Hmm, this one will need context. So. When I was eight and a half, my brother died on our bedroom floor. Skipping over what happened to me, here is some stuff that is likely to happen to your mom. That stages of grief chart is mostly true as far as that stuff goes, but it is also unhelpful in that it does not name specific behaviours to watch out for (and not blame yourself for).
After the first stage of "does not compute" where her behavior gets really strange and starts flipping coins where actual planning and decision making should be, you get the "angry about everything for no reason" stage where she will probably snap at you and everyone else with little provocation. One of the bedrock beliefs she has about the shape of the world has been violated, and trauma reactions are not uncommon. So she will probably be very untrusting, not letting you do things which before she considered perfectly safe, being very severe and forbidding if you argue, since some part of her knows she has no solid foundation from which to make those arguments.
When her belief system fully collapses, she will have to rebuild it and test it, from which springs another host of seemingly nonsensical behavior. The Bargaining/What Is Reality" stage was kind of treacherous in our family, because Mom was finally awake enough to be making rational decisions and acting like herself, but doing a bunch of things I didn't understand to test what was safe and what was not. Expect risk-taking behaviors like drinking and smoking and making unwise decisions financially.
The depression stage is different from person to person, but if you have seen your mother have a major emotional setback before, then expect more of the same and for it to last a lot longer, because this time there could be survivors guilt, which is the "It should have been me" bullshit that your brain will pull out when someone whose safety you emotionally depend on dies. She may also blame herself for negative outcomes of the reality testing/bargaining phase, especially in the longest part of the grief process.
Acceptance and getting on with her life are going to be different for everyone. In my family we just avoided subjects that led back to my brother and focused on doing things that had never had much to do with him. Mom mostly gave up reading scifi and instead started reading murder mysteries and fantasy books, I gave up sports and giving a shit about people I didnt know, we all tried to not walk on each others sore spots, though actually having a conversation about it didnt ever happen, not even after we all went through therapy when I was 13 and we were all still fucked up.
I hope your family has a higher emotional health baseline from which to fall, and that you have the financial stability to get therapy from the start. Because even with this tiny helpful guide, trust me, you are not prepared for this. No one ever can be.
Please do not blame yourself or anyone else for that. That, too, is a tragedy.
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Every death is a tragedy.
Date: 2018-12-29 05:20 pm (UTC)After the first stage of "does not compute" where her behavior gets really strange and starts flipping coins where actual planning and decision making should be, you get the "angry about everything for no reason" stage where she will probably snap at you and everyone else with little provocation. One of the bedrock beliefs she has about the shape of the world has been violated, and trauma reactions are not uncommon. So she will probably be very untrusting, not letting you do things which before she considered perfectly safe, being very severe and forbidding if you argue, since some part of her knows she has no solid foundation from which to make those arguments.
When her belief system fully collapses, she will have to rebuild it and test it, from which springs another host of seemingly nonsensical behavior. The Bargaining/What Is Reality" stage was kind of treacherous in our family, because Mom was finally awake enough to be making rational decisions and acting like herself, but doing a bunch of things I didn't understand to test what was safe and what was not. Expect risk-taking behaviors like drinking and smoking and making unwise decisions financially.
The depression stage is different from person to person, but if you have seen your mother have a major emotional setback before, then expect more of the same and for it to last a lot longer, because this time there could be survivors guilt, which is the "It should have been me" bullshit that your brain will pull out when someone whose safety you emotionally depend on dies. She may also blame herself for negative outcomes of the reality testing/bargaining phase, especially in the longest part of the grief process.
Acceptance and getting on with her life are going to be different for everyone. In my family we just avoided subjects that led back to my brother and focused on doing things that had never had much to do with him. Mom mostly gave up reading scifi and instead started reading murder mysteries and fantasy books, I gave up sports and giving a shit about people I didnt know, we all tried to not walk on each others sore spots, though actually having a conversation about it didnt ever happen, not even after we all went through therapy when I was 13 and we were all still fucked up.
I hope your family has a higher emotional health baseline from which to fall, and that you have the financial stability to get therapy from the start. Because even with this tiny helpful guide, trust me, you are not prepared for this. No one ever can be.
Please do not blame yourself or anyone else for that. That, too, is a tragedy.