After reading your post 13, …. I can certainly agree with you. I’m glad you continue the converstation, you most likely will help someone who needs comfort. When friends or anyone bring up my parents or others whom I have loved it makes me feel that they cared about them. Ignoring death or its heartache makes it much worse.

It must have been very difficult to lose your dad at such a young age, not even 17. My heart hurts to hear such a thing. If you had been in our church you would have been comforted, invited and loved in our home. My mother had a real spot in her heart for those who were hurting, so did my dad.

After my father died, an anticipated death, I still wanted to sit “shiva” for a couple days or even a week, just to give myself some space to grieve and cry. Kids pulled me on into life and activities revved up again. But I never felt I got the buffer I needed–which made the mourning feel incomplete.

I suspect many in our society are in a hurry to rush past grief because they don’t want to have to think about death, so they want you to have “reached closure” quickly. I don’t think grief works that way.

I make it a point to ask people how they’re doing after a death–often for months afterwards. I’ve found people want to talk about the recently deceased and appreciate hearing someone else remembers them.

I wrote a condolence this morning in which I noted “I don’t think we ever really get over the death of a parent. The pain lessens, of course, and the immediacy diminishes, but you honor them with your tears, so cry away.” No matter how long it’s been.

Maybe I’ve had too much practice, but I like to give mourners the benefit of the doubt in public–even if I agree with Keillor in private.

I’m sorry your cousin didn’t understand and was so blunt about it. That must have hurt; I hope when she experiences grief of her own someday, you’ll have a chance to offer better comfort.

I never had anyone actually say I should be over it. And with my mom, I was in a more caring community that mostly did OK. But when Dad died, I wasn’t yet 17, and people in my church simply didn’t know what to do with a teenager who’d lost her dad. If I so much as mentioned him (not even mentioning his death, necessarily, just mentioning something about him), the other person would be silent, and I could hear their brain working feverishly with, “What do I say?” I soon learned to change the subject to a “safe” one–not for my sake, but for the sake of the other person. The people who brought the most comfort were those who’d mention Dad on their own–who’d comment how good a picture that was of Dad, or how hard he had worked to build the porch.

But in years since I’ve seen that with other people. If they mention missing someone who has been dead three or four months, another person in the conversation often gets almost panicky. Grief is considered abnormal in our culture. Having been there myself, I deliberately continue the conversation if the other person brings up a deceased loved one.

We in the Christian community do particularly badly in one regard. SO often I’ve heard someone compliment someone who isn’t grieving much in the first week (the week when people are numb) and say that their calmness proves their spirituality. It may indeed–but if grief hits hard the next week, that doesn’t prove their faith isn’t real anymore. We need to let people grieve as they grieve, not how we want them to. Even Jesus showed grief at Lazarus’s death–even with full knowledge He was about to raise him! Death is a true enemy.

For me, May and June are coming up, and I plan to send notes to friends who’ve lost a parent in the last year (in the week or two before Mother’s and Father’s Day). My mom lived to be 78; her mom had died when she was in her 20s and out of the country, no clue she’d never see her again–and she told us she never had stopped missing her from time to time. Fifty years later, she still missed her–not pathologically, but just as a loss.

I wasn’t using two years as a CUT OFF date for grieving. Yes I still think of my mother, as I do my dad, and the tears fall down my face. However the deep pain I felt the first few years has gotten better, GOD has healed that pain, but I still miss them, and sometimes I cry.

Nothing I said should have meant that anyone would stop feeling sad about losing a loved one after any amount of time.

Pastors most often bring the situation back, as they speak, sometimes as my dad did…. telling those in the audience about Salvation, the way to Jesus Christ. He was a strong man, even taking the funeral of his favorite sister, (she died of a heart attack very suddenly) I sat in the back, as I didn’t want anyone to see me sobbing. I watched my dad and saw how brave, and careful he was. However after the burial my dad walked away from the grave site, and it was his time to grieve as we walked arm and arm.

Just remember everyone who stands before the guests at a funeral or memorial are under a great deal of pressure and pain, they don’t always do it just the way you would expect, if they are close to the deceased their emotions will many times determine what they say.

Those of us who sit in the pew can pray for those who choose to speak, and pray GOD blesses them with the right words to comfort themselves and others.

You make an excellent point and one which is overlooked more often than not.

Losing a parent, or any close loved one takes time, sometimes it could be two years. There are people who don’t/can’t/won’t understand this because it hasn’t happened to them yet, OR they don’t love as deeply as you do.

When I lost my mother not to long ago, I was devastated. She was devoted to the LORD Jesus Christ and I knew exactly where she was, but the point was, I couldn’t talk to her anymore, I couldn’t hear her voice, ….. I just missed her with all my heart. I shared my heart with a cousin about two months later, and was shocked to hear “you need to get over this, and move on” I got off the phone as quickly as possible. Her words made it much worse, and inflicted pain which hurt me deeply.

I had made an appointment to see my Internist for another reason, and while there related what had happened. His words to me were thus; “it often times takes no less than 6 months and more likely a year and half to two years to get over the loss of a parent” I knew this deep down in my heart because my father was a pastor (my father passed away before my mother and that was painful too, but my mom and I could talk and share) and had dealt with those who grieve, but hearing it from someone else really helped.

My mother often grieved for her friends, she lost a dear friend when she was 35, it was heartbreaking. It isn’t a matter of my mother not knowing where her dear friend was, it was plainly a loss, which was painful and lasted a long time.

Cheryl, after reading your post, I would say you loved your mother dearly, and that says a lot about you and your mother.

Blessings

If you have freinds that you are close enough to confide your grief to, and they have the temerity to abuse that trust by asking why you’re not over it yet, I think you might need need to re-evaluate that relationship.