Making Bad Connections Between Two Separate Things When They Don't Make Sense
When something terrible happens, people reach for an explanation. The trouble is that some of those explanations point the finger inward, and the person ends up feeling guilty for events they had nothing to do with. Bad things arrive without warning and without our permission. That gap between what we can control and what we cannot gets wider the moment someone dies with no notice.
The habit starts young. A child, and later an adult, will link some small thing they did to a disaster that followed, even though there was no way to know the disaster was coming. The two events sit side by side in memory, and the mind ties them together with a knot that feels like responsibility.
Grief makes the knot tighter. Say there was a family gathering not long before the person passed, and it went sideways. Somebody's feelings got bruised, maybe a cross word was said, maybe the day fell short of what everyone hoped for. We load these occasions with expectations, so when they disappoint us, the hurt lingers past the event itself.
Ordinarily that kind of friction fades. People assume it will smooth over well before the next birthday or holiday, and usually it does. Then the unexpected happens. The death arrives, and suddenly the forgotten argument becomes a weight: the grieving person decides they are to blame, or that they failed to treat the one who died the way they should have.
A sudden loss is already hard to carry. It gets heavier when a mourner convinces themselves they played some part in it, and now regrets whatever came before. Often what drives this is a quiet preference for having a cause, any cause, over accepting that the loss simply happened for no reason at all. Sometimes the person was on poor terms with the one who died and now wishes they had acted differently, forgetting they had no way of knowing what was coming.
Forgiving yourself matters as much as the forgiveness you would extend to anyone else. It matters even more once you see that you never meant to cause harm, that you assumed this person would still be around, that there would be time to patch things up if patching was needed. Do not hold yourself accountable for what was never in your hands to control.