was is something like a long drawn out illness?
was it unexpected?
was it horrible and broke your whole world in pieces?
was is wished upon?

are they alive yet gone?

both parents. drugs. long time ago though, so it wasn't so obviously painful.
but growing up, i think it weighed heavily on me, in good and bad ways.
but it was especially weird not to have parents when i started elementary school, cause i never really understood "families" in general. which is probably why i'm still kind of a loner. like p.w.

wow thats heavy mr wanker. i couldnt possibly imagine having to go through that. i was so attached to my mom growing up. i hid behind her legs for so long cus i was a shy one. so, you lost both rents pre elementary school, were you in foster care or did you have family to take care of you?
im a loner and i grew up with both parental units at my disposal til i was 15, so i dont thinkthat has much to do with much in terms of being a loner.

i lost my mother in 1990, but i was young enough and that's been so long ago that i don't remember it (or her, really, for that matter). i have some photos though. it was completely unexpected - she had an aneurysm. she was 35, i think. i'm not postive.

it never affected me growing up even though the school kept putting me in counseling, but more recently it's started to bother me. i suppose now that i'm older, i wonder how my life would've played out with her present. i'm sure everyone who loses a parent goes through that, but i wonder even more since i have no idea what she was like.

also recently, i found a website called findagrave that (for whatever reason) just happened to have a picture of my mother's headstone. i think it's a bit weird to go around and randomly take pictures of someone's grave, but i enjoyed seeing it again as i haven't visited the cemetery in a long time.

i don't know my father and he wasn't married to my mother so i just pretend/assume he's dead.

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do you mind if i ask why you think or feel that it didnt effect you? when it happened did you turn it off? was she raising you?

she was raising me, but i'm not sure i was old enough to fully process the idea of death. i'm sure it must have had some effect, but as far back into my childhood as i can remember, i don't remember any sort of grief or trauma. it was almost as if she never existed. i have a very faint memory of being at the neighbors' the night it happened and being told my mother was in the hospital, but i can't remember any sort of emotion.

i'm actually curious now how i took it when it happened. i'd ask my family but i don't know that it's something i feel comfortable talking to them about.

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No relationship with either parent due to their drug/alcohol/mental issues...as cold as this is going to sound, it's for the best, sometimes you have to distance yourself from people who set really bad examples. They are still alive, which is shocking, I would have figured they both would have overindulged or have killed themselves by now.

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Here's a spoiler for you: Chinese Democracy is shit

was is something like a long drawn out illness?
no
was it unexpected?
wel...yes and no
was it horrible and broke your whole world in pieces?
yes
was is wished upon?
by him i suppose, not by anyone else

are they alive yet gone?
the other one is, yes

This.

Except I don't think it's in any way comparable to the death of a parent.

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my father was sick with cancer for about two years (when i was eighteen) and for the most part, because my mother had to work, i was the one to stay home weekdays and care for him. i would take him to radiation treatments. put aloe vera gel on the burns on his back. feed him instant breakfast. it was like a long and drawn gradual mourning process. eventually i started praying for him to pass to stop his suffering. he died at home while my sister and i had gone for donuts. later that day there was a major earthquake in the bay area. when we came home and my mom told us he had just passed, i felt overwhelming joy(?) for his release from the sick body and hurting.

he was a really great dad. alot of my friends dads were assholes of assorted varieties. but my dad was amazing and i am gratefull. i visited with him in a vivid dream several months after his death and he was holding a beautifull baby and they were both smiling radiantly.

i miss him very much.

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albert, you are the father

this is really beautiful, especially the bit about the dream. makes me tear up a bit, really.

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the only parental guidance i ever had was for two years when my father wasn't in prison. but he and his parents all died within a year of each other, when i was 4/5. my mom was never around at all. so once my dad and grandparents died, i was raised by my dad's drunk sister and her boyfriend. i was on my own by about 15 or 16, and i started to try and track down my mom. but when i was 18, i found out she had died the year before.

hiding behind mama's legs sounds good, i wish i could've had that sometimes. but yeah, i don't blame my life on that kind of stuff anymore. or at least not as badly as i have in the past. i always had a hard time not letting myself feel like a victim of circumstance. but it's also kept me strong and determined to live. double-edged sword kinda?

i'm sort of curious why you started this thread though.

I lost my mother 2 years ago. my mother was sick for most of her life - she couldn't have kids of her own so my sister and I were adopted because she desperately wanted children. It was a tough process as nobody really wanted to give a potentially ill woman children to raise.

my mother had hodgkins at 18, was treated for years but didn't expect to live, the doctors literally told my father not to marry her because she was too sick and likely wouldn't make it.

the cancer went into remission and she was fine for about 15-20 years (ish?) I can remember being in 11th grade when things started to go wrong again. Her blood was messed up from radiation treatments and they put her on a coctail of pills. we discovered that she'd contracted Hepatitis C from tainted blood she'd received in the 70's. We also discovered that she had a faulty heart valve. she underwent open heart surgery to repair it. things went wrong again afterwards with more blood problems and her needing to have her spleen removed as her platelets were being killed off and there was a chance she'd die of internal bleeding because of what her own body was doing to itself.

a few more years of med coctails until they went wrong and she was hospitalised for a med related psychotic episode. after that (or was it before I really can't even remember now there were so many problems) she would have 'drop spells' where she'd pass out - she couldn't drive or be anywhere alone. the meds for this were horrific. the platelet blood issue returned and she had to go in for twice weekly transfusions. In the end she was hospitalised with breathing problems, they ended up putting her into a coma and onto a ventilator, things got worse and when they didn't improve our family had to make the decision to take her off the machines. We were with her when they took out all the tubes and I was holding her hand when she died.

her funeral was a month to the day before I got married and she was cremated in the dress she'd planned on wearing to the wedding. My niece was born a month after the wedding, something else she missed.

Because of so much else going on I didn't grieve for a while, I think I'm still processing it. I moved across an ocean 2 months after it happened.

I think in her own way she let go, everything was such hard work and there were so many health problems. my sister was pregnant and I was getting married, in her eyes we were taken care of.

I made a thread last month, I think about her all the time and from the looks of things she might still be here in some weird way, there are things to do with my sister and her kids that can't really be explained.

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Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room.

i lost my dad over a year and a half ago to cancer. he had been ill for a while but had not told us until my uncle callend my mum to say he was in bad shape. i hadn't spoken to him in over 10 years due to his alcoholism. we went to see him and as soon as i walked in i knew yhe only had a few weeks to live. he was yellow and thin and weak, the chemo wasn't working and he ws in major pain. it was extremely hard to see him like that and to have to let go of all the bs form the previous years and just try to be there.

while this was happening i lost an aunt to cancer and my grandfather was inthe same hospital as my dad. my dad died onthe sunday night and my grandfather died a week later. it was the hardest and most emotional week i've ever had.

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my dad died about 5 yers ago (summer I was 17). It was unexpected and it wasn't, he was a heroin addict and he had people after him who wanted to kill him and I wasn't allowed to know where he lived. At the beginning of that year me and my mum had both said to each othr that it felt like he was going to die that year. But I thought he would die of a heroin overdose or something drink/hep related but acutally he got run over. theydid a big investigation into it becuse they thought he might haev got run over on purpose.
my grandad (who was a gross old man) went on tv and offered a reward (that he didn't have) to anyone with information.

I'll be honest (even though sometimes people get angry when I tell them) there was quite a big part of me that just really enjoyed my dad dying, I liked that there was someething that could cause me to feel somthing SO big. like when I went to look at his body (which was a few days dead and with one eye and his mouth open and not enbalmed becasue of hs hep and also yellow because of that) and it filled me up with fear and anger and really massssive feelings. and I liked the drama and attention and telling people andseeing how their faces looked when I told them.

But I felt awful a lot of the time and freaked out by lto of things. I don' think it brokemy whole world apart but it certainly shifted things around in me. Ultimately though I think it made other things seem smaller which I kind of miss. You know its like if you ate one fo the hottest chilllis that you could those chillils that had tasted hot before might seem less so.

It wasn't wished on him but at the same time he had a sad life that seemed to be getting worse and that's not so tragic to leave that behind.

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Now honies play me close like butter played toast

I'm the next generation. My mum lost her mum to breast cancer when she was 6 and she's never really recovered. Her dad re-married (to his cousin who was 20 years younger than him) and she didn't want my mum around so mum was passed from relative to relative. They had another child, Fiona and told her mum was a 'friend of the family'. Fiona found-out on mum's wedding day that they were half-sisters because Grandad had to walk her down the aisle and give her away.

Supposedly this is the trigger of my ocd, because mum was depressed ever since I can remember I always felt responsible for her and was scared to leave the house/go to school incase she died while I was away.

I can't believe what so many of you have gone through, I hope you've got good support.

Joanna - the things moving about in your sister's house - how's it going?

I always want to hug you because we both lost the 2 generations so closely together. my mother was in her induced coma when my grandmother died of lung cancer. five days later we watched her go.

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Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room.