This is my first time posting on here so don’t really know where to begin…
I am 26 years old, and have an extremely tight knit family. Growing up my safety circle was my Dad, my mom, my brother and sister and my grandparents… but apart from that I never had any kind of relationship with any extended family like cousins or aunties and uncles ect…
3 months ago today, my mom got taken to hospital for stomach bloating and died within 12 hours due to liver failure and a ruptured bowl. (The cause of death was alcohol and stress. I only recently realised the extent of moms decades of alcoholism.) With my family being as small as it is, it feels like a pillar has been removed and has impacted our lives more than you can possibly imagine.
She was my ultimate best friend, the only one who would listened to me when I cry, told me I was beautiful and how proud of me she was, but now she’s gone, I don’t feel genuinely connected to anyone and feel completely alone. My Dad is the non-emotional type, but during this time he is relying very heavy on me for emotional regulation and off-loading, but doesn’t necessarily know how to respond when I talk freely about how this loss is affecting me. He says he wants to give up, so the idea of me speaking freely about how I feel the same way feels wrong.
I feel so so so alone, and the future looks very dark and bleak. Doctors said she would recover quickly then within hours she just died… at 53… I have felt intense fear every day since she passed.
I have almost reached the point of giving up because I feel like I have to pretend every second of every day with every single person I know and pretend that I am okay, but I am not okay and its getting harder and harder to hide. I don’t want to smile, or laugh. I want to cry but feel like I am not allowed to. So now 100% of my alone time is spent crying and mourning. So i’m either pretending or crying. I can’t keep going like this…
Please, someone just tell me that this feeling goes away eventually… my mother is the first person I have ever lost and is my first experiencing death outside of family pets. the thought of ever going through this again makes me want to shut down although I understand that loss is one of the only guarantees in this life.
help me…