Bereavement: “I don’t miss my mum because I didn’t really know her, what I miss 40 years on is never getting to know her properly”

(approx 5 minute read)

X’s mum unexpectedly died aged 36, and he was only 16. Here he talks about coping with bereavement as a teenager, the emotional impact of losing a parent young, and how her passing still affects his life today, at the age of 56. 

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It was 14th March, 1983. I was sitting in the living room when the landline went. My step mum went to pick up the phone. All I heard her say was, ‘oh no’. 

She came back into the living room and asked my three step sisters to leave. She sat me down and said ‘your mum has died’. I was numb, totally numb. Coping with the death of a parent at such a young age felt surreal.

I was only 16. My mum was just 36. She’d died of a heart attack completely unexpectedly. 

My parents had divorced when I was six and made the decision for me to live with my dad. We lived in Cambridge and my mum lived in Cheshire. I saw her fairly irregularly during school holidays so when she passed it was an odd sensation of all of this sadness and devastation going on around me, yet I wasn’t necessarily feeling it myself.

I think it’s why in the immediate aftermath I felt emotionally disconnected from the whole experience.

At the funeral I felt like I was having the least emotion, almost holding everyone up, but I was just 16. Of course it was tragic and sudden, so many people were crying, sobbing even, but nothing came out of me.

That afternoon, we got in the car and drove back to Cambridge. As strange as it might sound I then simply got on with life. I never went to talk to anyone about it, that wasn’t what happened in those times. I didn’t really reflect on it or talk to friends or family about it. 

I had the odd hug from my step mum about it but don’t think I had a hug from the one person I wanted one from - my dad. I don’t think I’ve had one to this day. It’s not a blame game, it’s the way he’s made, he’s just a bit fucking practical.

Seven or eight years passed. 

I’d finished school, college and university and decided to go to Australia. 

For the first time in my life I decided to write a diary while I was away. It was fairly surface level stuff, documenting what I was doing each day.

Then one day, after a hard day's work on a farm in Adelaide and some meditation the day before, I sat down and almost out of nowhere simply wrote in my book: why? It was the first time I’d questioned how unfair it was that my mother had died. It was the first time I’d asked, what the actual fuck. 

For that short period of time I went to a very dark place.

But minutes later I shut the diary and never opened it again. 

Perhaps closing that diary was my way of locking away the emotion. Or being avoidant. Who knows. 

More than 30 years later and there’s only been a handful of times I’ve spoken about her death. Mentally and physically there’s been a few dark days like that diary day, but thankfully not too many. 

I have thought about her in that time but the emotion is always centred around the pain that losing her caused me, rather than thinking about her in my life, which does feel quite selfish.

She died too young but I don’t miss my mum because I didn’t really know her, what I miss 40 years on is never getting to know her properly.

I have two kids. When I look at them I see parts of me, parts of my ex-wife and parts that are just them. I’ve not had that chance to see if parts of them are my mum because I never got to know what those parts were.

It sort of feels like I have a part of me I want to track down to find out about, almost like I’m adopted. 

I think the loss of my mother has affected me in a number of ways, some good, some bad. 

I struggle to develop relationships with females on a romantic level. I can’t let them in, I can’t let them know me on a deeper level.

My parents separated at a young age and then my mum died. I wasn’t able to develop a close relationship with my mother so I had nothing at a young age to model. 

Sadly I think it led to my marriage ending in divorce. Why? Because I could never truly emotionally commit to my ex-wife, which caused a lot of pain.

On the flip side, I’ve gone above and beyond to build close relationships with my two sons so they don’t grow up wondering where parts of them come from. I have a beautiful relationship with them. 

Emotionally, I rarely get too high or too low. I think it has given me perspective to not focus on the small things too much.

For anyone reading this who has recently lost a parent, there’s no doubt it will shape your future in some way. Some ways will be hard and challenging. But some ways will be beautiful.