If you're having a happy holiday, please don't read this as I don't want to spoil anyone's Christmas with my moaning but I could really do with some opinions and advice.
If you've seen me on other threads, you might know that my Dad lost his five year battle with cancer at the end of November. He was only in his sixties and my parents had been together since they were teenagers, more than forty years. Obviously, Mum is going to find it hard to cope with life without him and, of course, Christmas was bound to be difficult but we - my siblings and I - are having trouble coping with the way she is grieving. Maybe anyone here who has lost a partner or a parent can tell me if she is behaving normally or not. I am loathe to say she is grieving 'excessively' as who am I to judge the level of her grief but she talks constantly of her life having no meaning without him and how she wants to be with him. She says she wants him to come back and take her with him, that there is nothing in her life any more yet she has four children and eight grandchildren. Don't we mean anything to her?
The irony of it is that, before Dad was ill, they were at each other's throats all the time. Hardly a day went by without a row and they made our childhoods a misery with their constant arguing. We never dared bring friends home in case there was a row. Mum was constantly belittling Dad and putting him down yet to hear her talk now, you'd think they'd had the most perfect relationship in the world. I wonder if part of her display of grief is guilt at how she treated him in the past.
I guess there are two things that bother me particularly. One is that she does not acknowledge our grief. We have lost our father, and he was always a brilliant Dad to us, yet we're not allowed to talk about our feelings as, in her eyes, we can't possibly be grieving anywhere near as much as she is. That hurts because, as a mother, I can't imagine not wanting to comfort my children, no matter how grown up they got and how much I was grieving myself. The other thing that bother me a lot is that she keeps saying they 'only' had forty years together and their time together was cut short. He was only 63 so that is a fair point but I really wish she wouldn't say it to me. Regular MNetters might know that my DH has the same cancer Dad has just died of and life expectancy is usually less than five years, often only a year or two. We'll be lucky if we reach 14 years together, let alone 40. At least Dad got to see his children grow up, marry and have children of their own. Unless they come up with a miracle cure, my DH won't see any of that. There are other brave, brave ladies on here who have lost their partners or face losing them to illness and any of use would give anything to have as long as 40 years.
I guess in terms of her grief, she has to grieve in her own time and her own way and we must respect it, even though it is upsetting that she seems oblivious to our feelings. That part I can accept and deal with. My big question is should I ask her not to talk to me about 'only' having 40 years together or would that be unkind? I don't want to hurt her feelings in any way and I want her to feel free to talk about Dad and her feelings but the conversation I had with her yesterday upset me so much. We're doing our best to ignore DH's cancer and have a bloody good Christmas yet every time I speak to her, she reduces me to tears and brings back all the fear for our future that I try so hard to put out of my mind.
Sorry this is so long and miserable and thank you for reading.