You don't know what it's like until you've lost a parent

Very few people can really understand this concept of what it means to lose a parent, until they've gone through it.

People who feel like once they have lost their close friends or family members, then they can understand. But losing a parent is something different and something bigger than anything else you can possibly experience. To lose a close friend or a spouse or even a sibling does not cause the same inner trauma.

To put it in this way, it's really a club. You don’t get it until you’re there, in the club with people who have lost their parents, and you’re not in it until you’re in it. It never gets easy, but it stops hurting as much or as often. As days and months passed by, the farther away from it you get, the more it hits you like a punch in the stomach when it does come up appearing in your mind.

2 years later, I still find that I think of my mother a lot, that she appears in my mind to me every now and then again. Sometimes it’s like a welcome breeze, but when it comes as a complete surprise,it really does hit me like a punch. When I think of the first thought of someone to call, my mother, that’s when I'm reminded of the pain.

When people close to me lost their parents, I am reminded of my own loss, it made me think about losing my mom. I don’t talk about it. I mean, I can relate to what that person is saying and can validate that I do know what they’re going through, but I don’t impose my experience on them, but somehow I wish I could. To let them know what it feels like when finally they have lost theirs as well.

What that really does, that reminder, is to play back that time period for me.  The loss hurts again, but I can remember what I needed, but I did not get. But a part of me was in a lost and yet not know what I wanted/needed. The reason I did not get it is because NONE of my closest friends had lost a parent.

My friends used their past experiences of what it means to be hurt and try to apply it on me to make me feel better, or they try to pretend what's its like to not have a mother, but it doesn't work that way. I know their well intentions but I'm sorry, you don't feel the lost of a mother until you really lost her.  

My entire world has been shattered and I don’t even know what I need, let alone who can help or how. I then know pain and sorrow unlike anything I've experienced before. Its then where I felt that I need to do something for people around me who lost their parents, because I get it now, what it means to lose a parent.

But I have to admit, it’s still a hard thing to do, because it makes me think about my mother in so many ways that I don’t often think of her.  I think that's the part of what makes it a club.  Every time a parent dies, we all feel pain all over again.  And every time, it hurts a little bit less than it did the last time but sometimes, it just hurts like hell.