For Anyone Needing Support After Losing A Parent. Very Supportive Thread

[Mummylin]

Luckily I was keeping my eye on the thread so it would of been ok. Hopefully this new thread will once again bring comfort to newly bereaved.
To the newest posters, I wish you all the best in the coming weeks / months.
And to the longer term posters, thankyou for being such a support to each other. 💐

I lost my wonderful dad 4 years ago suddenly and two weeks ago lost my beautiful mum .. again suddenly! I didn't get a chance to say proper goodbyes.. one minutes we were talking about how to cook her first bag of spinach .. next minute gone. I have a severely disabled son and she was my rock and my inspiration. I know I have to channel her now but it's so difficult.. I feel like I can hardly breathe .. let alone channel her strength. I know time is a great healer and to remember all the good times but feel like I've lost a limb. Grief is so surprisingly physical 💔

@ChillyPanda I'm so sorry and can definitely relate to the breathing thing. My mum died this week.

@kittlesticks I'm so very sorry 😞 it's rubbish isn't it. My husband's hopeless .. sooo much to do wrt funeral & looking after children and he's taking the guest bed to the tip.. you know the one my mum used when she visited ! He's definitely unable to read the situation well .. 😳

@sweetiepie1 I'm so sorry .. it's tough ❤️

Sending love to all who have lost a loved one .. the pain is real and the sense of loss hard to understand by those who haven't experienced it yet (luckily) . Thankyou for sharing your experiences.. not feeling quite so alone ❤️

Panda I'm sorry ... My Dad was similar, he & Mum were long divorced and when she died I got my DH to tell him as I knew he would say something unfortunate and I just wasn't up to fielding that. This is the same dad who quite seriously asked if I had a cold when he was driving me back from another relative's funeral when I was weeping in the back seat - DH and I looked at each other in stunned silence.
Some people are just that way - it doesn't mean they're bad people but certain situations are really not their forté!

@FluffyFluffyClouds Urgh not just me then. Tbf I do know that I always have to spell things out to him a bit 😉 so why expect now to be any different .. my son deleted mums number from the landline as I wasn't able to call her any more 😧. you have to laugh or you'd cry . Xx

The thing is it's not so much we don't like the grief, it's more that we would like them back (healthy). In a way the grief feels like it's all we have left of the closeness and love that we shared.
I now feel - 18 months on - that I can let Mum go, if that makes sense, but I feel sad that I feel that! And that seachange only occurred last week fwiw.

Grief happens in its own time...

@sweetiepie1 and @ChillyPanda

I'm so sorry for your recent losses.

Sweetiepie, it's very early days (hours) for you so my advice is to take care of the essentials and feck everything else... and by essentials I mean eating, drinking, grieving and resting. I hope you have good support in place?

Panda, I'm so sorry you lost both your parents suddenly? I've always found it comforting to know my mum didn't suffer but going from messaging at 11am to her being dead before 1pm is still incomprehensible at times.

A dear friend of mine lost her mum suddenly this week and its bought a lot of emotion and grief to the surface (its never far away tbf). I am utterly heartbroken for my friend and I saw her in person today. She was so dazed and off kilter, I remember feeling like that and all I wanted to do was make that pain go away!!

On a more selfish level I hope I am not invited to the funeral. It will be at the same place as my mum's and I can't face it.

I can't bear this. I just can't believe I've lost my mum in my 30s, there is still so much I wanted to say to her. I have moments where I can only scream or feel like screaming.

I've just found this thread and think it might be what I need, it makes me feel better somehow that there are others who feel as lost as I do right now.

I lost my incredible mum just over a month ago after an out of the blue terminal cancer diagnosis exactly a year before. She was my best friend and I talked to her every single day and I'm just lost without her. I have an amazing husband and friends but I just don't feel I can keep crying on them!

@kittlesticks I'm sorry, it's hideous and yes you are still young. It's not fair .. so much ahead now not to be 💔 sending you hugs ..

@margotsdevil I'm so sorry to hear this. It sounds like you had a very special relationship and it's very painful when that is taken away. I lost my dad 4 years ago and my mum 2 weeks ago. Both absolute stars, my rocks and we also spoke daily. The only way I can reconcile the pain is to say to myself the fact it's so painful meant we had a real love for each other and I was lucky for that. With dad it did get easier and I channel him when I'm feeling low. Still in shock over mum but hoping to do the same eventually.. hugs to you ❤️

It's very fresh for me, I know, mum died on Tuesday. I almost can't believe it enough to type it.
Is it normal to hear her voice and certain phrases in my head? All the time?

This is such a heartbreaking , but uplifting thread. I still read it regularly and am so happy to see all the support given to the posters who sadly join this thread. I never thought when I started this thread, that ten years later it would still be going. Someone else had started it previously and it sort of passed by unnoticed, but when I had my own loss it was revived and I have to say it was so helpful speaking to others in the same or similar situations. Now there are so many more of you , but I can see that the same care and empathy is shared amongst you all.
For the latest posters who have only just started this terrible period of grief, I hope you all have RL support from friends & family, it's so important and will help you a lot. Wether you have this or not, this thread will do their best to help all that need it.
You are all a wonderful support to each other. Thankyou 💐💐

Hugs to you @Mummylin thank you for keeping the thread going it is invaluable to me to have a safe space to say exactly how I feel I don't have that in RL people just don't understand the anger, sadness, rollercoaster this truly is day in day out x

@margotsDevil
@kittlesticks
@ChillyPanda
@sweetiepie1

Just catching up with the thread and welcoming all of you, while being so sorry that you need to be here. It's terribly hard for anyone to understand if they haven't been through it themselves - losing a parent is a profoundly deep and destabilising experience. I honestly feel like a different person now. This thread is truly a refuge to share thoughts and sadness. Thank you to @Mummylin for maintaining it.

Everyone here who's read my experience knows by now but just to add...my darling mum died last year. She was in her 90s, frail but we weren't expecting to lose her. She became ill though, and over the course of a few weeks just couldn't bounce back the way she'd always done before. Losing her was a huge shock and I think I was slightly out of my mind for a while....but now, almost 9 months later, I'm starting to have better days. I can still often be in the depths of despair but I can see objectively how the grief has changed over that time. As @mrssunshinexxxs says, it's a rollercoaster. Hugs to all.

@Mummylin

I didn't realise thread was so longstanding. I'm glad you've taken the time to keep it going and you always post with kindness and positivity, I look forward to being more where you are and less where I am. But I know all the clichés about time are true and I just have to "live" this horrible period of my life.

I finally got my birthday card from my dad today (me and DC3 were in hospital, he didn't forget or anything like that). Hit me a bit to see it signed just from him [and mum always used to write the cards so not seeing her writing was also hard]. That's it now though. Me, dad and all my siblings have had our first birthdays without mum. We've had our first Christmas without her and our first mother's day. Next stop although not for a few months is the anniversary of her death.

Keep well everyone

@Brillig I agree, I am entirely different person I can't even explain in what way I'm just not the person I was when I had a mum

@ChillyPanda thank you. to everyone who is here.

The thing that is resonating most with me right now is that there are so many here saying that they feel like they are a different person now; this is how I feel and to be honest I actually thought it was me losing the plot and being hysterical. The fact that so many others feel the same gives me comfort and hope that I will adjust one day to a new/different me.

Thank you for the welcome. I've had a quiet few days. I feel really drained and exhausted at the moment. I've fallen out with my sister too, which is a bit rubbish. Hopefully it'll blow over soon. Father's day was unexpectedly hard too. I don't know why - I've never made a big thing out of it (just a card for my dad and another for my husband from our children) - but I guess I felt out of sorts not needing to get him a card this year. I'm also a bit sad about how few people I know who mentioned my loss on father's day. I'm probably guilty of not making the effort when friends have lost important people but I guess I feel a bit like everyone has assumed I'm fine now and that they don't need to acknowledge my grief any more. It's only been three months.

Also chiming in with how transformational loss is. I found myself looking at photo of me from just after my 30th birthday last night. It was only a couple of years ago but I felt it was like looking at someone entirely different.

@margotsdevil

I've just found this thread and think it might be what I need, it makes me feel better somehow that there are others who feel as lost as I do right now.

I lost my incredible mum just over a month ago after an out of the blue terminal cancer diagnosis exactly a year before. She was my best friend and I talked to her every single day and I'm just lost without her. I have an amazing husband and friends but I just don't feel I can keep crying on them!

I felt this way too when my mum died 3 1/2 months ago I needed to speak and crying actually sob my heart out every single day for the best part of 2 months. I felt that my life was over. Fast forward to this present moment in time and the loss is still cavernous and I still can't believe that my mum is gone at 66 years old. I seem to be going through days where am ok then I slide back again into heartbreaking grief. What I can say which helped me in the earliest months was a combination of reaching out to people who knew mum this even seen me arranging to meet up with an old school friend who also lost her mum and relatives who I haven't had much contact with since childhood but sometimes I just needed to cry and cry for as long as I needed without feeling guilty taking up peoples time and for this I used the Cruse Bereavement helpline. They are amazing sometimes I couldn't even get my words out but they just listen to you. They really were a life line. I have just today finished my 4th early intervention session with a named counsellor this too has been a useful sounding board. Really the only thing that seems to help is talking about my mum.

I wish you well it is tough without a doubt but I also found this forum extremely helpful linking in with people who are experiencing the same feeling and emotions as me.

Hi everyone, I lost my amazing dad age 70 in April, still doesn't feel real. I miss him so much. We had such a special bond, he was my best friend. Some days I feel numb but I've lost a part of me that I don't think I'll ever get back. It's just so hard going from being with someone every single day to realizing that you're never going to see them again. It's just heartbreaking 💔

Hi and hugs to everyone. My dad died in March and I’ve been reading this thread pretty much since then.
I’m finding some days I’m ok and others it just hits me . Also found Father’s Day very hard . I get what you mean @letsallbemermaids . I think because I can hold it together most times people think I’m fine . Someone at work Monday asked me if I’d had a nice weekend which I was slightly stunned at . (We’re a small team and they all know what happened) I am also guilty of similar in the past though .