended (again). My mother was the one that broke the news to me that I had gotten the wrong end of the stick, because I was clinging to that excuse not to go in. God I felt embarrassed about it and I had to go to school again.

I learned that a good friend died of cancer after I grew distant from most of people of my past. I think about him from time to time. I had a lot of respect for him, he was a friend of my father's and also one of my closest friend's father. I would see him every weekend when I went to visit my friend and he would always treat me with undeserved respect for my age and lack of any sort of sense. Not respect in the sense of reverance, but that he wasn't afraid to treat us both, his son and I, on the level playing field he would with any adult. I think because I know he's dead I think about him more. There's the regret that I'll never get the chance to listen to him talk again.

Only my grandfather on my father's side has died, and I wasn't terribly close to him.

What depressed me more than his passing were his last few months of life. Severe, severe demensia. When I saw him last, he didn't recognize me. Or know who his wife was. His wife who had been sitting beside him in that Down-South Assylum for the Elderly for 10 hours a day every day, slowly wasting away as he grew more and more distant from the world. As he died, I could see part of her dying along with him. And that was the worst part of it all.

While we were visiting him for the last time, a severe storm passed and knocked out the power to the home. In the blue-black muddle outside his door, I could hear people moaning and screaming and sobbing. Monitors screeching for generator power. The man who shared the room with my grandfather was crying and calling out for his son.

Tired, his wife tried to calm him and mumbled that he'd been dead for over a year now, and it was time for him to remember that.

*shudder* The day my continued existence starts to suck the life out of everyone around me, I want to be taken out back and euthanized. No questions asked.

I left home and started working the streets as a male prostitute in 1988, a couple of years into the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. Whereas AIDS was ravaging the gay subculture in its entirety, it was of course among male prostitutes where the plague raged most ferociously and most visibly. When I was sixteen, a health agency tested a large number of male prostitutes working in Ottawa where I hustled most of the time.
Seven out of ten male prostitutes were found to be infected. The older male prostitutes -- i.e., guys in their early to mid twenties -- were dying like flies and a large number of the younger ones my age were also beginning to die. My best friend, also a hustler, spent all of his time with dying hustlers because he enjoyed taking drugs in obsene quantities and it was dying hustlers who were most into spending their time getting as close to ODing as possible since they had nothing to lose. I couldn't stand being around dying hustlers because they had an apathetic attitude towards their impending death that I found chilling and unbearable.

So death was an omnipresent part of my adolescence. My daily life was spent amid dying young adolescents and men. And AIDS was only one of numerous causes of death among my brethren of the streets. On two separate occasions, for instance, I stood thirty feet away while skinheads murdered two of my fellow hustlers. And of course, death by overdose was a regular occurence among us. (Strangely, I can't think of any of my hustling buddies dying by suicide.)

Growing up amidst so much death has certainly effected me profoundly, for worse and, strangely, for better. Thanks to it, I'm better able to appreciate the poignancy of human life having experienced firsthand just how fleeting and fragile it is. But it also makes me melancholy to think of the sheer waste of all those lives. So yes, firsthand experience of death has contributed to my depression, among other things.

I'm not much of a recluse nowadays, but I have gone through deep depression and thoughts of suicide (plus a handful of attempts). Make yourself at home here and don't be hesitant to post! I look forward to reading more from you Stay strong, SF.

@Saigyo: I admire your tenacity. You've gone through so much over the years and yet you've still managed to carry on and make the most out of your life. I really admire that. Thanks for sharing. It's really got me thinking about my own life.

I love this post, Saigyo. I don't have any authentic experiences of death of my own, so hearing it from somebody once surrounded in an environment almost rife with it as a daily fact of living is incredibly intriguing. I hope you find some value in your experiences, even the hard ones. To have never tasted bitterness is never to have appreciated the sweet.

A kid at my school died, and I barely knew him, yet he was in my Latin class. It hit me kinda hard, and was probably the only time I've truly broken down and cried (during the open casket ceremony, and when I looked right at him as he lay there).

It was like he was sleeping, but with a very pale face.

my cousin was gunned down in a shootout. he was a badass and a 14yr old kid took him down. i always felt his presence behind me in school. like he was watching my back cause alot of the so called cool kids wanted to beat my ass down cause i looked stupid. there had to be a reason why no one ever layed a hand on me even though i knew at least 2 guys had every intention of jumping me. im a ugly crier... i had to force myself to stop crying during his burial. all those memories of just the two of us... our adventures... im the only one who remembers those events. i no longer feel like crying but the guilt of not crying my heart out has added onto the mass of negative energy stuck in my gut.

btw... he was a horrible person

Granpa, father, and uncle years ago. Granpa devastated me the worst and was the start of my issues because I was real little when my dad died and granpa was who raised me after that. Uncle hit me hard because I wanted to visit him but was disallowed because he was gay. And he died when I got 18 so I never got the chance to see him again.

Cousin who just died this year from kidney disease and heart disease. He was only 35. He accepted me as is and was my only friend except for another guy who we lost touch after college. His grandma, mom, and wife stressed him out so much fighting that he just broke down.
And they took it from the streets to the courts. they had connections so it got pretty bad.
I miss him every day because he just got me and let me be me.

..I have had at least 1 family member or old friend die every year, for the past 8 years. I feel like it's a jinx of some sort. The most recent was a HS buddy committed suicide. Before that, my great grandmother, who had been devastated by alzheimer's. before that, an uncle dying in a freak accident (ran into a tree; he was sober.) A couple aunts, uncles and grandparents. It makes me ponder my own mortality...