@SlashBeef
I'm so sorry. I haven't experienced this personally so I can't imagine how I would feel. A good friend lost her mum when she was 6 and I think perhaps it was less damaging for her than it was for your at 14. She does feel sad that her mum isn't here and she gets upset discussing how she died because it was very sudden and in upsetting circumstances. However her dad later remarried and she developed a very strong relationship with her step mum and I know now as an adult she would say she is happy.
Is it perhaps an age thing? Maybe combined with how it leaves things afterwards.
It isn't less damaging at a younger age. Its awful. You don't remember her voice, her smell, her likes and dislikes. You're left with a couple of faded memories and emptiness when your classmates talk about their mums. You join in mothers day preparations and put the card you made in the bin when you go home from school. But you muddle on. You go to the hairdresser on your own and hope nobody will notice your haircut. You buy clothes when you grow out of them. Nobody buys you something because its pretty or because it might suit you. You never talk about her as nobody ever mentions her. You realise they are actively avoiding mentioning her and you follow their example. She's just gone. Her name never to be said aloud again.
When you get older, your friend's mums are so proud of them, they enable them to do their best, they advise and nurture them through the teenage years, the first kiss, the first break up, the exams that went badly. You return to a house that isn't a home because that person who should be there isn't there. You muddle on. When you think you're broken hearted in your twenties when a relationship breaks down, you don't have that person to turn to, the person you want to desperately turn to who will tell you it will be ok, that it happened to her and she was ok. You have abandonment issues and unhealthy relationships. You muddle on.
All the time you are muddling on, you look at people and wonder why they say that since it happened so long ago, you mustn't miss her anymore. That not knowing her from primary school age is better than having had her for longer. You don't say anything because how can you explain something you are feeling that you know they haven't....
When you are pregnant it really hits. You are desperate to talk to your mum and ask her about her pregnancy, to have someone near you to advise and help you, who will look after and reassure you. When your child is born, it really really hits, You wonder if you should have children for when if you died and your children grew up with the same emptiness and loss that you were so familiar with from your earliest memories. You feel alien because you realise you would rather your child die than you die because you'd rather deal with the pain and loss again yourself than have your child experience it if you died.
You look at 'generations' of females in photographs and you wish your child could have known your mum. You wish you could have known your mum.
Then you get older and you wonder about your health, what age did your mother have x/y/z and very occasionally someone will say you look like your mum and you will want to ask them in minute detail in what way you look like her, what were her mannerisms, her humour, her anything and everything but you won't ask because its so long ago and you mustn't rake up the past.
Its a loss, an emptiness that has to be lived through to be realised.