Oh, I am so sorry to hear about your dad and how you are feeling now.
Of course you are not over it. It takes months and years to recover any sense of stability after such a close personal loss, whatever the age of the person you lost and the manner of losing them also makes a difference. It is terrible to see someone you love in pain and to know there is nothing you can do to help and worse to know that that person will not recover. I shed so many buckets of tears before my mum died. She was in hospital and there was nothing I could do to save her. Then shed buckets more after she died and went on crying for months. Almost two years on and I cry less often now as have accepted that she is gone and that I can't do anything about that, but still wake up daily with an empty feeling inside and still feel the tears bubbling up at times, even if I have got better at holding them back. You can't stop once you start.
Unfortunately, until you have been through this kind of experience yourself, it is hard to understand how devastating it is for those left behind, so I am guessing your wife has not been through such a loss yet. If she had, she would know that it takes months or years to be able to reach some level of normality again and that it is something that changes you forever. You will not 'get over it'. You will learn to live with it and accept it, but all those things you describe, the shock, the anger the pain, sadness, guilt, isolation, being an emotional wreck are all perfectly normal symptoms of grief. We all experience these feelings and it is not something that you can recover from in days or weeks. They change and vary in strength over time as you struggle to deal with daily life and the change that the loss has brought about both in yourself and your life, so that you have both bad and better days as time passes, but as you say, your emotions are all over the place, so you have times when you feel pretty ok one day or one week, then terrible the next and so it goes on. It does improve in time and the better memories start to come to the surface again as you find your way forward, but learning to live with it and with the new you it has made of you takes a long time, so don't expect it to be over, well, ever really. Your world is forever changed, so you never really do go back to being who you were before it happened. It teaches you what matters and what doesn't and it teaches you to value your time in this world, if you are lucky and to make your life as good as it can be, because life is short.
If your dad was in denial, you can't change that. You can't change that he didn't tell you he was ill. You can't change that he left a mess behind him. I think people find it hard to plan for when they are gone and that is one of things I have learned I must do for my relatives. But if he didn't, you just have to get on with clearing up the mess and I know about that too. I have spent the last two years dealing with the fall out from my mother's death. Some of it was fairly straightforward like closing bank accounts, other elements much more time consuming and difficult. The inheritance tax is complete nightmare to deal with and all this at a time when your mind can't cope with all the upheaval and pain and you can't think straight as well. I recall having to make myself visit the banks and try not to cry walking up the road and ending up in a complete panic, about six months after my mum had died, not knowing what to do or how to cope with it all.
It helps to make a plan and list what needs to be done urgently and get those things done and another list of what you can take a bit more time over and how best to deal with those things going forward on a practical basis. At least then, you can tick them off as you deal with each and feel you have regained some control over things. But doing it when you are an emotional wreck is a huge challenge and just the sort of challenge you don't want and find hard to face at such a time. So I do sympathise.
Anyway, I hope some of this helps you. If nothing more, I do at least understand how you are feeling, as many others here will too. We have all been through it ourselves. You are not alone. Keep talking to us. It does help you feel less isolated and alone.
In regards putting a brave face on it. We all do that too, as others don't know what to say or how to help, but it can help to talk to those close to you and tell them how you are feeling, so take up any offers of help that others make, even if it is just to meet up for a coffee or a drink. It helps to get out of the house and do something normal for a while. I also found walking in the park helps. It is a calm and peaceful place to sit down and try to absorb all that's happened and process it in your mind to try to come to terms with it. Revisit places you visited with your dad in happier times. That helps bring back the good memories, but don't expect this to get better very quickly. It's a long slow up and down journey, but you are not alone here.
Thinking of you.
