A Grief Expert Replies:

Dear Anon,

Thanks for your note and concerns and question.

In response to many of the questions we get here at Tributes.com, our first comment is to say how often we hear the kind of issue they have brought up. But your note contains something that we’ve rarely heard. You indicate that your daughters react negatively to you talking as if your son was still alive, yet they want to preserve his room the way it is and leave it unoccupied. Based on our experience talking to thousands of grievers, those two things don’t usually go together.

And, when you indicate that you talk of your son in the present tense, but you want to move your other son into that room, those things also don’t match up for us, based on our experience.

However, nothing is really wrong with either you or your daughters.

One of the issues may be the newness or rawness of your son’s death for all of you. After all, May is only a little more than four months ago, and while time doesn’t heal emotional wounds, it does take some time to adapt to the new, painful, unwanted reality of a death—and sometimes even more so when the death is to a young person and therefore doesn’t make sense.

Unless you have something strongly against it, we’d recommend that you begin to refer to your son in the reality of the fact that he’s no longer alive. That may help your girls adapt and be more accepting of making the changes to his room and to having your other son move in to that room.

We have to guess that everybody in your home has a broken heart, and we know that each person can have different feelings and different ideas about how to talk and what to do.

Perhaps if you just tell the girls the truth about how sad you are, maybe they will do the same. Then the issues will be on the real topic – everyone’s grief – and the matter of the room will resolve itself.

From our hearts to yours,

Russell And John