Hi Mizzy,
I really dislike that phrase 'move on'. It's so cold and unfeeling. Besides, how do you 'move on' when your life has been thrown into turmoil and turned upside down? And you certainly can't do it within the space of a few weeks. It will be two years since I lost my mum in October and thirty four years since I lost my dad and I still don't feel like I have moved on from either loss. I still talk to my mum and dad's pictures each day and tell them about my day. Sounds a bit mad perhaps, but it still seems like a normal thing to do to me, to keep on talking to them. They may be gone from this life, but they are not gone from my consciousness and I still think of them and miss them every day.
From dreams I have had, I feel as if they have sadly moved on to the next phase of existence, whatever that may be, but for myself, I tend to look at my life as going forward, not moving on. We don't ever really recover from a close loss. We will never be the person we were before it happened and our world will never be the same either. Everything is different and we just have to look for ways to make it better for ourselves; find things that help us get through each day; make our lives work for us; give us some pleasure in life and reasons to keep going. I think it takes time to work out what those may be, but as time passes, you do find yourself looking at how you can fill your time in ways that still make life meaningful and give you something to look forward to. It's a new phase of our existence too, so you have to work out what you want that to be like and start to work on creating it.
It is still early days for you Mizzy. I think Charlotte has summed up well all the things to try that might help best at this stage, so I would endorse that. It is a slow process to find your way into this new life that you did not ask for or expect to be faced with, so just take it slowly and look on it as an evolving process. You will probably never 'move on', because you will never stop missing the person and the life you have lost, but you have to move forward into the next phase of your life whether you like it or not, so you have to work out how to do that and do it without leaving the person you have lost behind, because, even though they are gone, you can't do that either. They will always be in your heart and your head, so you have to take them with you into that new life. I think that is as it should be anyway. You will never forget them, so how can you leave them behind? I think so many people, especially if they have not been through it themselves, just don't understand this, but you can move forward, slowly and with difficulty. It will be a matter of trial and error as you find out what helps and what suits you, but it can be done.
I think the loss of a father is a different experience to the loss of a husband, so I am not surprised to hear that you say your daughter seems to be coping well. She may not be coping as well as you think. I remember when my dad died, I felt I could not talk about it for a long time or talk about him. I wasn't much help to my mother at the time really, as she felt she needed to talk about him and I found it too painful, so we each had to find our way forward ourselves. Time did improve that and we were able to talk about him more easily in the years that followed. Outward appearances though do not necessarily reflect what is going on inside, so it might be worth trying to talk to one another about your differing experiences of the same loss.
I think we all put on a bit of a 'front' after a loss and try to appear that we are doing better than we are and others willingly accept that, as people find it so hard to know what to say to someone who is newly bereaved. They feel embarrassed and lost for something to say to us, so we tend to say we are OK when we are not to save them the trouble. I don't think you do ever get over it. You just learn to live with it and you move forward in your own life, because you don't have a choice, but I don't think you 'move on'. It is always there in your consciousness, you just learn to get through the day with it there.
At least we here understand that, Mizzy. Talking does help, so keep talking to us.
