Grieving Sims

It really interests me how sims deal with grief differently. My Johnny Zest recently passed away, and his family all reacted very differently.

The ones affected the most in the family were:

• Wife, Arya (who was in bed next to him): She's devastated. She's always sad and crying; although she doesn't go out to his grave often, she'll stand on the deck and just stare at it from a distance while thinking about him.
  
• Granddaughter, Celina (sleeping in the next room): She lost a friend and was sad afterward. She didn't wake up while he was dying, but she had the moodlet for witnessing a death.
  
• Foster grandson, Loren (His daughter-in-law's brother, whose parents are both deceased): He woke up and came into the room while Johnny was dying.
  
• Daughter-in-law, Kiana: She didn't react immediately, but she's the one always going out to his grave to mourn.
  

Meanwhile, his own children, Braylon and Bethany, have not expressed sadness. Bethany was upstairs. Braylon was sleeping. Bethany did come to comfort her mother after the fact briefly, but then she went home soon after (she lives next door).

His grandsons who were asleep upstairs, Christopher and Connor, have remained unaffected. I think it's interesting how their foster brother is more affected by the loss of their grandfather than they are. For storytelling purposes, I say it's because he's already lost his two parents. Losing his surrogate grandfather was too much. :( Poor kid - no wonder he's a kleptomaniac. :)

I was very disappointed with the way sims mourn, to be honest. My first trial with dying in this game was such a let down. I had a family of four (two YA children and their elderly parents). In my story, father and daughter were very close, at maximum friendship, and both had family oriented traits. The daughter didn't witnessed her father's death, and I had to prompt her to view the urn to even make her sad, but that was it. A few hours later, and in the following days I never saw her cry or mourn for her father, and she never developed the sad moodlet on her own. I didn't see the son mourn either, beyond the day of the death, and he witnessed the father die. On the other side of the spectrum, in my asylum challenge, one of my sims (who was insane and hot-tempered) wouldn't stop grieving for another patient whom he was barely acquainted with. There was barely even a sliver of green in their friendship bar, no romantic relationship, and yet he's always crying over her tombstone.