For me, at least, I think it tends to act as a sort of circuit breaker. When my feelings of grief started to become overwhelming I would sometimes just go numb emotionally for awhile, then start feeling again later on. Which is not to say that it didn’t sometimes hit me like a ton of bricks at times, too, because it did.
But feelings of unreality, of weirdly forgetting (like saying "Oh, so-and-so will be coming home soon - oh, wait, no that’s not going to happen), of hearing the person’s voice (in dreams or sometimes thinking you hear it in the distance), and other phenomena are fairly common, even if not commonly talked about.
A death of a loved one is enormously stressful, one of the more stressful things you can experience in a lifetime. Don’t be surprised if your brain is sometimes doing weird stuff in an attempt to cope with the situation. You’re not going crazy, and things will settle down again with some time.
I’m already familiar with the emotional numbing. I think it’s helped me take care of practical matters. It’s like an internal version of a poker face.
I’m not worried about going crazy. I’m acquainted with altered states of mind and I once caught a brief visual hallucination of a cat I’d lost and found it interesting.
With Dad there were times I had to remind myself that our relationship involved two people directly and three onlookers most of the time (and Mom, directly hostile to us communicating with each other); yeah it’s true there’s things I wish we’d talked about, but it’s also true that whenever I tried to talk about any of them with him he didn’t join the conversation.
I’ve got my grade cards. The first one from first grade says “es mimosa pero no cariñosa”, something like “she tries to get pampered but isn’t loving”. Written by the hand of a man from whom I can’t remember ever getting a hug…
I know exactly what you mean about an internal poker face.
I felt like if I let go I would die from the feelings of loss, regret and memories. So many memories. It was suffocating.
After that stage, I just couldn’t shut up talking about my Daddy. I still catch myself up when I talk about him. It makes others uncomfortable.
So, I think about him. Alone. Inside my head. With only my own counsel.
I’m better. But, man oh man, it was difficult getting here.
Take care of yourself. Eat and sleep as well as you can. Love your cats.
I wish you peace.
I totally feel this. I lost my mother in January. Shortly afterward, I watched the first episode of the Lincoln Rhyme TV series, and I thought, “Mom would like this show; I should tell her about it… aw, shit.” I still catch myself making mental notes of things to tell her next time I talk to her.
Thing is, it happens with my Dad, too, who’s been gone for 10 years. I’ll see a car he would like or something, and think of him. But instead of being a bitter reminder that he’s not here to see it, it becomes a nice memory of him and usually makes me smile.
I don’t know how long that transition took, and it certainly wasn’t like flipping a switch. You’ll have good and bad days. You’ll never forget your mom, but time will soften the blow.
Is resentment something that sometimes crops up? Her death has made me look back at her life and her parenting and I’m starting to perceive her possible codependency as having been harmful parenting. There’s a part of me that feels better now.
9 months on, it feels strange and horrible to say but I’m glad she died. I’m trying to make sense of our relationship and what she may have been dealing with but it’s been an exercise in frustration so far.