How long after death of parent did you turn a corner?

[sleeptight1]

My Mum died suddenly a month ago. I know that everyone's situation is different but how long did it take before you felt you had turned a corner and were beginning to cope better with it?

Thanks for all your responses. I'm so sorry for all of you that have lost a loved one. I am only 4 weeks and haven't had the funeral yet.
Just feel very drained and sad at the moment. Also, I feel like this loss has tarnished all my memories from the past. Even hearing music from the 80s makes me sad as I remember being at home with my mum and dad as a child. It feels like my life has become divided into two parts - before her death and after. I find myself looking at emails sent before it happened and thinking how naive I was not to know what was around the corner. I know I will come out the other side of this, but it is all just so sad.

It's been a year for me and I feel better knowing all my firsts without her are over now.

So sorry for your loss.
When df died the raw pain was a couple of months.
A yr later I felt better like I had done all the firsts.
He had cancer and was in his mid 70s.
He wanted to go.

As others have said it varies I think. My mum died 5 years ago. I think things were getting easier after 6 months but my Dad died 6 months ago and I haven’t found the experience like when my mum died. It has been harder. With my mum there was a very long illness where we knew she was dying. With my Dad it was a traumatic RTA, I was in shock for ages. And I think because it is my last parent it is also difficult.

Sibling loss is very tricky, it just didn’t seem fair when I lost my bro. I’m lucky to have his wife as a SIL though. She’s fantastic and we have developed an even stronger bond.

With my mum, she slowly slipped away with illness. With my dad, he was well and then suddenly not. He was mid 90s and had seemed indestructible.

2yrs, I went to Sri Lanka and spent 10 days with a bhuddist and only then did it begin to make sense to me.

Both my dh and I recently lost our respective fathers. Apart from the initial shock, I don't think it affected either of us badly emotionally. We dealt with the practical stuff and supported our newly widowed mothers.

We might both be odd to take it relatively lightly. Our relationship with our dads was not particularly close and they both had suffered ill health for a long time prior to their passing.

Sorry for your loss. I would say honestly 5 years but we were very close and she was one of my best friends. The acute pain lessens and you’re left with the beautiful memories of a life that was.

I’m so sorry for all the losses here. My darling Dad died just before Christmas, and although I look and seem more like my old self, I continue to feel enormous grief at having lost him. I sometimes feel so full of rage too - we were really close and I just can’t fathom this life without him 😞 Sending love to you all xxx

It's been three years and three months and just today I realised that I'd not thought about her for a couple of days. Prior to that it's been a thought nearly every single day, of missing her, wondering what she would think about different things.

So much has changed too. My dad has remarried, the grandkids are now tweens, I've refrained for a new career and on and on. Because her death was so sudden, it felt like a tornado had ripped through the house and everything that was normal but just in the past week or so, it feels like maybe the house that had been knocked down, was being rebuilt.

Everyone is different!

My mum died very suddenly too, it’s coming up for three years. I stopped randomly sobbing and having “non-functioning” days about a year after her death, it was two years before I can say the grieving was basically done.

Things still set me off - when one of the kids does something amazing and she isn’t there to tell, or when lamb is roasting in the oven rand reminds me of her cooking, or when one of her plants flowers (I nabbed cuttings from her garden!). Those moments sting a lot. You are braced for the anniversaries , it’s the little things that get you.

My dad died 3 years ago. He was 63.

The first year was mainly shock and trying to accept it.

Second year was sadness, about everything he went through, and will now miss.

Third year is the year I've accepted he's gone. I still hate it, will always hate it, it's not right and never will be. But I've accepted it.

There's no wrong or right answer to your question as grief isn't linear, it's good days and bad days, eventually the good days outweigh the bad but there will always be bad days when you want to scream with the injustice of it all.