Question but no sugar coating

Okay

Ask your therapist if you have one for a referral to a grief support group. I’m very serious. If you don’t, then contact a local hospice and ask for recommendations. It helps to know you are not alone

Yes, it’s too early to be over it. Because you’re never over it. But you want your life back ? Then get some help.

Everyone grieves very very differently. I was not close to my parents at all, for, well reasons. As a child I was my daddy’s girl. My mother died when I was 26. My father when I was 67. She was 56. He was 93. I may have only seen him once a year or so, but I still grieved.

We all grieve in our own way and on our own time line. Do not compare your progress to others, it is not the same. Take your time and like @Kyeh and @Cerridwyn said maybe find a grief counselor or a support group where you can express your thought and feelings.
You got this, we are all here for you

And, of course, Charliedoggo offers cuddles and pb treats!!

@Kyeh and @Cerridwyn are right - your best path to healing is to find a competent professional. It’s not an admission of weakness or failing on your part. It’s a recognition that this is a path that is unclear and you need a guide just like you would if you were visiting a foreign country where you don’t speak the language.

I’d also suggest you might want to discuss including your boyfriend in the counseling (or some portion of it). I’ll just say that while he may not communicate it well or even particularly compassionately, he’s probably scared he’s losing you because of this and he doesn’t know how to handle it. If he didn’t love you, he’d likely just walk. Don’t give up on him. He could be a huge asset in your own healing, but he’ll need guidance as well. You could actually come out of this a stronger couple.

And - be careful of advice from strangers on the internet…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@Star2236 as others have said, grief takes time. Lots of time. It’s not that you “get over it”, it is more that you slowly incorporate what has happened into your life (often not as a conscious effort) without tearing you apart. What you are going through is normal, the timeline is normal, there is nothing wrong with you. You are grieving and the path you take when grieving is hard.

People who have not been though this do not understand. This society does not deal with death and dying well nor the grief that follows. My boss, not 8 days after my brother’s funeral, told me I needed to stop upsetting her staff looking so glum; that her brother had almost died so she knew how I felt. Really? Her brother lived. WTF?

Your boyfriend likely has not experienced this with a parent or sibling (or child) and so has no clue that grief is a long, hard journey that takes time, lots of time, and much of what goes on isn’t under your control. They just don’t get it because they haven’t experienced it. And don’t understand this takes a long time to learn to incorporate this into your life so that you can keep living without your grief and sadness tearing you apart.

Or if they have experienced it your grief triggers them and they don’t want to think about it so they expect you to accommodate them by keeping your grief to yourself. They expect you to keep your grief to yourself because you are upsetting “others”/them. Of course there is the rare person who understands without having had to experience that, but plenty of people don’t.

In many ways grief is an invisible disability. I am not sure that someone who has not been through this really understands on an emotional level (and for many, but certainly not all, the grief of grandparents or aunts and uncles or even cousins dying isn’t as intense or as long for reasons I am not sure of but am guessing that it is partly because grandparents, etc. aren’t part of their daily lives - it would be different if they were I’d think.) I don’t think they “get” that it is normal to struggle with grief for far longer than they think someone “should”. I don’t think they understand that compassion and empathy are needed for a long time with respect to this. They haven’t experienced it first hand and so have no real clue.

After my brother died (he was 24 and I was 26) it took me 3 months to even laugh again. I still think about his death on occasion and I can be triggered decades later. Yes when I am triggered the tears only last a few minutes but the feeling of grief is still there at that time. My father died 27 years ago. Same thing with him. Nearly failed my classes in grad school that term (and it was made worse by having to put down my cat the day after I arrived home after his funeral).

I found for about 3-6 or so months after their deaths I couldn’t accomplish anything much, get anything done in a timely manner. I was a basket case in that regards and was sort of paralyzed in that respect. By the end of year one I was feeling more “normal” but still had periods nearly every day where at least for a moment or two I’d feel the grief and often fight off the tears. By the end of year two life was far “better” on the grief front.

In both cases I would have dreams about them - in fact I had one about my dad - I was with him and talking with him - a couple of weeks ago. I sometimes would feel their presence. About 8 or 9 months after my dad’s death I had a dream where he came to me comforted me, hugged me (he was not a big hugger in life) and said good by. I woke up crying but it was comforting. As other have said you still miss them for so many different reasons many decades later - just not in the emotionally disabling way you do now.

And you can still briefly feel grief and cry (like I am doing while typing this) years later. You somehow learn how to talk about them without it triggering your grief and pain, how to tell stories about them and laugh and remember them fondly, tell stories so the generation under you knows more about their grandparent, or in the case of my niece who was 3 when her dad died, knows more about her dad. Once when I told her that her dad would be proud of her for something she did - and this was years later when she was an adult with young kids of her own - a few tears ran down her face and she said she really misses him. But there are still times, when you think about them, really think about them, that the tears flow and your pain is triggered. It is just far more briefly the further away you are from their death.

In both cases I found it took about 2 years before I didn’t think about them every single day and I still cried fairly frequently that second year. BUT I was not as falling apart after the first year. It was much easier to enjoy life, to think about them and good memories without crying. I was able to function normally again nearly all the time.

In some respects grief is like an earthquake with lots of aftershocks. Over time the periods of intense grief, sadness, tears… last a shorter period of time and those periods are further and further apart. The intensity can be as, or nearly as, intense when it hits but because it starts to last shorter and shorter periods of time it isn’t as disabling. And after a while you can talk about the person who died without having to work as hard fighting back the tears… further down the road you can talk about them without crying and being triggered. Most of the time anyway.

I am not trying to discourage you. Eventually you will start to feel happy again.but it takes time, lots of time. You won’t be carrying the heavy emotional load of grief, sadness, missing him around with you in a way that you feel like crawling into bed and pulling the covers over your head. You are currently learning how to incorporate this loss into your life in a way so that you can live again. You will never stop missing him, it just won’t be a disabling missing.

The suggestion of a grief group (or grief counseling) is a good one. There you can talk about what you are going through without judgement with people who truly “get it”. They can tell you how their journey has been and if they are further down the road than you are it gives you some idea of the path ahead. If they are newer to grief than you are you may well see how what is going on with you is changing a bit as you are learning how to pick yourself up and start moving forward again. This isn’t something you ‘get over’ or ‘put behind you’. It is something that you learn how to incorporate into your life so that eventually it doesn’t continue to tear you apart.

And you are now an orphan (My uncle, when his mom died at 99, said, “I’m an orphan. I don’t know what I am going to do”. And he meant every word of it even though is mother had suffered from dementia for years. Emotionally he relied on her being alive and being his mother even though her time for mothering him was long gone due to the dementia.

I wish you strength as you grieve. And your grief is a testament to your love for him and his love for you. Take care.

Also @Star2236, you said

I think about how I could have done better and how much I regret

I can relate to this so well and it’s so painful, but you definitely did your absolute best, under really hard circumstances. It will take time to recover from that too, but be as kind to yourself as you were to him, and allow those little breaks in the clouds where you feel happy or amused by life even though you’re still so sad. ️

Kind of the way you stay at the title of this topic and some of the things within your opening explanation make me wonder if you it’s kind of expect we might think you’re doing something wrong?

Losing a parent or somebody that close to us is incredibly consuming emotionally and mentally for so many of us

Losing a person we have cared for so intensely is also utterly consuming. I did care for a friend during his years of terminal cancer. I wasn’t the only one that I was one of a group who sort of scheduled ourselves

And when he was gone, it’s like it took me a year or something to figure out how to be alive and interact and stuff

So these terribly intense and consuming reaction or nothing unusual, although it is unique for each person

Grief is as much a physical process as it is an emotional or mental one

It affects your entire body. People are more likely to become ill or to die or to have accidents or similar things in the first couple of years because they’re so knocked out out of whack, physically, and emotionally.

In the case of losing somebody, you are terribly terribly close to your mental world is out of whack because that person was such a presence in your world and suddenly they’re gone, and you don’t know how to sort of knit your mental sense of who you are and what you’re stable touchstones are in terms of people and How you feel about things it’s all consumed by grief and also the shock of the depth of the change

In your case, probably greatly intensified by your multiple roles as family member as child and also a caregiver on a very intense level

So the intensity in the disorientation may be that much greater in your situation

Plus, there’s a thing that happens in children’s lives and their mental maps of the universe when parents die

Parents have always been there since the moment we arrived for those of us who have our parents still anyway

And so, in a sense, they have always stood between us and finality between us and eternity because there are customary assumptions that they’re mortality will come sooner than our will in most case cases

And losing a parent can create the additional shock of that sense that there’s now nothing in terms of other people nothing generational between oneself and the end of oneself or between oneself and eternity or the end of our own life

When my dad died, that was a pretty big hit for me just realizing that my generation me my peers. My friends of my generation would kind of be next in line.

That changed my perception of what human life is about in some subtle ways that are hard for me to articulate

It changed my sense of who I was

It wasn’t comfortable for a while at all. I felt very dislocated. I think it’s been years since the experience and so I don’t remember it clearly as I had awareness of it when it was pretty fresh

So you may find yourself reflecting on just these issues I don’t know if it happens to everybody or the most people, but it did happen to me

Another thing that I think is sort of common place and definitely happen to be both when my mother died, and then later when my father died

At first, the grief was just pure and searing like this mark that separated me from the rest of the world or something and that’s kind of what I felt as I went through each day I could go through the day, but I was apart from normal life in some big way And my thoughts were always about the loss and the person

Then overtime, those thoughts stepped back and became more part-time and a bit less intense although the intensity would recur in waves, I would feel left for a while and then more and sometimes the ways would come back so sharply it was like it was fresh and these could last a while

But as I began to sort of re-interest myself in normal life, I was so torn, and I felt so reprehensible in a way

Because part of me felt terrible every time I realized I didn’t think about the loss or the person for a little while or I sort of enjoyed something a little bit or something that I kind of didn’t wanna do turned out to be not too bad and I was capable of reacting a bit normally instead of just putting on a normal face

I would feel like I was betraying the person I lost in the memories because part of me was moving toward reintegrating to the world
But part of me wanted to hang on so hard to being consumed with grief because that was a way of holding on to some shred of what I have lost, which was the actual person

Sort of felt like I was betraying the memory or betraying the relationship or betraying the person by slowly starting to rejoin the world emotionally
And I was terribly torn about this

Part of me didn’t want to move forward at all, but wanted to stay immersed in the sense of acute loss and all the memories and thoughts as a way of not finally accepting that my dad was gone

I’m talking about it in a very intense way here and I didn’t really share this much with anybody at the time

But I think it’s something a lot of people feel it’s weird to start reintegrating and at the same time want to hold onto everything you felt during the loss because all those terrible feelings in a way or a mark of how precious that person was to us

And I had a lot of ambivalence about this

I never needed to resolve it by making a decision or talking with somebody about it or anything like that

Overtime it just worked itself out

Although grieving can sort of go sideways or get stuck as has been pointed out here it’s also a natural process that we have a capacity to endure and go through and be different because we went through this extreme process

And part of the process is finally accepting the totality of the loss in the here and now at least

No matter what our religious beliefs are

The practice or business of going through grief and getting to the point where at times it lifts a little bit and then feeling torn, wanting to go backwards and overtime starting to want to go forward as well

And having it when naturally, and then starting to feel resentment and fresh grief, because not only do, we grieve the person, but because our grief connects us so strongly to our awareness of the person and the loss, as our grief starts to win, we sort of grieve, our grief in a sense

Because if our grief is whining, that means we are accepting the loss

And fully accepting the loss can feel like a kind of betrayal in the beginning, although it isn’t one

Grief is a very complicated process, which is one reason why it’s so individual for every person and every relationship

But your title of this topic made me wonder if you thought we would think you were doing something wrong

And thinking that you’re doing something wrong while grieving is, I think. possibly akin to thinking you didn’t do enough while the person was alive

But you’re not doing anything wrong

This is hard for everyone who walks through it

And there is no guide or path for each individual, although we can comfort and wisdom from each other to some extent

If you believe you are stuck, then it makes sense to reach out

But don’t blame yourself for grieving if you can possibly not do so

Because it’s a natural process of the body of the mind and the soul and the emotions and a natural process of losing critical bonds when the person’s life comes to an end

Taking years to slowly heal from such a loss is not unusual or strange or in itself unhealthy

You are the best judge of whether it is time for you to possibly get a therapist or grief group

Or whether you just need to handle it as you are

But we certainly have nothing to approach you over. We have no hard terrible truth to tell you about how you’re handling it that just doesn’t even exist.

If significant others in your life, kind of don’t understand what’s going on and wish you would sort of. I don’t know bounce back and be the person they had before the loss or something.
My instinct would be to say that that person needs to educate themselves about the grieving process

Grieving is hard, but I cannot see how you are possibly in need of any critical perspective about your life from us

There’s inevitably a lot of of self blame involved in grief because there is a loss and we want to kind of find ways to find thought with ourselves for not doing enough or for not handling it properly

Just as we find shortcomings and how we treated the person when we still had the active relationship

I think fault finding of oneself is very common place in those that are grieving

It somehow makes the scale of the loss more human if we can find faults in ourselves to hold up to the light and reproach ourselves for

I did it I think many others do it

And I couldn’t help doing it and I suspect that is also common

But strictly speaking, it’s not true in the sense that finding fault with oneself is part of grieving, but that doesn’t mean one is actually a fault in any sense other than that one is not absolutely perfect about everything

Since none of us are absolutely perfect about everything we can always locate faults to magnify or focus on

Can you forgive yourself for not being perfect and let yourself grieve and can you forgive yourself for not grieving perfectly?

Do you really believe your dad would blame you for how you are grieving?

I hope he was a sort of person who would never have done anything like that

If that is true, and he would never blame you for how you are grieving then can you trust that there is wisdom in the perspective you know he would have?

Please take care of yourself

Please let other people assist you or be with you at times.