I lost my dad about 2 months ago but it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. I’m at the point where I can sleep at night and I don’t have that sickly empty feeling in my stomach anymore, but gosh it’s still so hard.
The hardest part is knowing that he won’t be around to watch me get married or have my first kid. It’s all of the unmade memories that make me feel so sad. Deep down I was holding onto this hope that maybe he would want to do better for himself. Maybe he would get sober someday and really want to love me the way I needed him to.
It’s also the guilt I feel for being so hard on him the year before he passed away. He had health issues outside of the addiction that I could’ve been more empathetic towards. I was just growing so emotionally tired of worrying about him. I said so many mean (but true) things and blocked him a few times. But I talked to him over the phone the night he died. I told him I loved him so that brings me peace.
It was also hard realizing how much he’d lied to me about the drugs he was doing. When I was going through his stuff with my siblings, we found crack pipes, lots of empty Oxy prescription bottles, and of course he did weed. The weed was never my main concern, but there were several times he would get the munchies and down an entire French silk pie with diabetes and no insulin on hand. His death was caused by a culmination of these kinds of decisions.
I’m sad but I also don’t have this constant anxiety anymore. Has anyone else lost an addict/chronically ill parent? Did you feel the same way?