@Hatethisdrama I went through similar after my father died. People thought that because he wasn’t part of my life it wasn’t a big thing. To make it worse, DP’s dad was given a terminal diagnosis a few weeks later and anything I was feeling was just swept out of everyone else’s conciousness.
So here’s the thing. I think that whenever a close relative, particularly a parent died, a lot of stuff gets opened up and pulled into focus.
Some of that is general existential stuff like confronting your own mortality, your changing role in life. And if you have a good relationship with your parent, you have a better handle on that. They’ve been a role model, you’ve talked about the deeper side of life and learned from them. You maybe saw what they went through when they lost people. What has happened depends a bit on them and you as people. But they have prepared you for that. You’ve got something to refer to help you deal with it. And however hard it is to deal with it, you’ve got some guidance that has specifically come from them. So you are still reminded of them as you work your way through it and it gives a sense of closeness even in loss. When you don’t have a relationship with them, maybe didn’t for a long time, and maybe there were bad things in there, then what you feel is that big empty yawning hole of the absence of a parent. And that is a feeling you are familiar with, they aren’t there in spirit to comfort you in it and it also feels a lot bigger and final and more endless now. It’s a very unpleasant and painful reminder in all you missed and didn’t have.
Some of it is practical- your changed role as a person, within the family, organising practical things. And a lot of that is difficult, but it keeps you busy and gives you a sense of purpose. And at a time of inevitable change, you have something to change into. So there are well worn and signposted opportunities for growth and action amidst the loss. You can also in some ways take on some of who they were. And you also get the flurry of attention and connection that comes from being around people who have suffered the same loss and you are able to connect with them in new ways and share the pain.
And in a more particular yet philosophical sense, when you are grieving you go through stages. When the parent is in your life those take on a different hue. So if you are in the anger stage of grieving, it doesn’t get muddled up with the anger of being abandoned or abused previously. One of the things that really hit me was that my sadness was really complicated.
By this I mean when at other times I got sad with grief I found it easier to move through, because the sadness reminded me of having lost something beautiful and worthwhile, and that feeling led me back to those beautiful and happy memories. And those memories were a comfort to me in my sadness, both in themselves at the time I felt them and as signpost that it was worth connecting with other people, even if at some point I might lose them, because of the beautiful things and times connection creates. With my dad, not so much. Just another road back to the big empty painful hole of loneliness and abandonment and confusion and loss.
It also made me realised that I had grieved before, earlier in my life, as a child, as an adolescent, as a younger adult. I’d grieved alone, in secret, with no support, no understanding and at least partly at a very young age.
That grieving had been messy and incomplete and had left behind both scars and unhealed wounds that festered. And all that was opened up again. It was incredibly, painful, disorienting and isolating. It was a lot.
But I did get a chance to redo it that grieving. I got a chance to smooth the scars and clean out the old wounds. It was incredibly painful but also incredibly, incredibly freeing. It profoundly changed my relationship to myself and my outlook on life.
It is shit. It is hard. It will be unrecognisable in the other side.
You are not a fraud. You are not a hypocrite. You are someone who has carried unimaginable pain for a long time and you still have the depth, the humanity, the compassion and the heart to feel. Do not think badly of yourself, do not be hard on yourself. That you can go through all that for so long and still be alive inside is a testament to how amazing you are.