I’m so sorry to read this.
As many people have said…grieve in your own way. There is no right or wrong. There is only how you cope. Take it slow, feel what you feel. Talk to people if/when you feel like it.
Talk to us. We’re good listeners. 
-D/a
I’m so sorry for your loss. You have my condolences.
You know, everyone reacts differently to the death of a loved one. I know that in my case, when my mom died (exactly 10 months ago yesterday, actually), my half-sister (Mom’s other daughter) cut off all contact with me. Why? Because she said I didn’t cry, or show any emotion when mom died, or at her funeral. Apparently, that made me, in her eyes, ‘one of the devil’s people’. Her words. Not mine. :rolleyes:
So, just take every day as it comes. May you find peace.
My mom died on march 12th of this year at the age of 67. I’m 32 and certainly thought I’d be much older when it would eventually happen. Like you, I had a unorthodox relationship with my mom, albeit loving. My mom, who luckily only lived about 3 hours (driving) away, had complained of feeling “under the weather” for several days. I got a call from my older brother 3 days before she died that she had been admitted to the ICU for pneumonia, but that she was doing fine. I reached out to her immediately and, based on her labored speech, decided to take time off of work and go be with her. By the time I got there she had taken an unfortunate turn for the worse. I remained by her side for those last couple of days and held her hand during her last moments. I have cried more in the last few weeks than I did in the couple of months following her passing. It seems that my emotional journey continually gains momentum. I didn’t cry at her funeral and I felt like there was something wrong with me.
Don’t feel guilty for being honest with your feelings. The worst mistake anyone can make when they mourn is worry about what they are ‘supposed’ to be feeling. Each person grieves in their own way. You are entitled to yours. Don’t let anyone tell you different, or try to persuade you to feel something you don’t.
My relationship with my father was a little weird, too. He and I never really talked that much, since with both had quiet, introverted personalities. When he passed, I mourned and grieved. He was my father, and I loved him.
But I never really had a crying session with anybody, or a groundbreaking moment when I realized that one half of the people directly responsible for my existence was gone. I just wanted people to stop bloody asking me how I was doing. Thankfully, I was in high school, and most of the students either understood, or were too afraid to brooch the subject with me. So I only had to worry about it when I was with close family(It didn’t help that my aunts kept jumping when I walked into the room, thinking I was my father. I’m a spitting image of my old man.)
This is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about. When my mom died there was something that each of my kids wanted that just said ‘Grandma’ to them, and not one of those things had any intrinsic value. Enjoy your little Kitty Eyes.
Ah, Infovore, I’m sorry to hear this. I hope you and your dad will continue to do fine and to grieve however you need to.
Jagwasher, nice post. I’m sorry for your loss as well.
This weekend we went down to the hometown for my mom’s memorial service. My dad had asked me if I wanted to take anything back with me–he’d been going through some of her stuff and planned to donate a lot of it to charity or have a garage sale, but he wanted me to take what I wanted first. As I think I mentioned, my mom and I didn’t really share tastes–she liked dolls and teddy bears, ornate jewelry (mostly rings), fake fur coats (she had three, of which I think she might have ever worn one), angels, and lots of things with no other purpose than to display them–so there wasn’t much I wanted to take. I had specifically mentioned a few things I remembered that I might want and he had found some of them already–a music box, a little bottle that used to hold violet perfume that I liked to snifff when I was little, a couple of specific pieces of jewelry, a few records I remember her playing a lot, my old school stuff, things like that. We spent part of the day going through drawers and closets, and every once in awhile I would see something I remembered and ask if I could have it, and he always said I could. I think he was happy that some of the stuff was going to end up with me instead of going off to charity. I didn’t take much, really–everything I picked out took up two small boxes. There were photo albums that I wanted to pick through but there just wasn’t time–we were only down for the day. He promised to keep them for me.
He mentioned that he’d found my baby book and asked me if I wanted that. I’d remembered seeing it briefly a few times in my childhood but never paid much attention to it. I added it to the box and last night I found some time to go through it. I didn’t expect to be hit with such a wave of nostalgia. She had kept that book up, in her nearly-illegible scrawl that I’d long ago learned to decipher, through about 1992. She’d saved clippings, written notes, saved school papers and photos…the book was old and stuffed so full the bindings were breaking. As I carefully paged through it, I recalled things that I thought I’d forgotten forever.
I’ve never been the type to dwell too much on the past. There aren’t many eras of my life that I look back and examine–I tend to look to the present or the future. But paging through that old book I remembered people, places, and events that I’d long forgotten. They came back to me surprisingly easily, memories jarred by a few scrawled words here and there (Mom wrote a lot but not in depth–just a little bit on each thing. But it was enough.) It amazed me how much she’d noticed–she’d written down my friends’ names, the things I was into at the time…she lamented the fact that I was a tomboy (“hope that’s over soon! Haha!”) (sorry, Mom…) and joked about the fact that I was so sure I would never have kids (heh–I was right about that one, too!) but throughout the whole book there was this underlying thread of just how proud she was of me. It used to embarrass me as a kid–she’d tell anybody who’d listen how smart I was, how talented…and she did exaggerate. I guess that’s a mom thing. But reading it, I remembered her as she was then–younger, with a wicked sense of humor, heavily involved in her own Eastern Star and my dad’s Masonic activities–not as she’s been in the past few years when her memory was going and she could barely get around. It was kind of amazing, having all that right there in front of me. In a way I’m glad I wasn’t born in the days when a child’s every movement is chronicled on video tape. All I have is photos and written records and newspaper clippings…but it’s enough.
And then I got to the end of the book and I had to laugh: In the section on “Children” (as in, my children) she had written cheerfully, “They just got two motorcycles, and a Nissan 240SX.” And under “Grandchildren,” she added, “I think they plan to get a couple of Harley Davidsons soon.” It amused me that she had finally come to terms with the fact that her grandchildren were either going to be on two wheels or four paws.
Sorry, kind of rambling here. I still don’t think it’s quite sunk in that Mom’s gone, but it’s a little closer now.
Now that my father’s gone (I don’t miss him), it’s a lot nicer visiting my mom . . . but at the same time I’m more keenly aware of the fact that someday she will be gone too. My sister will be a blubbering mess, and I’ll have to be the one to handle everything. Fortunately my mother knows this and is a good planner, so she keeps me up to date on her affairs. Still . . .
I have this song in my head now:
A mother’s love’s a blessing,
No matter where you roam,
Keep her while she’s living,
You’ll miss her when she’s gone.
Love her as in childhood,
Though feeble, old, and gray,
Oh you’ll never miss a mother’s love
Till she’s buried beneath the clay.
I’m so sorry -
Everyone deals with such a loss in their own way. Be kind to yourself. Time helps.
Infovore - The baby book thing is sweet. As the 5th kid in 6 years, my mother never got beyond page 3 of mine. Although when I bought my first horse, my father showed the picture around the office saying “this is my grandcolt”.
StG
Sorry for your loss. Don’t worry about not being able to express grief. It can sometimes take years for it to finally surface, usually sparked by a completely unrelated event. In my case, it was the recent passing of our cat. It just triggered the grief that I held back for my mother’s death 20 years ago. You owe apologies to nobody.
Chefguy, I saw (and commented on) your thread about your kitty–your beautiful stories about her made me cry. What you said here reminded me of another reason I feel a little guilty. In 2005 my beloved little 5-year-old Russian Blue, Meep, got lymphoma and we ended up having to have her put to sleep after 8 months of chemotherapy. I lost it then. I cried more for that cat than I have so far for my mom. I still cry sometimes when I think about her. And then I feel guilty because I’m showing more emotion over a cat than over my own mother. Emotions are weird like that sometimes, I guess.
I am so sorry for your loss.
I am very sorry for your loss.
I’m sorry for your troubles, Infovore.
Do not feel guilty.
Death effects each of us differently.
Thank you for sharing your baby book with us. Take care of yourself.
The baby book made me tear up. What a neat memory.
Don’t worry about crying or not; I find it takes me much longer to get to a point where I’m crying about people than about pretty much anything else.
Hang in there.
The pet was up front and personal. You had to deal with that firsthand and with no interlocutor for your grief (such as distance or a relative). It was the same for me: I was in Romania when my mother passed, and it just seemed so remote and unreal.
Sorry for your losses, Infovore and Robot Arm.
Dad died in 2000; I’ve recently been doing some much-delayed housework and got to handle the few keepsakes of his that I have. His ashtray (there were many ashtrays in my parents’ house, but that was The One Ashtray), a box of high-quality drafting implements (for some reason I never thought of Mr Accountant as any kind of draftsman - but he took draftsmanship electives in high school and business school, something I hadn’t known until we were going through his drawers after his death; I’ve got 8 years of draftsmanship classes) and a ballpoint pen he got as a gift from a coworker who considered him as a mentor and who has in turn mentored me. What’s got meaning for you, like how you mourn, is something that’s personal to you and which can not be ordained.
Holy crap, I felt it could have been me writing your post, but just about my Father’s (instead of Mother’s) death. January 2010. It was devastating and crushing, I will spare you the details (and I have to confess that the thought of relating it all here is a little overwhelming)- but I never had a movie style breakdown. I was waiting for something- some kind of catharsis, but it never really came. Once in a while I suddenly think of how I will never see him again, think of all the great things he did for me, old times when he seemed a permanent, eternal fixture i my life, and I will be moved to tears. But not bawling and howling in a corner like in the movies. Just quiet calm tears.
I actually wondered if I was somehow ‘not processing’, since I never really had a good big messy cry. So I asked a psychologist friend if he thought that that cathartic breakdown (and the accompanying implication that it is a necessary part of ‘processing’) wasn’t a myth largely created by Hollywood and he said that the thought it was. In his estimation, most people DIDN’T experience that cathartic meltdown.
However and wherever you find yourself is your way of dealing, he said. Or something to that effect.
As empty and trite as this might sound, I am very sorry for your loss.