Hi, I’m so sorry for your loss. I’ve joined the community today too, because my mum died very suddenly this week, but I wanted to reply because eleven years ago, i also lost my dad who I was very close to, when I was pregnant with my first baby. He had terminal cancer, so I was prepared, but definitely not ready to let him go. My dad never wanted to talk about death or his cancer so we never had a “goodbye” type of conversation, which made things very hard afterwards, I felt a lot was left unsaid and unresolved. With a sudden death like your mum’s, and now recently mine, that is magnified - it is very hard to get your head round.
So I can only imagine how hard it must be to lose your mum suddenly when you are nearly full term, when you are at the peak of excitement about the baby arriving.
i felt I had to suppress my grief during the pregnancy because I was worried it would harm my baby in some way to feel so stressed and sad. It definitely made it harder to grieve normally. Feeling joy when the baby arrived helped in some ways but looking back, it meant I didn’t deal with my grief well. I felt everyone, and especially my husband, expected me to feel better and move on quickly because now I had a baby to focus on. I think it triggered some undiagnosed PND, and it certainly took a toll on my marriage. I muddled through my grief and it was many years before I was able to talk about my dad without bursting into tears. Eleven years on, I can say that there are times when I still miss my dad very much and tears will come again, but those are moments, not whole days submerged in unbearable grief.
I think a sudden death brings many difficulties. The lack of a proper goodbye, things left unresolved or unsaid that you regret not dealing with when you had time. Knowing that your mum wasnt ready to go, and the feeling that she was cheated out of life, that is really hard to bear.
But the real problem when someone close dies suddenly is the massive gaping whole in your life that is left behind. There is just an empty space. All the things you want to share with your mum, trivial things and happy things and difficult problems. That person you depend on for advice and comfort, just gone. I really don’t have an answer for you as I’m struggling already and it has only been a week since my mum died.
I hope you find some answers on this thread, maybe I’ll learn something too.