The thing about Rumi as a means of grief processing is that she not only has to grieve the murder of her parents and the loss of her fiance, but, in a way, she has to mourn herself too. The loss of her identity, of her memories, of her control over her own life, of the lifestyle she had... After all, it’s safe to assume that the version of herself that’s in her head, the one who grew up in the countryside, had a vastly different education to the Rumi that grew up in the city and attended school with Takuto. She had a completely different job. She had a different upbringing with a different family in a different environment. Her worldview, her outlook on life, and her attitude towards the world must be completely different. She’s a whole new person, with new experiences, maybe even with a new personality and moral compass and goals and wants.
Regardless of how much the cognitive dissonance did or did not affect her, she definitely has to confront that contrast once she recovers her memories. In the moment it all comes back to her, Rumi is truly a blank slate -- she’s unable to return to either her life as Takuto’s fiancee or her life in the countryside, so... where do you go from there? What do you do when you discover that everything you thought you knew about your past was a lie, but you can’t return to your “real life” because you’ve been living the fake one for too long?
In a lot of ways, her struggles echo Sumire’s, except that, in her case, she isn’t trapped between her identity and her sister’s, but between two versions of herself. Her memories might’ve been a lie, but the Rumi that was shaped by them was just as real as the Rumi that Takuto knew... They are both just... her. But after she recovers her memories, she can’t be one or the other anymore -- the two parallels lives she’s been living have collapsed into one and now she has to start over from them.
It’s an interesting study on nature vs. nurture, if nothing else. But she would also have to mourn all the years she lost from her previous life while she was living the fabricated life -- the love of her life, the friends she lost contact with because she didn’t remember them, the education/jobs she might’ve missed out on when she suddenly up and left for the countryside, her home, her family... It forces her to reconsider who she is, to rediscover her sense of self now that both of her lives have fallen apart, to ask herself what life does she prefer, because she’s had the opportunity to see two different paths she could’ve taken in life... and then she’d have to mourn both of them anyways because she can’t go back anymore.
There are so many possibilities to explore... the identity crisis... the existential crisis... The potential is criminally underused.
