what's wrong with me?

[minnababy]

it's one year and two months since i lost my mum. everyone seems to think that's long enough, everything should be back to normal again. i don't even know what normal is anymore. i'm still waiting for her to walk back through the front door. that hope never goes away. she was 55. not old enough to die. i was 19. not old enough to lose her. i'm not old enough now either, to live without her. i'd still choose dying over living right now, if i had a choice. there are still nights when i cry myself to sleep. still times when i play what happened over and over in my head. everyone who promised they'd be there for me at the start, either never really was, or stopped being after a few months. i hate how everything went back to normal for everyone else so damn quickly, and i guess they just assumed i'd be the same too. i have no-one. okay, so i have friends, my boyfriend, my brother, some extended family miles away. but basically, i'm all alone because i can't talk to a single one of those people. i tried, at first. but they made me feel so awkward. it's got to the stage where i physically CAN'T talk about how i feel. i assume everyone therefore thinks i'm okay now, but i'm still in pieces. my mum was everything. i'm holding back tears as i write this, and just thinking about how much i miss her hurts in my chest. i can't think about her and breathe at the same time. she was everything. i didn't know losing her would be so isolating. even my little brother seems to be dealing with this a lot better than me. he seems to be getting on with his life, dealing with things, people told me i had to be strong for him cos he needed me to be and i tried, i really did. but now i'm the one still pretending i'm okay, like everyone wants me to. i've got so good at pretending. my mum was the only one who could look at me and know i was lying when i told her i was okay, when really i wasn't. now there's no-one. there have been times when i've had to fight myself not to swallow bottle fulls of pills, i have to fight thoughts that i want to die too. when i told my brother i wanted to die he said 'people who want to die have bigger problems than you'. seriously. did we go through the same thing? i suppose he was a bit more sheltered, the day she died my mum's friend ushered him into the living room, he didn't see her how i saw her that day, but he was 17 i was 19 was there really that much difference? i've always resented that. i saw things he didn't. maybe i should be feeling better after a year, but i'm not. all i've learned is how to completely internalise everything i feel, because it's the only way to deal with it. i can't even talk about my mum, it shocks me how easily everyone else talks about her, everytime they mention her i feel like i've been stabbed. i don't understand. if i'm telling a story and i need to say 'my mum did whatever', my head automatically changes it into 'we did this' or whatever. it even hurts to write it. i just want to go to sleep and never wake up, i don't want to deal with this anymore. my grandma died in 2006, my mummy in 2007 and now my grandad is really ill and i'm scared he's going to die too, is this how it's going to be now, i'm going to lose someone i love every year? i hate having no-one, i hate being alone, i want my mum back. it feels like there's something wrong with me cos nothing's got any better for me, i still feel like my heart's been ripped into pieces.

[canadiangirl]

Hi I'm new here and was just checking some of the posts when I came across yours. I recently lost my dad in a horrific accident. I was with him until the end. Even though I'm 37 I still share the exact feelings as you do..it's like everyone has moved on already and just expect me to as well. I don't know when or if we ever really will move on or be normal again but I do truly believe it is going to get better with time.

I wish I could give you some life changing advice but I can't. All I can tell you is you are normal and everything you are feeling and thinking is normal..there is nothing wrong with you please continue to seek others who can at least listen if not offer anything else. From my reading of these boards there are alot of loving caring people who will try to support you as best they can.

Hugs.

 

[alysonm]

Madi, I know. I know. It's been a little over a year for me. I miss her so much today. I am fighting back tears as I read your post and now as I am typing this. I don't understand. I don't know how to live when she is dead. My mom was 56. I can't breathe and talk about her at the same time either. It's like I feel like I'm going to have a panic attack everytime I think about how she's dead. I have pictures but I hate looking at them, because it's that stabbing can't catch my breath feeling. I wish I lived near you, so we could support each other. I don't understand how a year has gone by, I really can't fathom it. Seriously. A year. Where did that time go? Crying myself to sleep. I seriously remember very little about the first few months after she died. What I do remember is how she looked dead. I didn't see her die, I just saw her after in the mortuary, a lot of times when I clsoe my eyes I see her how she looked that first time I saw her after she died. So stiff and all puffed up and swollen and kind of blue. I hate that image, ,i hate how it's like burned into my brain. don't take the pills, I'm tempted too, I even save them for the right moment. Because it seems so much easier to leave and be with her. I don't know how not to be this sad. Because what the **** matters now, because the one person in our lives that truly mattered the most is dead right? I'm just really sorry Madi. I don't want you to feel as bad as me. I want to hold you close and tell you everything is going to be alright, but the thing is is I don't know myself if it is ever going to be alright again. I guess just try to survive. That's all I can do at the moment. Survive. Barely.

[minnababy]

canadiangirl; thank you for your reply. i'm sorry about your dad. it does feel like everyone else moved on incredibly quickly, even within the first few months i constantly felt like i was the only one who was still hurting. i still do. and everyone does expect you to get over it so quickly, or at least they make you feel like you should. and no matter how many people tell me i have to get through it at my own pace, just take one day at a time, it will never effect me as much as the people who threw cliched 'life goes on' type comments at me after the first few months had passed, who told me i was 'lucky' when i got extra time to do an essay. i hate how people don't understand unless it's happened to them too, and everyone i know has both their mother and father still alive, so there's no way they can even begin to comprehend.

alyson; i can't look at pictures either. in first year all my bedroom walls were covered in photos, now i can only bear to put up the ones of my friends. it hurts too much otherwise. i didn't see my mum die either. i saw her right before, her lips were blue and she was rolling around and kicking and she wouldn't open her eyes, and i was trying to hold the oxygen mask on her face and her breathing sounded terrble. then they took her away in an ambulance and told me i couldn't go with her, and then when we got to the hospital they told us she'd died in the ambulance (and i will always feel guilty that she died all alone). then they wouldn't let us see her til the next day, in the mortuary. her hair looked different. the doctor told me she'd just look like she was sleeping. she didn't. her face was different and she wouldn't wake up. that's how i remember her. how she looked the day she died and then how she looked in the mortuary. i don't think i actually would swallow pills, at least i hope not. but sometimes it is a massive struggle against myself not too. i sit and look at them, fighting with myself.  i just want to get out of this world. every time i think about her i can't catch my breath properly and it hurts in my chest. i have to go back to uni soon and i don't want to. my last year. i don't want to graduate without her there. i don't know how to stop feeling like this. i have no idea how my brother has. i mean, i'm sure he's sad sometimes but i don't know how he's got out of this...blackness. i wish we lived near each other too. i don't know a single person here who lost a parent when they were young. i can't believe a year has passed either. it seems like no time at all. i can't even remember her voice anymore. i'm surviving, just. but i don't want to.

[need2talk]

All, Your pain reflects mine too. 10months next week. How have I lived in the world without her? How has everything carried on? I have only just started to process the loss into my life these past few weeks i think. Photo's have become out of bounds for me too, they just bring on a breathless pain and longing, a sense of the unreal. I hate that I found my lovely mum, lying on the floor of her kitchen, just dead. gone forever. It couldn't be, She was only 63. She didn't look asleep either. I think it'd only been an hour or two, I kissed her and she didn't respond. I tried to put a blanket on her, I gave her a pillow. She wouldn't wake up. She was warm, but her arms were red. I think the mortuary the following day was worse. I remember just staring at a mark, kind of a dent, on her forehead and  I was scared they had hurt her in the mortuary. Hideous....I hate that I have these images burned into me, the flashbacks are of the worse kind.

The shock of her sudden death, kind of masked the grieving. That's only just begun. I'm dreading her birthday, November 1st, we always made such a fuss of her. Then November 24th will be the anniversary of her death, 6th December her funeral and last, but not least, Christmas to face again...I barely remember last year.

I don't think my life will ever be the same. I don't want to stay here, immersed in grief, but I don't know how to move on.... what the f*** is a 'process' anyway? 

[alysonm]

Need2talk_ I completely understand what you mean when you say you've only just begun to process the loss because of the whole shock of it all. My mom's death was also sudden and unexepected. And I think that this year will really be like the year of firsts because the first year was shock. Ugh. I miss her a lot today too. I hate this I hate this I hate this. What the **** is up with the whole process thing about grieving? I'm still in the shock and denial, maybe the depression and the anger all at one fucking time. And every book every counselor everyone makes it seem like it's this neat pretty process that everyone follows but it's not, it is so fucking not. It's messy and it hurts, and it never stops, it never let's you take a break, a rest from the fucking pain. I'm pretty fucking mad at grief right now. I'm mad at death, I"m mad at God, if there is such a thing. I'm mad at my mom for having the audacity to go and die on us when everything was fucked up anyways. I AM SO MAD today! sorry about the swearing.