Are You Feeling Guilty Not Missing Dead Family Members?

No. Some people were shitty, regardless of whether they were family or not.

Guilt is like a bag of bricks, all you gotta do is set it down.

I don’t feel guilty about the ones I didn’t get along with or the ones I didn’t know. So far, those are the only ones gone! :-)

There should be no “shoulda, woulda, couldas” in your life.

My belief system deals with the here-and-now. The rest is a mystery. Love the people you love, mend fences with people you might want to have a relationship with, forget the rest, except for common courtesy and respect.

thanks Gailcalled but I’m speaking of the dead only. I like your “belief system” though.

@aster: Same belief system. One misses the people one misses; you can’t change much of the hard-wiring in your brain that relates to emotions.

No,not too much ;)
...it has never been my way to bother much about things which you can’t cure.
– Mark Twain

I’m with @gailcalled

Chersih your memories but dead is dead, no one knows, no one cares anymore whether you are carrying a torch for them.

Die to the past in every moment.

Part of healthy maturity is challenging one’s programming and belief systems.

Fond memories are healthy, canonizing the dead is not.

I didn’t cry when my uncle died, & I feel bad for not doing so. I didn’t really know him well enough to miss him

If my brother died, I wouldn’t care one bit. Actually, I’d be glad.

I miss my father sometimes, but he’s not dead (as far as I know).

Anyone else… nope.

I just don’t really have the capacity to form the kind of bond with someone required for mourning their absence. If I were separated from my husband or my son, I would feel it, but not anyone else. And I don’t feel guilty about it at all. I sometimes wonder whether I need some kind of counseling, but I don’t feel guilty about it.

I do not mourn my parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents. They lived long, died peacefully surrounded by loving family, my mother especially. I miss them sometimes, especially my mother, gone less than a year. I still want to call her up and ask her things like did she go to school with Timothy Leary and what was he like?
I do mourn some friends who died early and my cat who was poisoned.

I don’t think there is any set standards for who should be missed. I have friends and family members I miss, but then there are family members I don’t miss as well. I don’t feel bad about it though.

Here’s an anecdote.

I had a really awesome grade school class. We were a group of twenty or so kids, going through every year together, for eight years. Starting as four year olds, until we were twelve. We grew up together. We pretty much ended up all being close friends to each other. A big family. A veritable nakama.

And then we graduated and moved on to high school, and I didn’t see any of them any more. At first I missed them a lot, of course. But eventually I moved on, I made new friends, and I stopped missing my old ones.

Ten years later, we had a grade school class reunion. Almost everyone was there. And even though we were all ten years older and everything, we all recognised each other again, and everything immediately came back. It was like we just continued where we had left off ten years ago. We had a great evening together.

You don’t need to keep missing people in order to love them again when you meet again.