MUM DIED AND I JUST FEEL NUMB

Dear Coleen

My mother died two weeks ago after a six-month battle with cancer and I feel completely numb. I expected to fall apart or be floored by grief, but instead I’m just going through the motions of life.

I work and have young children, and I’ve just been keeping busy but I worry I’m bottling everything up. I’m not really sleeping properly and my temper feels shorter than usual.

Is this a normal way to grieve?

Coleen says

Grief affects everybody so differently and any way of grieving is normal.

I think the feeling numb thing is normal – it’s your brain’s way of going, “I cannot deal with this right now”. When my dad died I was going through the start of a really bad time with my first husband. I felt really bad that I was going to bed at night and crying my eyes out at the thought of my marriage ending, and not my dad dying.

I spoke to a counsellor who said that your brain sometimes has to put stuff in boxes and deal with one thing at a time.

So maybe you’re now dealing with the shock, and then you’ll deal with the sadness. Grief counselling is a fantastic thing, and I’d definitely recommend you try it.

It’s somewhere you feel comfortable crying or screaming, or just sitting there and saying nothing.

I also think with cancer, you start grieving from the moment they say it’s terminal.

I did that with my sister Bernie. Once we knew it was terminal I had three months of grieving before she even died.

You start to prepare for it and when they do die, it can also be kind of a relief that they’re out of pain and you’re not on that roller coaster of emotions.

I think what may happen is the grief will jump out at you from time to time. Remember, there is no normal way to grieve – you just muddle through it.