Hello again, Helen. Sadly I recognise all the reactions and feelings you describe from October 2017, when I lost my mum. It does make you want to scream and wonder what the point of anything is anymore.
I am sure you are not being a rubbish mum at all, just a person who has lost her dad. When you have just suffered a loss, you can’t be the person you would ordinarily be for those around you, so you feel you are letting your family down. You are not. You are just someone who is grieving and that will stop you being the person you feel you should be. But you are grieving and that makes you behave and feel differently. You can’t do much about that except be a patient with yourself whilst you work through it.
I would suspect that you are being snappy and finding everything your husband does irritating because normal life fades into the background when you are hit by grief. I suppose that’s why I reminded you to eat and drink. I forgot to most of the time after I lost my mum. As you say, nothing seems to matter anymore. It really does feel like that, but that feeling does slowly pass as you come to accept what has happened and realise that life does and must go on. You probably have some weeks and months to go before you will feel like that. I still have days when I feel like that, especially when life isn’t going very well, but most days now, I can be more interested in life again, but for me that definitely took about fourteen months and I still struggle with it now.
You feel engulfed because this loss has been so significant for you and you are trying to get your head around the fact that this terrible thing has happened. I know I found it hard to understand how the world could be going on normally around me when I felt like my world had collapsed and that nothing would ever matter again. You wonder how the world can keep going round when there has been this terrible disaster?
It does seem incomprehensible that you will never see or speak to the person you have lost again. It is very hard to grasp the fact that one moment, someone who has been there all your life suddenly isn’t anymore. You are grieving not just for the loss of your dad, but the loss of the future you would have had if he had not passed and for the way life was when he was still here.
It is a huge change to your universe and will take a lot of effort to adjust to and recover from that. That’s why I said it changes everything. Sadly it does and to me felt like I had to rebuild my life almost from scratch again. I am still struggling with that too. It’s a work in progress and I’m still finding my way. You will probably have to do that too and it takes time, thought and effort. You can’t rush it. It’s too hard.
So that would probably be why you are being snappy and impatient with your poor husband. He is probably trying to hold everything else together and trying to be there for you at the same time whilst not knowing what to say that will help and whilst wanting to help you so much. It is a very difficult time for others less affected by the loss than you. Friends and family will be hurting for you, but are probably aware that there isn’t much they can do to make you feel any better, so they just try to do what they can, which to you will feel pretty lame and ineffective, because you are feeling all the enormity of the pain of the loss of your precious dad and that will exclude everything else and make it seem small and insignificant. That is normal.
I still walk around every day with the feeling that I am crying on the inside and find the daily requirements of work and trivial bickering of colleagues completely irritating and insignificant. I still feel that in comparison to the loss of my mum, other usual daily arguments and clashes of personality are like the buzz of an irritating fly that I want brush aside.
I’m afraid wanting to scream, run away and look at photos all the time, crying uncontrollably and until it makes you feel ill are all normal reactions too. That period lasted for months for me. It made it hard to do any normal daily task. I didn’t even manage to get dressed some days.
I suspect you are looking at photos so much because it is the next best thing to visiting him in the mortuary. That probably made you feel calm because it made you feel like he was still there in some real way and now not having that, will make you feel panicky. I carried on feeling panicky that mum wasn’t there anymore for about six months, culminating in a horrible week when I basically went into complete meltdown. For me that week was a bit of a watershed and I had to make a plan to help me through the next six months and going forward from there. I am still working on and following that and it has helped.
If photos are your focus at present, why not sort them into your favourite ones and put them into an album? It would be something to give you a focus for the moment and to pick up whenever you needed to see pictures of him. You could share that the memories they conjure up with your family too and tell them about your memories of those episodes. I am sure they would enjoy that too. I am sure your children would find that helpful too. After all, they have lost their granddad and however old they are now, will want to know more about him as they grow up.
I know you say it made you feel calm to visit him in the mortuary, so I assume that was because you felt it was a way of being with him, just as smelling the scent of him on his clothes would be now, but you will come to understand that he is always with you anyway. You carry him in your heart and when you are wondering what advice he might have given you when you need it, you will find you can hear what he might have said to you in your head. He shaped who you are and shaped your life to a great extent and all that has made you the person you are, so you will always have this element of his influence with you and will carry that forward with you always.
Also, you probably have some interests that you shared and if you can carry those on in some way, that helps too. I took up some hobbies that my mum also used to enjoy, so that is a lasting connection too and makes me feel that she still has some influence on my life and I can feel I am doing these things for her too, as well as me, so she is still helping me, even though she is gone.
Your love for your dad will never die and you will think of him every day. My dad died in 1985, but still not a day goes past when I don’t think of him, even speak to him! I have a portrait of him on the wall in my front room that I tend to talk to every day, several photos of my mum now too.
Everything you are feeling and doing is sadly normal, Helen, but it will get very slowly better. You just have to accept that this is a long and hard time to get through and that you will not be anything like the person you were for a long time. It will get better though eventually.
As I say, it helps to put things down on paper. I did that from the first day after I lost my mum and now if I go back and look at what I wrote then, I can see progress and realise I have come some way from where I was then, so it helps in that way too, as well as giving some expression and outlet for your feelings.
Slowly, things will get a little better, Helen. I know if feels unbearable now, but that it grief. It is unbearable, painful and goes on for a long long time, but gradually you do start moving slowly forward. Little by little. For the moment, just do whatever helps. We are here for you..xx