In my last article, I decided that rather than writing about mental illness in general, I would write about the personal experience of the recent death of my mother.
I have written many articles on dealing with grief and you can find links to them at the end of this article. As in the first article in this latest series, I have decided to write about my own feelings on the death of a parent and how I coped and am still coping with this major milestone in my life.
Losing a parent can be difficult, and the degree of difficulty varies in terms of how close one was to that parent. Paradoxically, the more difficult the relationship, the more difficult it is to get past the death of that particular parent. I have already written articles on this puzzling aspect of human nature and again, you can find the links to these and many other links on similar topics below.
But regardless of the nature of the relationship between you and your deceased parent, as with any death of any close friend or relative, it takes a minimum of one year to even go through the motions of the initial grieving process. It is important not to put too much pressure on yourself to be “normal” as throwing yourself into work or other means of distraction does work – but only up to a point. Dealing with grief immediately is akin to the old maxim “a stitch in time saves nine,” as the saying goes. Otherwise you might find that one day you may experience enormous grief and sadness a decade down the track that was buried deeply and too quickly at the time of death.
So, in a relatively short period of time I have had to go through the milestones that must be gone through in the first year of a person’s death. So far I have had to deal with my parents’ wedding anniversary, which we always celebrated. Just recently in the week before Christmas, it would have been my mother’s birthday. Then of course, we have just had our first Christmas without my mother, a woman who, by her very title, I know no life without.
We had her famous Christmas pudding for dessert as we have done all my life and likely many years before I was born, as it was her classic dish. In the coming year, I have Mother’s Day to traverse and then my birthday without the woman who gave birth to me.
But I am one of millions around the world who have just had a Christmas without their parent. Life goes on, as it must, and memories last. And the Christmas pudding is her legacy to us all on that greatest of all family days. I will grieve, but I look ahead to the future that I am making for myself and my mother’s descendants. And that starts in the New Year with the final edit over the next few months to my new book on Narcissistic Personality Disorder. A dream of which my mother would have been so proud.
Related articles: Coping with Death