:hug:I dont think your mum will be angry with you -anger at the world though is part of grief as well - she will understand you are grieveing too but its hard to see beyond your own grief sometimes - and your own grief even when its for the same person will always be just that - your own.
Its really difficult to explain but i will try.
All grief is equally devastating, but even when we are grieveing for the same person that grief can affect us in different ways depending on what our relationship was with them - and absolutely when its a parent our lives are emptier we miss them and fear for our future without them in it. With a partner we experience all that too - its daily -and often the smallest things that hit hardest - if your parents were retired chance are they spent almost all their time together and in a way its those daily small things that are so much harder to come to terms with.
As we get older we watch as our children grow and leave home and then try and find things to fill that empty nest and when we have one, that stuff involves our other half because its our joint nest.Of course we still want to be there for our children and be part of their lives but also recognise they have their own life just as we did when we were younger. -we also recognise of course that life is fragile and wont continue for ever - we know we are more than half way through - and it also speeds up - it doesnt of course, a year is a year, but it feels like it does - remember when you were a child and felt like it was forever from one birthday until the next - ask a child how old they are and they will tell you in divisions of the year - if you tell some-one that child is 4 the child will correct you and say no i,m 4 and half - we dont do that as adults because it isnt as long in our minds until our next brithday. That speeding up continues as we get older so we make plans for retirement and fitting in as much as we can -knowing even subconsciousely that there may be a reason why we cant do something next year so we need to do it this year - but even knowing that, while we make those plans we dont really think about doing any of it on our own.
When we lose them its not just those big plans we cant hold on too - we miss them constantly, find ourselves making two cups of coffee in the morning,because thats what we have always done then bursting into tears when we realise that there it is right in front of us the coffee they will never drink - we cant bear the empty house yet cant bear life outside it either, and the last thing we want to do is burden our children with ourselves - whether they see it as a burden or not - we do see it that way. The nest isnt just empty now it has been blown out of the tree.
As well as missing them and being heartbrocken there is also the lonliness and the fear just as it is for everyone but maybe its the fears that are different - fear that we will always be alone, the house will always be empty - when our children or friends visit its fantastic - when they leave, that emptiness crawls back out of the walls and presses down on you from the ceiling like something from a horror film you can almost see it happening you can hear the silence creeping back.
I used to loiter reading notices in the post office window - looking in closed shops, anything to avoid the moment you open the door and feel that empty fog waiting to swallow you up.
Then there is another kind of fear - physical issues - if i fall who will pick me up - who will know i am at the bottom of the stairs -if i get flu who will look after me - if i get mugged who will know i havnt got home - i was 49 and i was thinking, like i imagined a 90 year old does - suddenly those fears we consider are those of much older people, becomoe our fears. - and even though when they were alive it may have been us that tested the smoke alarm, locked the door, sorted out the bills, drove the car - there was always some-one else there - we were not soley responible for ourselves, and when we are thats a different kind of alone. I had no idea how to care for myself or who i was -because i was always some-ones grandaughter daughter mother wife and i,m still some-ones mother but they dont need me the way they used too.
Even the basics -of looking after ourselves seem pointless cooking for two or for a familly is done out of love for them, doing that for ourselves is very different,I found myself eating rice pudding out of the tin with a spoon because i just couldnt be bothered to wash up a dish - for myself yet would have hapilly have made the rice pudding from scratch and washed up for both of us without giving it a second thought weeks earlier.
Some-one else here just last week said what is the point of buying nice clothes now, and i have felt exactly like that as well - we dont just have to behave differently we feel we have become some-one else, some-one we dont know, and along the way, often some-one we dont like appears
until finally we can find some kind of peace with ourselves as we are now.
This is all something we can overcome in time but it takes a long time - everything has to change -from how we live day to day - to all those plans for two - starting from the basics how we function in our own homes - i fell down the stairs - luckilly i wasnt hurt too badly but it made me think about what if i had been - where was my phone when i fell - upstairs - how can i make sure i can call for help in future.
Then the more mundane practical - how can i survive on half the income - how can i fix the car and do not only the things i used to do but the things he did as well, then it become how can i fill that great big hole in my life - how can i do any of the things we planned or change those plans and find something else. All that on top of all the emotions is a massive life change.
Please dont imagine i am saying your mums grief is somehow worse then yours, i,m not, of course i,m not -
i,m just saying it is probably different and i am saying it based on my own experience of losing both parents and partners,and i cant speak for others, because people are all different too.
