Thank you that you took my comment with ease.

You asked:

I be like "What about Julie? What about our grandma and (et al)?" Why arent they part of the Greek chorus throughout my day, and my dreams at night?

Perhaps because they have been dead for some time and you are still dealing with the death of your sister? Or your relationship was different? But presumably you will also hear these voices in the choir or have already done so in one or another, albeit comparatively rarer, situation?

I would like to add some more thoughts on this and hope, you don't mind.

In a way, it contains two messages that the social environment reacts differently to the death of ones relatives and how ones own reaction takes place.

1. death is being accepted widely
2. death is being rejected widely

I still remember, as a woman of 21 years, coming back to work, only a few colleagues condoled with me and that was that. One day of condolences and then work as usual, never mentioned again. Despite my irritation, I saw no other choice but to simply go along with it and, in a kind of unconscious shrug of the shoulders, accept that the consternation does not extend beyond my family. I don't think it's wrong, I think it's quite normal. A kind of unspoken acceptance of the fact that people die. That is related to number 1.

A story, related to Number 2:
I was less able to live with the fact that my mother's death did not prompt my childhood friends to ask me how I had experienced the time afterwards, or even the dying itself, when we first met months later. However, I could have lived with that if not for a phone call shortly after the meeting in which I broached a subject that seemed to excite my friend and she reprimanded me about the nature of my lifestyle and my mental excursions on a subject of my interest at the time.

She became downright furious and tried to force me with words to desist from my strange ideas. Finally, I told her that if she was really so interested in me and my life, she could have brought up the death of my mother, if she was so worried about my mental salvation.

I wanted to make clear the absurdity of her demand on me, but I achieved the exact opposite. Where such a small thing as a difference in interest had already provoked her anger, I would rather have wished that a more drastic experience such as the death of my mother had been of concern. Or, bringing the two together.

I would not have made this objection if she had not insisted that I had a questionable way of life. With time, I would have got over the fact that my friends didn't say or ask anything and I would probably even have raised the aspects that were important to me in this context all by myself. But this way I felt that it was a big hypocrisy from her side.

She did everything to not want to understand that the subject matter that was interesting to me could well be related to my mother's death, and her resistance to approaching subjects that were of a frightening nature made me conclude that while I was ready for talking about death, she was not.