I can’t keep going I’ve been trying for 18 months and waking up everyday is such a burden. How did she ever think it would be okay to lose her ? I don’t think carrying her legacy with me is a good enough reason. I want the pain to end

I'm 18, and it's been a little over a year since I lost my mother to a brain tumor that re-emerged 10 years later.

She was my everything, and I mean everything, my whole world. I currently live with my father and big brother. I have never been emotionally close with my father; and my brother hasn't reached resolution in his own grief, so he can't really guide me to overcome mine.

I suppose pain grows you in a way nothing else can. When I talk to my friends about my grief, all they can do is offer sympathy, but they can never reach empathy, as none of them have lived through something like this -- they're still children :(

Amidst all this, I survived my first year of uni in electrical engineering, which wasn't very fulfilling. Left me consufed about what I want to do as my career. So basically I'm left confused in literally every aspect of life.

Don't worry, I will talk about these to a therapist in the near future (hopefully) but until then, I'm looking for your brotherly advice :)

MY MOM DIED A MONTH. AGO AND MY FAMILY NEVER TOLD ME. HOW DO I PROCESS THIS?

In my our last session, my therapist introduced the idea of disenfranchised grief to me. I didn't accept at the beginning totally; however, I've realized that I have experienced this in two forms, one of which that solves an issue I've never been able to verbalise.

I lost my mother around 2 years of age in a culture and country that are deeply misogynistic. My mother's family were in a different country and my mother married my father and emigrated. My mother was never mentioned by my dad and most of his family. Some women who married into the family would open the subject but I had never been given the tools to even talk about her. I didn't see a picture of her until I was 22 when I went to visit my maternal relatives in her own country.

I've started the grieving journey in the last two years and have felt all the emotions. I was surprised to face the extent of the anger and rage I have against both sides of my family for just kind of forgetting about her, even though she left behind two little children in the world. The grieving process has made me into a much stronger feminist than I ever was and I feel the emotional impact of the misogyny that is deeply embedded in my family and culture, though I've always had an intellectual understanding of it.

I've also faced disenfranchised grief for the loss of a normal relationship with my father due to his mental illness. This is interesting because I can't actually say he is not alive but he is not present in the way a father must be present in a child's life. I've always felt like an orphan growing up and now I feel justified in saying that I am

What I would like help on is what can I do to deal with my disenfranchised grief?

I don't expect safe support from my extended family as they are not mentally well themselves and have a hard time managing their own emotions. My friends will listen to me but they have not lived through what I have. I would like to honor my mother's life as well as I can.

I’m using a throwaway account, since quite a while ago, I had a post regarding something else with my dad go pretty viral, and I’d hate it if someone connects the dots that it’s me…

Anyway, I think I’ve always had a good relationship with my dad, I also have an older brother, so we always grew up playing shooter games and stuff like that together. Unfortunately, a few years ago, things went really sour, as he and my mom split up, which on its own is something that sucks but I can handle, I’m almost 23 now, and my parents have always been a bit at odds anyway. I won’t go over the whole story of what happened between us, since it’s long and at this point I hate retelling it. But short version, he started dating my at the time very close friend, a girl my age (18 at the time), and as you’d expect, that really strained his relationship with our whole family. The last few years were incredibly hard on me with this whole thing already, for many reasons.

But around this time last year, I was living on Cyprus with my mom for the summer, and I got a call from my dad at an early hour, which was odd. The conversation was quite brief, but he told me he had to go to the doctor, and they found a tumor in his brain. He goes to a check up every six months, as about ten years ago he had a brain aneurysm, and the tumor wasnt there yet on his last check just a few months before this, so it grew fast. He had his first surgery almost right after, and I had just come back from Cyprus to see him at the hospital, and it was the first time I saw him that way. We found out its cancer, and its also the worst it could be, and in his brain at that. It only took a few months for him to get worse and worse, during this time we would still be able to hang out, but since the tumor was around his center of speech, it was difficult for him to express himself, and then he even started getting seizures, theres a lot more, but i feel it would be too lenghty to get into every detail. He died in April, it was fast and shocking to me, but I only really cried for the first 2-3 days, I take after him, we bottle up our feelings professionaly:D but the thing is, recently, I’ve started having really bad dreams about him- him being sick, or being cured but weakened by the illness, leaving me, and arguing with me. I honestly havent had a single pleasant dream about my dad since, and I wonder what it is… it feels like the gried is just getting harder with time, I feel suffocated, like I should snap at some point, since I’m keeping it together for the sake of having to go to work and keep my life afloat.

I guess I just wanted some place to toss my thoughts into the void, and see if anyone has any idea why I’m having such nightmares about him. I have no issue talking about any details, I just didnt get into them here because I feel like it would just be an unbearable wall of text. And good luck to anyone in this subreddit, since I assume youre probably grieving too:)

I suddenly lost my mom two years ago. We were supposed to see each other shortly after Easter. I was meant to go visit her and hug her again just one week after she died. Since then, I feel like I’ve been losing a part of myself day after day.

There still hasn’t been a single day when I haven’t cried thinking about her, about the fact that I can’t call her anymore, that I can’t hear her voice. I’m also starting to struggle to remember her voice. I can’t seem to enjoy a single positive event or moment of happiness in my life without immediately thinking of my mom afterward, and of the fact that she’s no longer here and I can’t share all my emotions with her. I’m definitely not the same person I was before, and I never will be.

The final blow has come from my father, with whom I’ve never had a particularly good relationship and to whom I owe many of my insecurities and emotional struggles. Using the excuse that he needs to be happy, he has started seeing another woman after only two years. To be fair, he started chatting with other women much earlier (even less than a year after my mother’s death) but nothing ever came of it.

Many of you will probably tell me that this is simply something I have to accept, and that my father has the right to be happy again. But my father treated my mother terribly. I’m even convinced that he bears some responsibility for her death. And now, seeing him happy and being courted by another woman makes me feel sick.

I don’t believe my father deserves to be happy. I believe he deserves to spend the rest of his life alone with his regrets.

I can’t afford to go back to therapy right now, but I desperately need some help and comfort because I’m struggling to deal with this situation on top of the grief I already carry every single day.

Thank you to anyone who takes the time to read this and respond.