Sea of Love

Chances of the World Changing, The

Actors: Documentary

youknowyouloveme<3 – I wish you hadn't deleted your question!?
There are a lot of people here who don’t think before they write stuff. Don’t let them get to you.

Here’s an answer for you:

So sorry you’re having a tough time right now. Unfortunately, life tends to take us by surprise most of the time and bad things surprise us as well as good things.

The thing to do, if you can manage it, is to carry on with your life as normally as you can most of the time. You will have some emotions to deal with, of course, but try to DO as many of the normal things as possible. For example, if you usually go to school or work, don’t take lots of time off. There is a strange kind of comfort in routine and doing fasmiliar things can help keep you emotionally balanced and remind you that life goes on. It helps keep you emotionally stable.

The big difference now is that your boyfriend has a lot of emotions to deal with. They’re going to be complex emotions because he and his father obviously had a complicated relationships. The thing to do – again – is to be as normal as possible with him. If you usually go to a restaurant every Thursday, do exactly the same this week if you can. The hard bit is, you need to judge your conversation so that he feels the normality and stability of your relationship – it will act like a kind of emotional anchor while everything around him with his family is going crazy. If (actually "when") he brings up his father, just let him talk. Tell him his feelings and reactions are normal and understandable -just reassure him that whatever happens, you will be there to support him and your love for him won’t change because of this. You don’t have to counsel him or talk a lot. Just be there to listen and hold his hand until he has had time to work it out for himself.

I know it sounds dumb, but when people die, the one thing their friends and family need is to feel that the loss of one thing is not going to lead to the loss of other things. Imagine a pile of building blocks. If you take one of them away, there is a chance that all the rest will fall down. That’s how it feels when a loved one dies. Your job is to "fill the gap" in the tower of blocks until he can rearrange them for himself and make them all stand up on their own again.

As for his relatives:

Typically, Greek people are often as loud and emotional about death as they are about weddings! This could be a high energy affair! Be prepared to see and hear things that people from other cultures find odd. I remember the first time I went to a funeral in the Philippines. After the service, they took the lid off the coffin, stood the body upright and started lining up to take pictures with the dead man. VERY FREAKY! The only thing you have to concentrate on is being unshockable. Whatever happens, treat it as strictly normal. You can go tell your mum about it and freak out later. At the time, act as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.

Whenever you are in an unknown situation, just be a little more reserved and in the background then follow what everyone else is doing. If you are young, polite, pretty and respectful, his relatives will love you. If they can see you love and support their boy (your boyfriend) they will think you’re the best thing since sliced bread. So be nice to the relatives, sweet to the boyfriend and follow their lead. You’ll be fine.

Good luck sweetie.