Watching White Lotus, and as a 40 year old who lost her mom as a teenager, this line hit me hard. I think because it encompasses a part of grief I hadn’t really been able to name previously—the part of it where, the person who thinks about you the most, your wellbeing, your happiness, who invests in your future, who puts you at the center of their universe, is no longer. That universe where you are the most important, is no longer. When this happens to you as a kid, it’s humbling in the worst way.

Sometimes understanding a feeling is comforting in itself, so I thought I would share. Solidarity ❤️

I can't remember my mother's voice. She passed so long ago and I can't remember it. Why does this hurt so badly and how can I cope with this?

My mom passed away when I was 25 years old, she has been gone for over a decade now. My MIL came into my life when I was 23. I miss my mom so very much and no one would ever truly replace her. She was my best friend, I called her everyday. I truly wanted a relationship with my MIL because I am lonely and I guess I just miss a maternal figure/friend. Someone to complain with and vent, shop but my MIL is just not it. She is a Christian who is not very supportive of others beliefs. When I try to vent or complain, she just tells me that Jesus wouldn't complain about people because everyone isn't perfect (even though she complains and judges people even who go to her church), she barely has any pictures of me in her house in comparison to my SILs because "I got pregnant out of wedlock". She is overbearing with my children, finances, and health. My daughter is my twin yet she rants how she looks nothing like me and just looks like her. I just.. I try so hard I call her mom, gifts, crafts (that I got told to stop making because they don't go with her decor and she is not interested in "Pinterest stuff"). But then she turns around and tells me I am her daughter she never had, she is the mom I needed since mine is gone. And she reminds me CONSTANTLY that my mom is gone. "Since you don't have your mom..." I dont know what to say to her, I do not want to start shit at all. My mom wouldn't want that from me. I just wish she could be my friend. I truly wish I had a friend. I miss my mom. I guess I am just asking for advice, does anyone deal with this.

I lost my mom, Jeni, in 2015. Her death was ruled a suicide, but there have always been unanswered questions about what happened.

I'm still trying to find answers, but I don't want her story to become only about how she died.

My mom was the person who taught me what joy felt like. She loved broken, fragile things, especially animals that needed someone to care for them. She was a florist who loved helping people make their dreams come true. She chose to love me, and she became my safe place.

I wish we had had so much more time together. There are so many things I wish I could tell her, so many moments I wish she could have been here for.

I'm sharing an article about her life and the questions surrounding her death because I want to make sure she isn't ever forgotten about. She would've done the same for any of her friends and family, and I am so sorry it has taken me so long to seek answers.

I miss my mom. I want answers about what happened to her, but I also want her kindness, her laughter, and the love she gave people to be remembered.

If you've lost your mom, I'm sorry. I know there is no simple way to carry that kind of loss. Thank you for letting me share a little piece of mine.

hello everyone!! i am venting but if you have advice or anything to say i’d love to hear it. my name is ej, im 20f and watched my mom take her final breath last july after a little over a year long battle with stage four colon cancer. its been a complicated journey processing this grief, if im being honest i feel like i still haven’t fully bounced back after losing her. we didnt have a great relationship before she got sick, and i feel like that always translates to friends as “i dont really miss her because we used to hate eachother.” which just isn’t the case. i miss her and i miss so many things about her and i miss the things we didn’t get to do, the relationship we didnt have etc.
since january (about six months after she passed away) my friends have been really comfortable making jokes about my mom. it was before that as well but i noticed i started getting a little upset by it in january. i make jokes about it as well, but honestly not as often as they do. my friends have dealt with grief in their own ways, my friend lost her boyfriend last year and my other friend has lost friends to suicide. but neither of them know what it’s like to be twenty without a parent. they are also both in their early thirties.
everytime i try to talk about my mom, they joke about it even when im trying to be serious, or im clearly upset. i still have random moments where i get overwhelmed with grief. last week in the car i saw her obituary card that i see everyday, but this day it hit me hard that she’s really gone. like really gone forever. i started silently crying and later was trying to talk to my friends about it and my friend was like “it’s been over a year and you still cry about it?”
yeah, i’ll cry about it forever. probably.
i only got nineteen years with her. i have no parent. i watched her die.
i feel like a hypocrite with the dead mom jokes, because i do joke sometimes about her. but when all my friends do when i bring her up is joke about it, it hits in a different way, i guess. i have a couple friends with dead moms and we say- the only semi good part about having a dead parent is getting to make dead parent jokes. i dont even think its pride like that… its just… this isn’t your parent to joke about. this isn’t your experience, this isn’t your grief to joke about. i would never joke about either of their grief. that’s something so personal to them. i guess sometimes i do get prideful about it because how do i know not to joke about your grief at twenty, and you’re both in your thirties joking about my mom and not creating any space for me to talk about missing her, when i always create that space for you? it makes me feel like a shitty person. like i can’t have both, i either don’t joke about my mom or i suck it up and have to get used to other people joking about her death.
it would be nice if there was a balance i guess. like if they could hold space for the grief and i guess it would be okay if they joke about it sometimes (but i just really don’t want them to. idk.) its my mommy, not theirs. my grief, not theirs. they didn’t have to stay up all night with her in the hospital, give her medications, make sure she ate and help her when she threw up, change her colostomy bag, tell the doctor to put a dnr order on her at seventeen years old, drive back and forth to and from the hospital, then the rehab, eventually have to make the decision to put her on hospice, listen to the death rattle and then watch her die. idk. feels weird that they’re making jokes.
but let me know if you have any thoughts. am i wrong? also sorry this is all over the place im just really emotional about this rn. thanks

Greeting Everyone my name is Michelle. I loss my only child my son “Mickale” to a senseless act of gun violence in the city of Detroit. I lived in pure devastation for the first 2 years after, the third year I became numb to everything around me..

until I realized that I have to be a Voice for my child, his life was beautiful and it mattered!

I’am a certified trauma grief and loss coach now.

I would like to say in honor of him and all of the other Parents who have lost a child tragically in Detroit I have wrote two petitions for the opportunity to get the community to have a win as well as the grieving parents! 

This will happen by asking the city of Detroit to grant  (at no cost) vacant ,abandoned lots that are very unkept all over the city to parents! 

this will help parents to create a beautiful space with gardens, flower beds, community events,etc in honor of their child while beautifying the neighborhood it’s in to help drop crime rate and get people involvement in community clean up and organization! 

Please sign this petition to help get this to city officials! Lets help a grieving parent who‘s life is forever devastated but can start healing with building their child’s Legacy! 

I miss you everyday. I am still in shock. I am not ready to say goodbye but God knows best

As humans we are told that we only need 6 months to process grief, for me it’s been 1 year and 5 months and I still haven’t come close to even accepting that my mom died. These past few weeks I’ve been struggling with what is real and what is not, in the sense that i cant distinguish if the emotions i’m feeling is grief or just me remembering her. Obviously thinking about her makes me sad, because her dying is a sad thing but is that grief or just sadness linked to the memory? By definition (aka according to Google) Grief is the natural emotional, physical, and psychological response to a significant loss, but how does that feel? How do I know that the feeling I’m feeling right now is grief? Personally I do have a problem with distinguishing between my emotions just because I feel like that I can never properly categorize them according to the standard if that makes sense.
What made me write this is that I recently watched the documentary ‘Dear Zachary’( I recommend that you watch it immediately if you haven’t yet) and I was in tears the entire time. I truly believe that the definition of grief will never ever be able to do justice in describing how it feels to lose someone significant. It not only changes you psychologically, emotionally and physically, it changes the entire trajectory of your life. I would find myself having to remind myself how to breathe, how to think and even how to cognitively process things. This documentary was the only visual representation of grief that I’ve seen since she died. It shows the person was exactly that, a person. Someone who had an entire life and someone who had all these connections with other people. it ‘s so hard for me to grasp that one day they could be there and the next they are gone. Like their physical presence just got removed from existing amongst us. We are conditioned to believe that this is just a natural thing and maybe it is scientifically, and I know that we all have to die but how is it just natural for us to be expected to just move on. If you take away the physicality were they ever even here? All we have are memories that will eventually fade and objects that we place a lot of value on but what I need is to physically hear her say something to me. Everyone around me just repeats the phrase “she loved you” and i hundred percent believe that she did but does she now? She can’t love me now because she’s not here. I believe that we are more than just our physical bodies, I believe that our souls are so important but most importantly I believe in science. How do I stop believing in science, because maybe if I stop believing I would be able to believe that she loves me now. I admire religious people for being able to just wholeheartedly believe in someone that’s not physically, because that’s the one thing I wished I could do. When I close my eyes and talk to her it just feels like I’m gaslighting myself or that I’m being silly but in retrospect I’m just a daughter trying to speak to her mom in the only way that she knows how to.
We are conditioned as a society to lead with logic,sense and strategically but I feel like as humans we are born to lead with emotions, whether we realise it or not. It’s impossible to remove emotions from our day-to-day life and I believe that, that in itself is how we differ from AI. We live our lives based on our emotions and this concept I call Emotality (I made up this word btw). I formulated the definition as the realization that we as humans are inherently emotional and base and live our lives off of that fact. And simultaneously we realize that after our eventual passing the only thing that impactively remains is our emotions, the actions/consequences of our emotions and what emotions we triggered from others. I believe that the majority of people don’t have emotality, thus expecting people to move on from grief after a few months instead of acknowledging how that loss, how experiencing an emotion, grief has the ability and most likely will change their lives.
Before my mother died I was ambitious, positive and in some form innocent, now I look for ambition in others and I am only a shell of the girl I once was. When she left she took every positive emotion she triggered in me during her life and left me groveling to find alternatives, but how do i find alternatives for something i cant even touch or name. Who am I without grief, but also without her? Because those two things can’t exist in one reality. Either I have no grief and I have my mom or I don’t have my mom but I live with grief. So I think that I should rather ask who I am with grief. How do I navigate my future while still actively being crippled by the feeling of intense loss? I will never get over this and i dont think that i should have to, because we are not robots that can just change the settings of our feelings. The more i think about it the more i think about it the more i realize that me still experiencing grief indicates the significant impact she had in my life, how much i loved her and vice versa but also that she was real. And that makes the constant pain of missing her worth it. I don’t know the direction of my life but I know that grief will remain a constant part of it and I ironically couldn’t be happier about that

Today i had a lot to do i cleaned the house took out the trash cooked lunch and dishes
I just remember how when she was here i didn’t think a lot about these things i had chores but now it feels like i am trying to hold up things together and the things are heavy usually mom helped me hold them but now i am alone and if i don’t hold them well or get tired everything will fall there’s no plan b no safety net

I have sisters they mostly cook and help with chores but i don’t want to rely on them it’s not their responsibility they lost their mom too

Honestly i envy anyone who has a good mom who is alive and they don’t have to worry about cooking or chores as much they can hug her and have her help them with alot of things and have her at their graduation

Throughout my mom’s almost 10 years with dementia I took many pictures, I wanted to remember the good moments and the emotional moments and in general just being with her and having her with me. Now I look back and I’m absolutely destroyed seeing how frail and unwell she was at the end of her illness, especially seeing those in comparison to before she was sick. She was an absolute angel; before the illness and during. It hurts me so badly for her that this happened and I don’t know what to do with that energy. Just heart pangs every time I think of her and wish things could’ve gone differently. I miss her more than I could’ve ever imagined. I’m in my mid twenties now and everything I do I look for my mom’s advice and imagine what our relationship could have been.

Hi, it’s been 13 months since my mom died very suddenly. This would be too long if I went over every detail but I was on the phone with her, she said “oh my” and dropped the phone. I got in the car and drove fast to her house about 7 miles and I found her dead in her chair, turning blue. I didn’t make it in time. We were extremely, extremely close all my life. Best friends, we went through a lot together and she was my biggest supporter and unconditional love I’ll ever have.
These last 13 months have been Hell. Life is so hard and lonely. I don’t have family support at all. I was her caretaker more and more the last 6 months but I always helped her and she helped me. We talked several times a day, saw each other all the time. There is a hole in my world.
I’ve had dreams about her before the first three months ago. Just two and she didn’t talk to me but looked ok. But they weren’t angry dreams. The one last night I woke up crying. We were at a restaurant waiting in a line( we went to lunch together once a week) and they sat her really quickly in a booth with some other people( strangers) I walked up real fast and was like what happened (like we were supposed to sit together). She looks up at me like she was so mad at me . And said something like , “you didn’t sit with me, or why didn’t you hurry and sit with me!” And I said “ I’m not going to to this”( argue) and I walked out and left her there. I could feel in my dream how hurt I was and hurt she was mad . We never fought like that in real life. Little disagreements but we always thought the same way, had the same values and likes. She would call me and ask if I needed anything from the store, I would take her to doctors appointments etc. I can’t understand after 13 months why this happened. I haven’t been handling this well, this year in my opinion. Reclusive, short tempered etc.
I won’t go into the terrible guilt that went along with her dying. I couldn’t save her, things I didn’t say. Things I didn’t do for her.
Sorry this got long. Can anyone understand this? Do you think she is really upset with me? I know we can’t know 100% but I would have walked on fire for her. I just woke up and the look on her face is sooooo vivid. I’ve lived with guilt this whole time, besides the pain and sadness.
Thank you, my husband doesn’t understand any of this.
Edit: also the last 6-9 months I’ve been asking her to send me a clear sign she was here and she was watching over me, whatever. And then this happened
I’ve seen others have nice signs or dreams, smiling , they hug them and talk to them. Would a medium help with this? Some mediums say ask for a specific sign/ numbers, animals, songs and they will come somewhere or in a dream.

First of all i wanna say that english isnt my first language so im sorry for any mistakes.

As the title said my mother took her own life and i dont know how to be me anymore.

For a little background, i was living with her till i was 12 yo but decided to move to a different country to live with my dad and his wife. My mother was an alcoholic, treated me as her own therapist, her actions made me be bullied in school etc. but she was my best friend nontheless. When i was 8 my little brother was born and since his father wasnt in the picture it was just us and my grandma living together and even though we were poor, i was a happy little kid if we put the abuse aside. When I was 11 my mother met a guy which I will call Matt for the sake of the story. At first Matt was nice, he picked me up from school or dance classes but he quickly became the person my mother favourited over her own children. They started drinking more, my mom started disappearing for the nights and leaving my little brother and i alone with our grandma. Right before my 12th birthday my mom got admitted to a mental hospital cause our case worker realised that her alcoholism was getting out of hand and she started neglecting us. She was there for 2 months and I have never see her so bright calm and happy which made me hopefull for a better future for us. While she was in the hospital i also got my first period and was so happy that my mom will take care of me since she was supposed to be back 3 days later. Then on the day of her coming home she called me and i could hear that she was drunk. i was completly heartbroken. Since then she started disappearing for days and she also told me directly into my face that she preffers Matt over us and when i threatend to end my life she encouraged me to do so. That was the wake up call for the 12 yo me and when i went to visit my father in the summer, i decided to stay as i realised it would be better for my future.

I have to mention here that Matt physically and mentally abused my mom. We tried to help her but every time she just went back to him.

As I started living with my dad and my stepmom, i tried to be in contact with my mom but she ended up cussing me out, calling me names, saying that i belong in a mental hospital and more hurtful things like that. I tried to rebuild our relationship once when I was 16 and she told me shes pregnant and im gonna have a baby brother but that too didnt work because sadly the boy died when he was 4 months old. Sadly I never got to meet him.

Fast forward to this year, im 20 now and my mom set an AI picture of me and my brother who is now 12 as her profile picture on facebook. I texted her to remove it because i didnt want to be associated with her as I was in no contact with her for years but she refused and started calling me a wh*re a dr*g abuser etc. I called her and I stared arguing with her ad we started throwing names on each other and in the end I said that it would make no difference to me if she was dead and told her to end her life. She blocked me. That was our last conversation.

2 months later I got a call from my grandma and she said that my mom h*ng herself in a barn. No goodbye letters. Not a text. Not even a cry of help. I was speachless and immedietally started blaming myself. Few days later i went back to my home country with my dad for her funeral. Till her funeral i was playing it cool and I guess i tried to be strong for everone but at her funeral i just couldnt control my feelings anymore and i cried. I cried so much that i almost passed out and had to be taken away by my aunt and dad.

Since then I have not felt the same. I dont get any support from my family except from my boyfriend. No one cares about me since I was in barely any contact with her in the last 8 years. At her funeral people didnt even know that i was her daughter. I miss her. I miss my mommy. I miss how things were before Matt showed up. I dont know who I am anymore ad no one is trying to help me. No therapist wants to take me in. Every day im alone with my thoughts and no one cares to ask how im doing.

I apologise for how long this post is, its my first time on here and im just looking for closure and advice on how to live with it.

Thank you all fo reading this.

Quiero a mi madre de vuelta.

Hay una marca horrible que deja el duelo: es la muerte no solo del difunto, sino también de la persona que lo vela. Nunca vuelven a ser las mismas. Eso lo aprendí con mi madre, Daisy. Mi abuela falleció un día de febrero, frío y gris. Tal vez es que me gusta representarme en el mar, aunque no lo digo por mí. Tengo presente sus ojos: una tristeza tan infinita que la sentía como un mar violento que podría ahogarnos. Era esa marca, algo profundo dentro de ellos. Se le desvanece la esencia; se ha vuelto fría conmigo. No es algo dramático, pero la noto distante: se ríe, pero me parece una risa plástica, trillada. Le falta algo que no sé cómo llamar. Entiendo que su madre ha muerto, pero yo siento que la mía también, aunque de formas distintas. Es como si fuera otra persona actuando como ella. Simplemente falta algo que la hacía ser ella, y no sé si se lo ha tragado el mar en la tormenta. Dicen que el tiempo todo lo cura, pero yo sigo esperando a que el mar borre las huellas en la arena, para permitirme respirar tan solo un instante, aunque ya estemos ahogados. Esta es la última vez que quiero tocar el tema, porque me duele mucho. No solo murió tu madre; también murió la mía, y la extraño.

Salve a tutti, scrivo perché ho tanto bisogno del vostro aiuto morale perché mia figlia, dopo la scomparsa della sua amata cricetina, all'età di 2 anni e 8 mesi, non si dà pace. E’ un uno stato di profonda depressione, non esce di casa, sta sempre a letto, mangia il minimo, non ha più interesse per nulla e per nessuno al mondo.Vorrebbe non vivere più perché il futuro le appare vuoto e la vita privata di senso.

C’è qualcuno che avendo attraversato questo dolore può aiutarla a vedere meno nero il futuro? Vi ringrazio infinitamente 

I miss my mom I had a dream she came back from the dead plenty of times and I came back from my vacation and we were living in our old apartment in my home state and city and I opened the door up we saw each other and we hugged and said I'm happy to see you . My mom has not hugged me like this since I was in my early 20s and my mom passed when I was 42.

I wish we were this closer just like in my dreams my mom and I were closer when I was in my early 30s . I just wished that her and I would get along when she was alive. As she got older she turned meaner and meaner.

And I have dreams about her and I put the tree up and in reality we did put the tree up guess what? it was an argument . But I wish my dreams come true and she comes back to life and her and I get along again and I wished she apologized to me . And I cried in my dreams about my mom it's so heartbreaking. I asked myself why she's not here anymore I did everything to take care of her and she won't go to the doctor. I feel lost and sad without her 😭.

Idk why what I am typing here but I need it off my chest and gods knows why I feel like y'all will relate or understand me.

So 17F in hospital with my mom and my old grandma. My mom on august had some episodes of left arm right arm pain chest disconforr and wake in between sleep due to chest block feel since sep 1 begged cried yelled at her to see a doc ao we went saw doc A he told us to take echo ecg tmt she told she will take it only with her master health checkup form her office to reduce the cost so I kept reminidng her for another week and all then doc A was so unable to contact in case of emergency so on sep 14 we went to doc B he saw tmt and echo and suggested ct Coronary angiogram but my mom scares and didn't trust him as he is big hospital guy and claimes he is milking money and went to another doc C near by who also works in big hospital but again she trusted him and all so now we in another big hospital and waiitbg with my old grandma and my mom in ward the doc are making it late for procedure she didn't eat for past 6 hrs having migranine and feel of low sugar smtg 100+ . So now I am here take care of her and now she tells she should have gone to doc B and it is great mistake of her to come here the doc C hospital is bit in rush due to emergency case and my mom have like ykyk low sugar incident and all.

The next day she took her new tablets. She got an allergic reaction within 30 mins and went to the time doc for herself fine. She in icu for observing she sooo weak tired.

I am scared to be one if you I want her with me for, long time I am so sorry please let ne, know what to do.

How do y'all cope with such loooses. If happened

I’m 24 years old but have some brain stuff going on and I have autism, ptsd, and age regression. Because of some health issues my brain only works at a 6-7 year old level. My parents are not great but I can’t get away. I’m looking for a mommy that doesn’t mind me calling her mommy or another nickname and that is ok with basically raising me. I ask a lot of questions and people hate me because of how my brain works. Will anyone be my mommy?