Hello Westy2k,
Oh dear, what a lot you have had to endure in such a short space of time. It's no wonder you are struggling. I am so sorry.
We are not experts here, just ordinary people who have been down the grief path ourselves and are still finding our own way through this terrible time. We certainly don't have all the answers, but can relate to what you describe and have experienced, as we have known those same feelings and had similar experiences ourselves. All we can do is try to give you a reference point by telling you what helped us and how we are slowly finding our own way through this terrible time.
The first thing that struck me from your post was the sentence
'It's pretty much the hardest thing I have had to go through.' I used almost the exact same words to describe the last weeks of my mum's life to my employer in an email I sent him at the time. It is exactly how I felt too. I don't think there is anything worse than watching a beloved parent slipping away from you in front of your eyes and knowing there is nothing you can do to prevent it and at the same time having to try to be strong when you are crumbling inside in order to try to help them get through those final weeks in as little distress as possible whilst trying to keep them calm and feeling loved, when you are screaming with pain and loss even before they are gone, yourself. It is an unimaginable weight on your shoulders that you wonder how you will bear and you know where it is leading and know there is no where else to go. I have never had to face anything harder either.
I recognise your harrowing description of your dad's final illness too. My mum spent her last six weeks in hospital after suffering a massive stroke due to a bad reaction between medications that the doctors had been unaware could happen, but I later found out they should have known about, so I was angry about that and about the fact that I had trusted them to know what they were doing and did not check myself that that combination of drugs was safe before this happened to her. I look back on those weeks as the weeks of hospital horror as they put her through endless xrays and tests and procedures and put tubes down her throat to feed her through her nose and did horrid tests to measure brain activity etc and remained so pessimistic in outlook, dismissing the signs of improvement that myself and my brother observed as she began to recover from the stroke. It was her heart that gave out in the end and she passed away soon after I had gone home for a short rest after spending four nights in a row with her as I felt I could not trust the night staff to look after her properly. Oddly, although it broke my heart to know I wasn't there when she died and felt guilty about that, I did feel relief that at least she wasn't suffering anymore. So I do understand the pain you felt of what your dad went through before he passed away caused you and can only imagine how hard it must have been to have to watch those last moments.
The next thing that strikes me about your story however, is that you say that after the funeral, things went back to normal. I think that is a mistake lots of people who have never experienced a close loss before make, because, as you indicate and I know, you don't go back to normal and never can go back to the same normal you knew before it happened. You are left with a new 'normal' that you would not have wanted and do not know what to do with. Birthdays, happy days in the past, become tinged with sadness and pain, because the person you have lost is no longer there to share them. Their own birthdays become days to take flowers to the cemetry and fight back the tears and recall sadly the last happy one you spent with them. New anniversaries stick in your mind and become days you dread; the first day your lost loved one fell ill; passed away; was buried etc. Normal holidays like Christmas and new year that everyone around you is celebrating and that you would have looked forward to in the past, become hard to face and hard to get through and painful days to bear that you dread arriving and don't know how best to deal with. In short, the world is turned on it's head and nothing is ever as it was again and neither are you. It's a new existence and a different life and new 'normal', where you have to build a new life for yourself and get to know the new you this terrible experience has made of you. You have to be gentle and patient with yourself as you do that and gradually work at finding ways to combat the pain you have inside you all the time. It can be done, but you do have to work at it. It doesn't get better on its own.
I found lots of little strategies that help me. I found it helped to have flowers around to remind me there were still beautiful things in the world and things worth living for. I found it helped to walk in the park and sit on a bench in that calm lovely place to help me feel calm and try to process all that had happened. It helped to see the benches that people had placed there in memory of those they had lost with their messages of love and remembrance on them and, at Christmas, often with little bunches of flowers left on them too, no doubt by the people who still remembered and missed and loved them still so many years later. It helped me to know that that love does not die and that people do find ways to live with loss and keep moving forward in a positive way.
The other thing I have learned is that you don't get over loss. You can't 'move on'. Instead you find ways to move forward; to learn to accept what has happened and you have to work at building your new life in your altered circumstances. In your case, with a disabled mum and sister to worry about, that will be harder for you. I am on my own, so I only have me to worry about now, but after my dad died 34 years ago, I remember the fear, anxiety, panic even of knowing me and my mum were on our own now. I have a brother, but he is married and lives quite a distance away, so we didn't see him very often. My mum suffered from a heart condition all her life, so I knew I would have to be the one to help her from then on; take her to hospital appointments; look after her in the middle of the night when she was unwell etc. It was daunting and I remember going into the garden, shortly after my dad had died, to work out what I was going to do and accepting, at that moment, that this was going to have to be my role from then on and that I would not be able to live with myself in later years unless I knew, looking back, in the future, that I had done my best to do that for the rest of her life. So I had a plan. I used that strategy again when I lost my mum.
Like you, i went through a time of not feeling like life had any meaning anymore. I think that is the shock of losing someone and your world being turned upside down and I also knew that I wasn't going to feel any better unless I worked at it. I had good days and bad ones for about six months after she died, culminating in a week of complete panic when I could not stop crying and felt in a complete panic about the future. I knew I had to do something, so I started by making a plan, as I did after dad died. I made a list of longer term goals and shorter term priorities I had to deal with. That helped me feel I had some control over my life again and almost two years on it is still standing me in good stead. I also knew I needed to do something to get me out of the house and help me engage with life again in some way, otherwise I was just sitting at home getting more and more dragged down by my grief and just going through the motions at work and my life was empty, so I joined a class in a subject my mum had loved too and that was the best thing I could have done. I still go regularly now. It took me out of myself, got me out of the house a couple of times a week, made me think about something else for couple of hours a week and gave me something to look forward to. I made a few new friends there who understood how I was feeling having gone through losses themselves and that made me feel less alone too. And I had some fun, which counterbalanced the misery I was feeling and gave me some relief from the pain I was in and still does.
The other thing that has helped was to make a photo album of pictures of my mum, so I had something to look at to evoke better memories of my time with her and to keep a journal of my thoughts and feelings each day. That's something you might try. I don't know, but wonder if you felt better at all after writing your story here. I find the act of writing things down helps you work out your own feelings and gets them out of your system a bit. It's worth a try.
I do know the impatience you feel with your wife and your dog. I think these are normal parts of grief. I remember feeling very impatient with people's petty concerns at work and just wanting to shout at them that these things don't matter in comparison to having been bereaved and had your life fall apart around you and yourself fall apart inside. But people don't understand until they have been through it themselves. So if your wife is trying to help, try not to push her away. It does help to talk and you shouldn't be afraid to talk to her. It will help you both, I think. You have to treasure those close to you because now you know what loss is and how you will likely feel if ever you lose someone else and know that you did anything less than make every moment with them precious and as good as it could be whilst you still had the chance.
I think perhaps you are right to put off the next round of ivf until things are a little better and they will get better, if you work at it. IVF is stressful enough without the added strain of trying to deal with grief at the same time and that is what you are doing. You are simply grieving.The anger, the feeling that life has no meaning anymore, the fear of acknowledging and talking about what you are feeling, they are all symptoms of grief and we all go through them. You are not alone.
Grief counselling can help, and there are no expectations or demands on you for giving it a try. Your wife is right and it is probably worth a try. It wasn't for me, so I didn't try, but I have always been quite independent and preferred to find my own way to deal with things, so in a way, the class I go to is what I look on as my therapy. I have a bit of a joke with that with some of the other people who go and use it as their therapy session too! We dance, by the way. I go ballroom and latin dancing. My mum loved dancing but for many years was too breathless to do it due to her heart condition, so now I feel like I am doing it for both of us and that she would approve. When I go out, I say to her picture, 'come on mum, you come too, you'd enjoy it!' Good job there's no one there to hear! They'd probably think I was nuts, but it feels ok to me.
And that's the thing. You have to find things that help you and work to make yourself feel better and sometimes you will succeed and sometimes you won't. There will be good days and bad, but with a journal, you can read over how you were feeling this time a month or a year ago and see that you have made progress. Acceptance is the key, I think. Once you have accepted that this awful thing has happened and that you are never going to put it behind you and you are living in a new and different existence, you can find ways to make that work for you and to be able to live with it. The person you have lost will always be in your heart and in your memories, so they will never really leave you and at times when you have some kind of dilemma, you will still be able to hear in your head the advice they would have given you, so you will never really lose them. You will find ways to take them forward with you into your future and the lesson to learn is that you still have your life and still have other loved ones around you that you need to cherish while you can. You also have a life to live so that you will have some interesting things to tell the one you have lost when you eventually meet again.
It is a difficult journey with ups and downs from day to day, but slowly it gets easier. The other thing you learn is that living with it is something you will be learning to do for the rest of your life and that the life you had before it happened and the you you were then will never be as they were again. Grief and loss reach into every corner of your life and yourself and change everything for ever going forward and change you, so it is a period of adjustment and it is hard, so it takes effort and trial and error to find your way forward.
There is no time limit and no right way or wrong way to deal with it. Alcohol does not help. Crying does. Talking does. Planning does. Dwelling on the last days and weeks doesn't. Acceptance helps. Time helps. Walking amongst nature helps. Thinking helps as long as you are processing what you have experienced and not drowning in all the misery of it. It does get better, but you have to be patient with yourself and with those around you as you work through it. Counselling and support groups can help, but it's ok if they don't too. You just have to try and find what works for you.
Keep talking to us here, if it helps. We are here for as long as you need us. You are not alone. We do understand here.
Good luck, Westy2K. Sending you an understanding hug.
