When You Are Angry at Someone Who Died

They died, and you are furious with them. For the thing they said and never took back. For the money, or the will, or the way they treated your mother. For smoking for forty years. For leaving in a way that has made your life much harder.

And there is nowhere to put it, because you cannot have the argument, and because everybody around you is being gentle about a person you are not feeling gentle about.

This is extremely common and rarely admitted

Anger is a standard part of grief and it is the part people keep to themselves, because saying it out loud feels like a betrayal of the dead and an embarrassment in front of the living.

So the first thing worth knowing is that this is ordinary. Being angry at somebody who died does not mean you did not love them, and it does not mean you are grieving wrongly.

It often comes with guilt attached, and the guilt is what makes it so heavy. You are angry, then ashamed of being angry, then angry at being made to feel ashamed, and the whole thing goes round privately for months.

Find out what it is actually about

Anger in grief is usually specific, and naming the specific thing brings it down to a size you can hold.

So write it plainly. I am angry that he never apologized. I am angry that she chose not to see the doctor. I am angry that he left the finances in this state. I am angry that she was the only person who knew me and now nobody does.

Sometimes, underneath, the anger is not at them at all. It is at the hospital, at a sibling, at the unfairness of it, or at your own choices. Sorting that out does not remove the anger and it does put it in the right place.

And sometimes the anger is the only safe feeling available. If what is underneath is unbearable grief, anger can be what your mind reaches for instead, because it has energy in it and sorrow does not.

Say it to somebody who will not flinch

The reason this festers is almost always that it has never been spoken.

So pick one person who can hear it without defending them. A friend outside the family, a counselor, a support group, a helpline. Not, usually, somebody who loved them equally, who will be hurt by it.

If there is nobody, write it. A letter to them, unsent, said exactly as you mean it, with no editing for kindness. People regularly report that doing this once changes something that years of carrying it did not.

Hold both without resolving them

The push you will feel, from yourself and from others, is to settle it: to decide they were good and let the anger go, or to decide they were bad and let the grief go.

Neither works, because both are usually true at once.

So practice the sentence with the and in it. He was cruel to me and I miss him. She did real damage and she was the only one who came when I was ill. That is not a contradiction you have failed to resolve. It is an accurate description of a person.

Do not wait for forgiveness

Forgiveness gets prescribed a great deal here, often by people who are uncomfortable with your anger.

You may get there and you may not, and you do not need to in order to live well. What matters is that the anger stops running your weeks, and that can happen with or without forgiving anything.

So aim lower and more usefully: less time, less grip, fewer ambushes. Not a changed verdict.

Give it somewhere physical to go

Anger sits in the body, and grief anger particularly so, which is why so many people in this position describe being wound up with nowhere to aim it.

So walk fast, swim, dig, lift something heavy, clean something properly. Not as a metaphor. As a way of spending what is in your system.

And watch the drinking, which is the most common way people in this spot take the edge off, and which reliably makes the anger worse and the sleep shorter.

Expect it at the dates

Anniversaries, birthdays and the ordinary ambushes bring it back, often sharper than the sadness.

That is not going backward. Grief is not linear, and anger tends to arrive in waves separated by stretches where you had thought it was finished.

When to get help

Please talk to a grief counselor or a therapist if the anger is still running your weeks many months on, if it is leaking onto people who did not deserve it, or if what you are grieving is somebody who hurt you, which is a particular and complicated kind of loss that is much easier with help than alone. Ask your doctor if you are not sleeping, if you are drinking more, or if your mood has been low for weeks. And if you are having thoughts of not wanting to be here, please tell someone today. In the US you can call or text 988 at any time.