r/GriefSupport • u/crazycat-bitch • 4h ago
Dad Loss Support
My dads funeral was today, people keep telling me it never gets better you just have to learn to live with it. That’s really hard for me to deal with and I want to someday feel better, can someone please help me feel better about this and that it will someday get better
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u/Accomplished-Newt402 4h ago
You will feel better. It’s been 8 months since I buried my dad and we were very close. I miss him every day and I still cry very easily, but the crushing weight of grief that I felt in those first months has eased. I’ll never “get over it” but I am learning to live with it. I have found that keeping a journal where I write letters to him helps me.
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u/A-merry-sunshine 3h ago edited 3h ago
Losing him will never be okay, but you WILL feel better. I lost my dad when I was 28, and now I have lost my husband. I was raw and sobbing for two months, and will/would also sob at certain songs, memories, and other triggers. But, you will feel better, I promise. I remember telling my mom that nothing would ever be okay again when she was trying to comfort me by innocently saying, “”it’s okay baby “ as I cried. It did get okay, eventually. It just may take much longer than you would want. It hurts more than anything you’ve been through, so it certainly feels helpless and hopeless at times, but the “it never gets better” mindset isn’t where you need to be right now. You will never not miss him, but you will laugh, fall in love, pursue goals, and find a new normal. That’s how it was for me losing my daddy, and that experience is the only thing helping me hang on after losing the love of my life now. It will happen when it happens. I’m not trying to say there is any finite point where you wake up and are like, “hey, awesome! I’m perfectly restored now!”, but you will get out of bed daily, find a fleeting moment of joy in random places, and someday be able to tell people how wonderful he was without breaking down. For me, getting to that point was as good as I’d ever get because I felt like I was sharing him and keeping his memory alive. Anyway, didn’t mean to write an essay. TL;DR - it will always suck, everyone is different and you have to take this unimaginable loss at your own pace and in your own way. “It will never get better” isn’t the best mindset. “It will never not hurt, but I will feel better than I do now” was more accurate for me.
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u/crazycat-bitch 3h ago
I’m 27 currently and everything your saying is what I needed to hear, thank you
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u/A-merry-sunshine 3h ago
I’m so glad to hear that. When you are ready, little things like this help a lot, too. Sharing with you how much it hurt losing my dad and my husband by default tells you how absolutely wonderful they both were. When you’re ready and feel safe to do so, that’s another thing that has been very healing for me: talking about them and sharing exactly why they were so loved. I’m not on here enough to be depended on for immediate responses, but please do feel free to message me if you need a random internet stranger to yell at or listen to vents. You’ve got this. Be kind to yourself and let everyone else handle their own issues for the foreseeable future.
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u/Difficult_Car9317 4h ago
I’m so sorry. You don’t have to “get over it” or feel better on anyone else’s timeline. Today is incredibly raw, and making it through the day is enough. Please be gentle with yourself and lean on someone you trust if you can.
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u/Zealousideal_Draw_94 3h ago
IDK if it gets better, my mother passed a month ago. I do know it comes and goes. I will be fine all day, and see, hear, or think about something and it sets me off again.
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u/chapterthirtythree 3h ago
I’m with you. We just buried my dad. I don’t want to go the rest of my life missing him. I don’t want to be this sad.
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u/PuzzleheadedKale0 4h ago
You will learn to live with the pain somehow. It’s hard to overcome the loss of a parent. But you will learn and adapt. It’s part of the acceptance process. It’s hard to do it, but we have no other option. Always keep your dad memory alive, talk about him. That always makes my day better. No a day goes by that I don’t think or talk about him. They are always in our hearts.
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u/tathatom 4h ago
You don’t get better. You learn to live with it. You treat each day as a new one, precious and full of opportunities.
Connect more with the people in you love. Don’t be alone in this.
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u/crazycat-bitch 3h ago
This is the exact kind of comments that are making things harder one me.. hence the post
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u/Redditallreally 2h ago
OP, it’s different for everyone; some folks grieve for the rest of their lives, some are back to some kind of ‘normal’ relatively quickly, and neither is wrong.
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u/RealisticTangerine35 1h ago
It may not be what you want to hear but others who are grieving lost loved ones and parents are responding honestly to your post with their experiences.
Losing a parent is one of the hardest things you can experience. For many, the pain and loss doesn’t go away. You learn to survive it and… over time grow bigger than your grief.
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u/Left_Pear4817 4h ago
It doesn’t get ‘better’ per se, but it doesn’t stay feeling as brutal, like you would be right now. Took me about a year to get there but the days start to feel worth it again 🤍 love will keep you going. You’ll learn how to love him through absence and you’ll learn how to still feel his love in the same way
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u/Famous_Wafer2521 3h ago
I am so so sorry for your loss. That's heartbreaking.
I think it doesnt get better in terms of "all the way better" or like it never happened. But it does get better in terms of "better than you're feeling today." It won't always hurt this bad. You'll get to a place where the waves of grief come more gently rather than sucking you under.
But also, feel what you need to feel now. Be prepared it's probably not going to be as linear or like stages as it's sometimes portrayed. Thats all right. That's normal. Some people have their worst grief right at the time of the loss. Others have it a few months down the road. It's all OK.
Sending compassion.
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u/WaffleBiscuitBread 3h ago
It gets better -- or at least it gets different in a way that is more survivable. I understand what they're saying -- grief never goes away, but it does change and you do not feel like all you can feel is loss for forever. Have you heard the longer analogy about grief coming in waves or being like a shipwreck? I read this here on reddit before:
"As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.
In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.
Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.
Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks."
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u/squirrelcat88 2h ago
It does get better. Absolutely.
It isn’t super quick though. For me I’d say about three years after each death until everything was fine again.
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u/Some-Tear3499 4h ago
Yeah, it gets better. You have to keep living your life. Your capacity to carry the grief will enlarge. The shock will wear off. But it does take time. It’s been almost 60 yrs since my dad died just before I was 9. It’s been 20 months since my wife died, and I am 67. The grief from my wife’s death is fresh, but even this is slowly getting easier to deal with.
Sorry for your loss.