Author Topic: I feel so lost  (Read 2288 times)

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Offline Jo B

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I feel so lost
« on: July 03, 2019, 06:02:57 PM »
My Dad passed away suddenly on the 8th June, he had a heart attack two weeks earlier, but was doing so well, making plans for the future.  When he passed it was such a shock for my family.  We lost mum 8 years ago, but she had lung cancer so we knew that we were on borrowed time with her.  With my Dad it was so unexpected, that I'm finding it hard to come to terms with.

Although I am one of 4 siblings, the bulk of letting people know, registering his death and the funeral arrangements have been left to my sister and I to get on with, which helped me at first as I was so focused on doing things properly for Dad that I could put what had happened to the back of my mind.

Now that the funeral is over with and I've collected my Dad's ashes I don't know what to do.  It has hit me so hard, as I don't feel like I've allowed myself to accept that he's gone until now, and I am really struggling.  I am very lucky that I have a wonderful husband who supports me, but I feel that even he is going to get fed up of my crying all the time, and my emotions being all over the place.  Don't know how I'm going to get over this.

Offline Karena

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Re: I feel so lost
« Reply #1 on: July 04, 2019, 12:13:11 PM »
Hi, sending you a warm welcome - i think before the funeral we feel we are doing something for them and after there is nothing more we can do and thats why we get hit so hard at this time. Also i think, having lost both my parents there is a realisation we have become orphans and that is horrible at any age, because the foundations of our lives, the people who were there for us always and knew us better than anyone have gone. At this stage the only way to cope is to get through one hour at a time, one day at a time and actually allow ourselves time to grieve, but also start to collect up the memorys of themn a different way as their whole lives, not just the end of their life, they are more than people we have lost but people we have known and who have loved us and that is their legacy.It takes time, longer than most people can imagine and its a roller coaster journey where you slowly climb the slope to feeling more at peace then end up plumetting down again,the thing to cling onto is that once you have got up the slope once you can do it again.
I cam here after my husband died and found it helped a lot as it was somewhere to be able to write down things i couldnt express verbally, but also that the other people here are here because we all lost some-one we love and are struggling and it makes you feel less alone and less able to cope.I hope that you will find the same for as long as you need us to be here we will be. :hug:

Offline Sandra61

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Re: I feel so lost
« Reply #2 on: July 08, 2019, 10:46:06 AM »
Hello Jo,

I am so sorry to hear about your father. I am glad you have an understanding partner to help support you, as I am afraid this is not a process that is quickly over.

I lost my own father to a heart attack also. He had one heart attack and a second one several months later. He did come home and did seem to be getting better, but passed away suddenly just after getting ready for bed one night. He collapsed on the bed and I just walked in to find him lying there. It is still something I can relive as if it happened yesterday and it actually happened in 1985.

I lost my mum in 2017, which is when I found my way to this website. It was only then that I came to understand that loss is not something anyone ever gets over, but instead, just slowly learns to live with. I think I cried daily for almost a year. I don't cry much anymore, but that dull flat sadness and awareness that she isn't here now is still the thing I wake up with in my head every morning and I still have to force myself out of bed to deal with another day without her. I miss them both so much and I don't expect that ever to change now, after losing my dad so long ago and still thinking of him and missing him every day.

I cherish my life and do my best to enjoy it as much as I can, because I know that's what they would want for me, but it is very hard to be without them both and to face daily life without their support and encouragement and having them to chat to. I still chat about my day to their pictures at home and can hear in my head what their answers would be and I do believe in an afterlife so also believe we will see eachother again one day, but life is hard without their being here.

As I say, the painful grief that you feel in those first few months and years does dull to an ache that you wake up with every day, but the sadness and the missing them never really goes away. You do just learn to accept that they are gone and learn to live with that.

I think you have to actively work against letting it depress you in those early years of loss. You have to find strategies that help you not to slide into depression, which I think is very easy to do when you are grieving. One of the best ways to do this is to get out of the house as much as you can. You may feel able to let others help. Just going out to a have a coffee with someone can help, but if you don't want to be around people, I find walking in the park helps a lot. It is a beautiful and calm place to sit to try to process what has happened and gradually come to terms with it. I also found making a photo album of some pictures of my mum helped too. I also kept flowers around the house and found that a comfort somehow too. Their beauty and scent seemed to help me. Others start a memory book or jar, writing down memories of times spent with the person they have lost or just character traits and then they can dip into that when they want to relive a memory. I didn't do that, but I did and do keep a diary and write down each day how I am feeling and what i am thinking about. I do find looking back at the early entries made in those first few months after I lost my mum, that I have made progress in dealing with my grief as time has gone on and hope I still am.

We talk alot about feelings and emotions when talking about loss and grief, but I think one of the most important things to be aware of is the need to ensure you eat and drink enough when you are grieving. It is so easy to be so consumed by your thoughts that you just sit and think all day and forget to eat or drink. I even forgot to get dressed some days or to wash and didn't notice time passing until it got dark and I had to go back to bed. It is important to look after your body as you will only feel worse if you make yourself ill from lack of food or water and it is very easy to forget about such things when you have no appetite and nothing seems to matter.

So you have to work at trying to feel better,  but loss does change you, so it's no good expecting to get over it and get back to being who you were before it happened, because you never will. Your world has changed, your future will be different without that person in your life and you change and become a person you don't recognise and don't know and don't want to be, so you are on a journey not only of grief for the person you have lost, but for the person you used to be, the life you had before you lost them and the future you would have had if you had not lost them, so loss is a life-changing experience that has a huge impact on every area of your life and yourself. No wonder then, that finding your way into the new existence that you find yourself in, without that person in it, is so hard and takes so long to adjust to or that it is so painful and long a journey to reach acceptance and find a way forward.

There are lots of people here who understand and will be able to help offer useful advice and at very least, understand, Jo, so do keep talking to us. Sending you an understanding hug. Take care.  :hug: :hearts:


Offline Jo B

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Re: I feel so lost
« Reply #3 on: July 08, 2019, 12:22:51 PM »
Thank you to both you and Karena for your warm welcome, and words of support and understanding.  I came to this website as although I have support at home, and I know that I can talk with my sister, I am finding it difficult to communicate my feelings to them.  When I lost my mum my children were younger and I felt that I had to get back to 'normal' as quickly as possible, as I needed to be there for them.  Now they are older, and don't need me as much I find myself drawing into myself, which I don't want to happen.

I'm sorry that you have also suffered such losses - I know from losing mum that it doesn't ever go away, and even now 8 years on thinking about her will either make me smile, or cry and I miss her so so much.  Although losing mum was the hardest thing I'd ever gone through, still having Dad made it slightly more bearable.  Now that Dad has gone too, I'm scared it's going to take me longer to get over this, and my head is telling me that I need to be dealing with this, but the fog and tiredness stop me from moving forward.  Wish I could talk to my mum, she always knew the right words to say. 


Offline Karena

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Re: I feel so lost
« Reply #4 on: July 08, 2019, 04:42:59 PM »
I think one of the key steps forward is accepting that it may take a long time rather than being afraid of that or trying to bury it but to just accept it is the case.

If you consider a physical injury - lets say you break your legs badly, you know it will take a long time before you can even take a step  let alone run a marathon or climb a mountain and you accept that and you recognise that healing is not going to happen faster than the natural process takes but you usually have an idea of how long that will be. - At first you get lots of sympathy and you are in bed resting and you have  plaster casts and crutches so its obvious even to total strangers you are injured and in most cases they will do what they can to help as well as those close to you will. Then later you have physio and have to go through a lot of frustration to take a few steps but those first steps are a great achievement and then you fall over a few times and those falls hurt all over again and you may even go back to the beginning, but you know that is something that can happen and so you might utter some choice words about it but you accept it to be the case.
Then  you get sent home with a prescribed sheet of excercises and its up to you then to keep doing them and even when you are back on your feet you know you can walk on them to the end of the road but not the next of the end one, and again no-one expects you too and so you dont expect it of yourself  and years later to varying degrees maybe for the rest of your life, you may  still have a limp and on a bad day you still have the pain,and on a good day you look at the mountain and think i can get up there.

Grief is the same - except there are no plaster casts and crutches, no physio, no experts and far fewer people who understand, so its much easier to become impatient with yourself and think that you must be doing something wrong, you are trying to do the excercises but you still cant walk so its your fault, when actually it isnt that at all its simply that with grief the journey cannot be measured in the same way, and you cant see the mountain for the fog in your head let alone believe you will ever get up there, and thats the difference, there is no order of  healing known too an expert, no discernable targets because you dont know what the goals are any more, and no benchmarks because although there is a lot of commonality, grief is personal too you and grief for one person is not the same as the grief you felt for another so even your own experiemces are not the same as they were the last time, in fact this injury has often re kindled he pain in the older one,   and yet as a society we function by having those targets goals and benchmarks, and so we put pressure on ourselves to reach them - with the leg we can see what they are but with grief we cant - so to me being kind to yourself is about accepting that you are as injured as if physically, and that healing is a long process which may leave some scars which you will live with but you will overcome the effects of and eventually and limp up the mountain as fast as anyone with both legs intact and despite the pain - but unlike with the physical it isnt one which is decided by any convention society can lay out.