If your mum/dad died when you were a child..

[Letsgroove]

Did you talk about it within your family or was everything swept under the carpet?

My mum died when I was 7. This was back in the 80s. I don’t remember a lot about it and nobody ever mentioned my mum and that is how it has remained. Very rarely my dad will mention her now that we are all
grown up; it’s just not a topic we ever discuss. I’ve just started counselling after all these years and it’s coming to light that the not talking about my mum especially within my family is one of my biggest issues. I would find it totally uncomfortable and awkward to bring up the subject with my siblings or dad and wondered if anyone else still can’t talk about their parent’s death because it wasn’t spoken about at the time?

OP your post is so identical to my family's situation I'm actually wondering if you're my sister. Hence the name change. My mum died in the 80s, when we were just little kids, it was rarely talked about at home, at school, anywhere. On the rare occasion I brought up the subject, adults would look so uncomfortable and my dad would like like he was going to cry so I just stopped doing it. Like another poster, I look back to how I behaved as a teenager (and in to my twenties) with eating disorders and emotionally dysfunctional attachments to unsuitable men and think HOW did an adult not look at me and think my behaviour needed to be flagged up/addressed? The ramifications are life long and I do increasingly think I should seek counselling to address various things which I think continue to hold me back

Hi Op

I went through same/similar experience of childhood bereavement losing my mum who adopted when I was 10 yrs age, then at 15yrs age,she die from breast cancer in her very 40yrs,

Life can be a total bastard at times,

She was a lovely person and as she was linchpin who kept the family bonds, together,

When she sadly died, everybody grieves differently,

the strong family connection died sort of with her,

It had extremely profound effect on me, I couldn't keep with this kind of really shit experience ,Cause of it i went totally off the rails,

I was brought up in children's homes,before i was adopted, i was separated from my large family of sisters/brothers ,my birth family gran tried with my aunties to keep us together as a family ,but social services in their wisdom split us up to our detriment as a family,

Thanks Birmingham social services ,they have allways had a medicare shit reputation..

I think it's very weird of how culture/society treats breaved children,

I think it should be regard thought of childhood emotional abuse,

Their is rafts, and rafts of evidence of childhood Adverse traumas contributes to mental health issues in later life, low achieving potential if there is no/or not enough support emotional and can also affect our bodies immune systems such as health disorders such as Rumertoid Athritis Lupos and other immune deficiency disorders there's a link to suppression of emotions and western diet which can be unhealthy for us processed food ect.

Hi Op

There's a world renowned Author/Psychologyist he is known as human whisper,

He had extremely shit childhood 😭 experiences living under Holocaust ect,

Dr Gabour Mate his name is,

He does very enlightening lectures on YouTube

One of his books is called The Myth of Normal,

The body keeps the score is another book

He is enlightening about childhood traumas and their after effects on children and how to start the healing process ect...

My dad died very suddenly when I was 9, my mum and the rest of my family never shied away from talking about him but it was always very matter of fact. In some ways this was good but it meant I never really talked about my feelings about his death.
My family are all dead now apart from my mum, we do talk about it but always in a very 'doom and gloom' way. Our relationship is difficult.

Sorry, meant to say he died in 1990. I have been in therapy on and off for most of my adult life and have never managed to talk properly about my grief.

In fact I'm only now even recognising it as grief.
Sorry for multiple posts!

Oops I ment to say I couldn't cope with this childhood trauma,

Six months after misfortune of my mother who adopted me her death,
My father was courting again someone who lived locally who loosely knew my mum, but not a friend,

I knew life moves on,
But it's like wants He started dating, He forget about his emotional responsibilities to me, such as he could offered to pay for free childhood bereavement counselling therapy ect too.

I feel I didn't have enough of good childhood to Counter act the Extremely Crap funked up childhood in children's homes.

I am glad young people today are challenging the view's points about emotive charged subjects as this,

And cause of the nightmare of Covid 19 Lockdowns and subsequently effects on emotions well being isolation ect

Society is waking up finally and realising mental health struggles issues is to do with dealing with shit experiences in life and not having even adequate support.

My father first became ill when I was 5 and he died when I was 13. DM and I used to talk about him a lot, and she also used to talk about their lives when the two of them were younger and first married. I really don't know how I could have coped with his death if it had all been swept under the carpet, and my heart goes out to you all.

@2chocolateoranges I hear you. Thank you for sharing your story.

My dad dies when I was 2, back in the 60s. Rarely ever mentioned again, I was shhshed if I ever asked and no photos were ever up of him. It caused massive psychological issues for me - lots of other unusual trauma in my childhood too.
I think the belief then was what you haven't had you'll never miss. Absolutely not true!

This is virtually my story too! Alcohol, self esteem, depression. My mum died a few years ago and I have such confused feelings about her.

Both my parents died when I was a teenager in the 1980s.

I was 13 when dad died but we (I'm one of three) were all encouraged to talk about him openly, and his family rallied round to some extent. Mum died five or so years later. My siblings and I were all older teenagers then though and I suppose there was no one then left to discourage us from talking, so we did (well, to an extent, we're not all that close).

I think there's little understanding of how fundamentally the loss of a parent in your childhood affects you. It changes everything and never leaves you. I'm now in my 50s but there are still days when the loss is still so fresh that it feels like it happened yesterday. The wound just never closes. It has defined my whole life and many of my choices (and especially my mistakes). I really struggled to bond with my daughter and I think it's all related.

Like many PPs I also find it quite hard to truly sympathise with people who lose an older parent (although I obviously try and hide it). I think most people see me as cold, and I probably am. I most definitely have a dark sense of humour from it.

This is absolutely my experience too, my sister was 3.5 when our dad died and she still refers to him as 'daddy' whereas I have no idea how to refer to him. Family talk to my sister about him, and my mum has done too, I think because she remembers him so it's easier. I've always felt quite shut out to be honest because I'm the only person in our family who has no memory of him and so no one bothers to include me, they just assume because I don't remember it hasn't affected me. It's like I never had a father at all. It's also something people say as a sort of platitude when I say my dad died when I was 1- oh but I suppose you don't remember him so..

Exactly that. My sister was 12so has memories. I have nothing - I keep trying to remember but it's grainy photos of him and I (of which there are 3!) The first thing I did when mum died was put photos of him up!

These stories are so sad. I was lucky enough not to lose a parent as a child but I’ve often thought how terrible it would have been. I see how needy for love my DCs were when they were under 10…they would still miss me greatly now if I died but with support they would grieve and survive. Their under-10 selves would, I know, have been destroyed. It chilled me to think about it. My heart goes out to you all.

This thread really resonates with me too through friendships. It's so sad. There's is so much documented clinical evidence linking these bereavement experiences in childhood to complex PTSD and other mental health issues in adulthood. There's is so much unresolved grief to process

This thread has just prompted me to tell my teenage niece (whose dad, my brother, died when she was little) that she can ask me any questions about her dad and I’m always happy to chat about him.

That just made me cry. It is such a lovely thing to do, and I wish someone has done this, though I'm not sure where I would start

That's so lovely @WolfFoxHare, I'm sure it will mean a lot.

My best friend's mum died when she was 11. I've known my friend for 18 years since we were both early 20s, never spoken about and I don't even know how she died. Her dad remarried pretty quickly from what I can work out when my friend talks about her step-mum.
Her mum wasn't even mentioned when her dad gave a speech at her wedding which I, personally, found a bit strange and quite sad!

My mum died in the 70's when I was 8. The first I knew of it was at 8:30pm the night she died (at 11:30pm). I went to school the following day and was told about the funeral by my cousin whose school was opposite the church. My first memory is of being told she was going to die. I have blocked everything before that moment, and even with counselling, it hasn't come back.
It has affected me mothering my children, as I over compensate in mothering them (can't do enough for them), though we're all very close now, so fortunately I don't seem to have smothered them.
I think it was just the way things were then; the less children knew, the better, though we know that not to be true now.

My dad died unexpected I was 10 (complex sequence of events, but he had an undiagnosed brain tumour, which made him fit, which made him drown in a swimming pool). My brother and I were present and witnessed the unsuccessful CPR, my mum wasn’t there.

We didn’t talk about it much, but there wasn’t really much to say. DBro was 7 at the time and has grown up idolising him, I was aware that he was a deeply flawed parent (workaholic so literally didn’t see him during the week, and he didn’t do much with us at the weekend as he “needed to rest”, so DM did 99% of the parenting - our lives didn’t change in any discernible way after he died). DBro hated us talking about DF as he felt we were being “disrespectful” - we were just remembering funny stories.

I had a difficult time in my teens (depression and eating disorder), and DBro had/has OCD and now has a bit of a hoarding problem. His death has definitely changed how I parent - I also love my job but I make sure I arrange my schedule so I can do school runs, take DS to swimming etc.

I am a widowed parent - children were all ten and under when dh died. This thread is a hard read. I don't want to hijack as this thread isn't about being the surviving parent, but I just want to say how incredibly painful it is to talk about dh to my kids, even after nearly a decade. I try to keep memories alive, answer questions, say things like daddy would have loved that' etc. But it still makes my throat hurt getting the words out and I want to go to the bathroom and cry. For them and what they've missed out on, more than for myself. For the lifelong impact they probably still aren't fully aware of.

If other family members who are perhaps a bit more distanced can take on some of that and can talk to the kids I can imagine that's a wonderful thing. Sadly I haven't had that help.

Oh JamJar. 💐

This is an interesting thread, my df died when I was a child and we didn't really speak much about him and like others I can be quite cold and can feel unsympathetic when adults get v upset about their grandparents / parents dying. My dc's father died when dc were young and this thread has made me realise we don't speak much about him, I'll try to work on that - I want dc to be more empathetic than me