My main character's two young children are drowned by his estranged wife as a mercy kill. You see the world around them is going down the drain, there was no real escape in the wife's eyes so she baths them, drowns them and waits for him to come. He walks in, aware that something isn't right, and then he finds them, swaddled in flannel towels, soft and smelling sweetly of bath-soap. He has an initial outpouring of grief, the kind of grief that wells from within and creates that god-awful agonizing sound from somewhere close to the heart. After this he is meticulous, he dresses them, makes sure their warm and safely buckled into their car-seats, then he drives them to their favorite spot where he holds them in his arms until the morning comes. I think eventually he will heal, but the threads of children have woven themselves deeply in him. His priorities are fumbling in his fingers and he no longer cares for his well being. He will be hurt for while, but he needs to come to realization that even though they are gone, he can live, he can go on.
Doesn't. My MC loses his mother and has to look after his baby sister, so has no time to grieve. Its all bottled up inside, eating away at him. He withdrawn and hates the world for the lack of caring and even blames his mother for abandoning them and is jealous that his sister is too young to feel the loss like him. But a stiff moral compass compels him to look after her is sister. And its only when she is a sleep he breaks down, crying as he cradles his . mother's picture.
My MC, Valarie, loses her father and younger sister. She plays the blame game, which, in some parts, is correct, and others, is not. She wants justice served, and in the way that she feels it should be served. No other form of punishment will work for her - it has to be justice as she thinks it should be done.
AJ grieves the exact same way I do: Alcohol, craving drugs, burying her emotions, and listening to music.
Asper buries himself in the lives of the people around him, betraying no trace of mourning at all. Human lives are complex, fascinating distractions to him; he finds that befriending them, learning about them, listening to them reminds him that he is not alone. There is someone else out there, suffering like him. At night however, as the mortal world sleeps, things fall apart. Sometimes, alcohol subdues his chills of loneliness. On particularly cold nights though, he'll light a candle, like Jezebel used to, and imagine that she's still there with him. I haven't quite gotten to writing the scenes yet, but he might even go ahead and hallucinate he presence, talk to her. Poor guy =[
Grieving is something I'm trying to get my head around at the moment in the current WIP. I know how an adult grieves, by personal experience, but my MC is a 12 year old kid, and it's his friend who has been murdered, in horrific circumstances, and in front of his eyes. Children tend to deal with grief in a different way to adults, and layering the grief with adult pontifications about mortality etc, just seems phoney. So far I've gone for the anger approach (and the remorse, as arguably he might have saved his friend), but at some point do I reflect on what's lost? I have one get-out, and that's the horror isn't really over yet for the kid, nor for the family or the rural village the story is set in, so there isn't that much time to grieve anyway, but I can't dismiss it. While the book I'm writing is kinda pulp-horror, it needs to be realistic. I can't have my MC having a major breakdown because I need the reader to see the rest of the horror unfold through the MC's eyes. But nor can I dismiss the death of his best friend as "something that just happened". There's a balance to be had here, it's just damn hard trying to strike it.
While I have yet to write about someone seriously grieving on behalf of others, I do have an opinion on the matter. As you say, we're all humans, and we grieve differently, that's because we are different. My advice would be, have your character grieve in the same, or close to the same, manner as yourself. While indeed it's an artistic challenge to attempt mimicking something you're not used to yourself, it's also so very much easier to make it realistic and dynamic if you can emotionally invest yourself in the grief-process of the character. Which is most easily done by having the character mimicking your own feelings.
I find a lot of written and film grieving to be overdone. Many people shed a tear, feel sad for a few days and just get on with life. And yes I know of what I speak.
The reaction to a slow lingering death might be very different to experiencing the sudden death of a loved one, or one that is not natural but perpetrated by someone else. I've lost several people close to me: one from cancer, one from a sudden heart attack, (a young man with no apparent history of heart problems,) and another from a bomb attack. I grieved differently for each, and each death changed me. I wouldn't expect any less from my characters. In the first instance, it was such a relief that the pain and suffering was finally over, I actually felt glad. I missed that person but got on with my life. The second, I was shocked to my very core that someone so full of life could be taken like that. Strangely enough, during that grieving period, I pushed the envelope when it came to tempting fate. I indulged in risky behaviours for some time after. The last shook me up the worst. How does one begin to deal with that? I lost someone I cared about, so a faction could make a political point. That was a long time ago. I'm still grieving. Whilst I can use my own experience to some degree, my characters are not me. If one is prone to melodrama, chances are that is how they will react. If someone is inclined to bottle up their emotions, they could be all 'business as usual,' but that's not to say that the smallest thing might not cause a huge, if temporary, outpouring of grief when least expected. I think if we truly know our characters, their reaction and grieving process will ring true to our readers, regardless of their own experience of grief.
By falling off his chair, using all his power to get back up and promising himself he'll move on, but only outwardly succeeding. It comes in flashbacks and echoes (and, yes, that's a Taylor Swift reference). It only stops haunting him, turning instead merely into a sad memory, when he, half a decade later, finds the only person in the universe that to him is as smart, kind and pure as the brother he once lost.
My MC's new dearest friend died right in front of him and by one other situation, he remembers and re-lives death of his family. And then, before his eyes, the villain was his father-lool-alike (Father killed the family, and MC killed Father in rage). Rage and grief, that's it, I think.
