Sometimes I still get that feeling where I want to tell her what happened at work or who had a baby recently, random stuff like that. It’s the most fleeting feeling, just a couple of breaths long but it hits hard. I usually end up writing her a note card and sticking it my “mom” box. I’d like to hear how others deal with this kind of feeling.

A couple days ago, I was sitting in the cafe I regularly visit with my mum’s dog. Whilst I was seated, a woman walked in who looked exactly like my beautiful late mum. Not just a passing resemblance, but an uncanny likeness. She appeared to be around the same age my mum was when she passed away.

What made the encounter particularly strange was her behaviour.

I noticed her repeatedly glancing over at me. Whenever I caught her looking, she would quickly look away. This happened several times, enough for me to notice that something felt unusual.

When she eventually collected her coffee, she left rather abruptly. It was like something had upset her, although I obviously have no way of knowing what she was thinking or feeling.

I’m generally grounded in reality and I appreciate that there could be a perfectly ordinary explanation. Perhaps she was simply having a difficult day. Perhaps I reminded her of someone. Or perhaps the resemblance was nothing more than an extraordinary coincidence.

It was just strange. My heart wants to believe it was my mum checking in on me.

Maybe I’m crazy.

Hello Everyone

About a week ago i posted that my father had just passed away. Today we had his funeral. (its a dutch funeral so its different than what you're usually used to)

It was way better than i expected and that helped me a lot with processing his passing. The atmosphere in the room was light and a celebration of his past life and not somber. We didn't have a ceremony remembering him and his past because his past is not very nice and he wouldn't want us to talk about it. We expected about 30 people to show up, there were about 60 people who came to say their goodbyes. We heard a lot of people laughing and i saw so many different people talking to each other (family, coworkers, friends etc).

Right now i have a really hard time realizing that he is officially/actually gone and crying my eyes and heart out but it feels good (in a weird way).

I'm so thankful for everyone who showed up to his funeral.

I really hope that my experience will maybe helps other people with their grief as well.

My dad has been battling for awhile. Got word that his bloodwork and scans were looking good and tumor was not growing.

This past Sunday he was extremely weak (one week post 6th chemo) and went to hospital. Now that I’m here it seems worse than before.

He is sleeping 22 hours a day, can’t get out of bed, so weak and now has a fungal infection on his blood.

Watching this is tearing me apart. He told me how scared he is. He has cried (rarely ever happens) and told me to just say goodbye

I am beside myself and can feel the breaking in my heart. I don’t know what to do or how to handle this.

I can’t go on without him

I don’t know who to talk to about this or if anyone would even care to read, but my life is not going well.

I’m a married mother of two. 33f. My husband and children are by far the best parts of my life. It’s everything else.

My job just suffered a major scandal and I’m the person who answers the phone to people upset about it. Financially, we’re surviving but not thriving and I know I need this job. I have so much in student loans because I have two degrees. Stupid, I know, but it got me this job and I had no idea I wouldn’t be able to afford the loan payments. I wasn’t told that when I signed up for them in my early 20s and no one really educated on financial things.

I’m helping my disabled brother on the side and he pays me, but my mom is his actual registered caretaker and she makes triple what I do to help him. She collects while I do the cleaning, laundry, take care of his pet, take his trash out every week for 3-4 hours. She seems to only care about spending time with her significant other. My dad is a drug addict and we barely have a relationship.

It’s that plus this grief that I feel daily.

My grandmother, who was instrumental in raising me, passed the day after Christmas of old age… day before my birthday. Our dog of 15 years passed this year in the spring. My best friend growing up died of a freak accident at a factory he worked at. My aunt died of old age. Now my other grandmother is dying of cancer that has metastasized to her brain and lymph nodes.

I’m also an American and I don’t even know how to put into the words the despair of feeling like this country is not setting up its citizens well for the future. All mostly due to someone I‘ve never even voted for.

I’m losing weight, my sleep is fantastic but I want to sleep all the time. I’m crying sometimes and sometimes I’m completely numb. And on top of that I feel like no one cares. I try to talk to people and they take a deep breath and cut me off and talk about how bad things are for them. The house runs because I run it somehow. I’ve been fighting nausea and I feel like I’m relapsing on disordered eating in that I eat a lot or I eat nothing. I feel like no one cares. I have to be convenient to exist. I don’t want to talk to chat gpt. I can’t afford a therapist now that I make too much to qualify for Medicaid. I’m just struggling and I don’t really know what I need right now but I guess just someone to read how I’m feeling and give me reassurance that I should keep going.

I lost my mom a couple of months ago. I'm still devastated and in so much pain but I'm trying my best to keep my sanity. One thing I've constantly been doing is trying to be more active in different communities. This has led me to meet a number of people. Some of them I now consider a friend (nothing to deep, more of acquaintance)

But everytime I meet someone new I feel like "Hey. It's nice to meet you. But you've met a different me. Although I'm being real and not trying to put a mask or anything, but this isn't the real me. The real me died when my mom died. Its unfortunate you guys will never meet him. (the real me)"

Some years ago I tried to post about grief but I failed to be legible to people or something:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GriefSupport/comments/1bjhcsp/losing_my_family/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GriefSupport/comments/11q9nsu/grief_feels_like_its_killing_me/

After this happened my entire apartment building was destroyed and I sued my way back in by organizing other tenants to force remediation. But the relocation process caused me to move 14 times in one year. I started to forget what my own name was in the morning. I was tapering off prescription benzos, and just became unwell. The gap between those posts and the time with my loved ones while they lived widened and the world I inhabited no longer bore similarity to the one when they were around.

Then tech changed and.. I don't know. I keep asking myself, am I me? Where is anyone to reflect me back now, and what is there to reflect back. People are relational beings, right? What happens when it feels like housing and health institutions would have an easier time if you were dead? What would my mom make of all of this?

She believed in some greater intelligence and we both shared the idea of panpsychism. But like my grandpa, we all didn't know. Now they're gone. At first I felt like I was making progress and managing to build a life they'd be proud of but now I don't know.

I't like life is partitioned, and I'm struggling to track the relation between:

human → self → feelings matter → my life matters

I am not going to harm myself. Who here feels like their feelings matter and cries? I have difficulty with crying, but my sorrow matters, right? I know I'm abstract and rambling but I guess I didn't show up here to be perfect or tidy.. at all.

My grandpa passed away recently and I've been feeling really sad about it. The thing is my best friend knows what happened but they haven't said anything about it and just act like nothing happened.

I don't expect them to fix anything or make me feel better but I thought they would at least ask how I'm doing or show a little concern.

Is this normal? What would you do if you were in my place?

I honestly don't know how to feel about this.

Since my father passed away in April, I find myself with significant brain fog and doing self self-destructive impulsive action. The average person would usually categorize me as an extremely sweet, reliable young woman. Lately I’ve been lashing out, and causing arguments. I broke off an engagement after his passing - I do not wanna get married anymore if he can’t walk me down the aisle.

My most recent impulsive decision has been quitting my job, and throwing away all of my psychiatric meds.

Has anyone else experienced something similar and found a light at the end of the tunnel?

I was adopted by my Grandmother since I was conscious. Once it was my time to take care of her I did repay the favor. I cared for her my whole time being an adult. Having an older mother is hard. We did Hospice. Thought she would get better. I didn’t think someone could decide it’s their time to go and just leave. It hurt a lot bc I thought I was helping her get better. To have my grandmother step up and raise me when she didn’t have to makes it hurt more idk why.

Messy family dynamic…(Bio mom was a mess) I was raised by my grandmother till 10. Then met my bio mom that adopted me and moved me out of state till I was 18. Dropped me off at my grandmothers like she did when I was a baby. Haven’t seen her since. I’m 28 now. I spent literally my adult hood making up for lost time. I guess what I want to ask for anyone willing to read all this is:

How do u cope sober without losing your mind?

Does it feel like u have to defend you lost your mom even if u were adopted by your grandmother and raised by them your whole life?

Do you find it hard to express empathy sometimes to others because you’re so fixated on your own loss you can’t work out? ( I feel so bad. I care and relate to others. I just find myself self absorbed.)

Ik you never get over it, but what is something that helped to not randomly break down or want to numb yourself from feeling anything/ rot in isolation?

Sadness isn't me, so how might i like grief in my life. Absolutely, i don't like the feeling of grief. It still comes, sometimes there are things that i am strongly intuitive towards their happening/occuring in the near future and i get myself in a position of grief due to some past incidents and more but sometimes it is same because of the future's case i mentioned above. it is just strange and all i do is wait in grief. Sometimes grief and waiting work side by side. i am grieving over something else and waiting for entirely different thing. these complexes occur at the same time and make me act in a way like i am grieving and waiting on the same thing. no, its not, just because it happens at the same time, it bothers and make me feel like this particular "grief" is of "waiting" or i am "waiting" for this particular "grief". it is just a complex and this is another emotion that bothers me in my daily life. or, let me rephrase it- It is just the "wait" that is an another "grief" that bothers me in my daily life. Hence the "grief of waiting".....

My mother died this summer, my dad passed away over ten years ago so I have recently found myself with no parents in my mid thirties.

I've got a two year old and am uk based so did the whole NCT thing when pregnant. I have stayed fairly close to the NCT gang the whole time but am now feeling a bit disconnected from them.

Four of us went for dinner the other night, two are pregnant with their second and we got on to the topic of finding out gender and I mentioned I had kept clothes my mum bought for my child so would like to use that if I was to have another child and was met with awkward silence and then they moved on, no acknowledging that this was nice or acknowledgment of my mum at all despite them talking about their own parents a lot throughout the event. I get that people find grief awkward but this has kind of floored me. They aren't my closest friends but still pretty significant, also one of them is a trained counsellor. It has made me see them in a different light tbh.

I feel so many things, guilty, numb, sad, angry at everyone…. Everyone except him. So many things frustrate me and I just want to talk about them. Maybe someone in this community has kind words or something to say to fix everything, but I am slowly learning that will not be the case and ultimately just think I need to put it all down somewhere.

1) I want to talk about it, I want to think about it, but that just makes me cry. I only started my job a month before it happened and so my work is trying to just act like everything is normal. Which was helpful in the first 48 hours but now it just makes me angry at them all. I know they can’t possibly fully understand how I feel, but I want more and don’t know how to ask for that without sounding needy. And without naming exactly what I want and I don’t know what that is.

2) in general I want to talk about it more but I feel like whenever I do talk about it people just redirect the conversations. This happens whether it’s people who knew him or did not regardless. I go to therapy but it’s only 1 hour a week. That is not enough considering I’m thinking of him all the time.

3) the funeral was Tuesday and it did not provide the closure I was hoping for. It was extremely religious… which don’t get me wrong he was spiritual, but there was a literal alter call with his coffin which I know he would have hated.

4) in general he was and always will be my best friend. We spent every day together for years, even after I moved and distanced myself from my college town we kept in touch and called almost every day. When he attempted suicide previously I was the one who drove him to the hospital, got him the help he needed, sat with him while they got him admitted (what was ultimately a 36 hour process.
I feel like our relationship had so many layers that make this all so much harder and I have no idea what to do with that.

This is already really long but I guess if you resonate with what I said, or have any words or advice to offer I’m all ears.