Mum: The Complicated, Beautiful, Heartbreaking Truth of Losing Her

Grief is not always straightforward. Sometimes you are grieving the person who died. And sometimes you are grieving the relationship you always wanted but never quite had. When it's both at once — that's when it gets complicated.

My mum passed away suddenly and unexpectedly, and on the 8th of May this year it will be eight years since she left. Eight years. And I still catch myself reaching for the phone sometimes. Still smell her perfume when she's nowhere near. Still ask her questions I don't have answers to.

I want to write about her honestly. Not to diminish her — she deserves far better than that — but because I think there are women out there who lost a mother they had a complicated relationship with, and who are carrying a grief that doesn't fit neatly into any of the condolence cards. This is for them. This is for us.

Who She Was

My mum was a survivor. Of domestic violence. Of sexual abuse as a child. She carried things that no person should ever have to carry, and she carried them largely alone, largely in silence, for her entire life. What those experiences did to her — what they do to anyone — was leave her emotionally fragile in ways that rippled out into everything, including her relationship with me.

She was an alcoholic. For most of my life a functioning one — present enough, managing enough — but towards the end things became harder for her. And being the only daughter, I felt the full weight of that. There was no one to share it with. No one to turn to and say — is this hard for you too? It was just me, and the complicated love I had for a woman who wanted more closeness than either of us knew how to build.

I love my mum. Loving her was sometimes very painful. But loving someone and having an easy relationship with them are not the same thing, and pretending otherwise would be a great disservice to us both.

And here is something I have sat with for a long time: none of what made our relationship difficult was her fault. It was done to her. By men who abused their power. By men who took from her before she was old enough to protect herself, and again when she was supposed to be safe. She didn't choose her fragility. It was inflicted on her. And then she spent the rest of her life doing her best with a foundation that had been cracked before she even had a chance to build it.

The Eight Weeks

She was in hospital for eight weeks before she died. Eight weeks of watching someone you love be vulnerable in a way you've never seen them be vulnerable before. Eight weeks of hospitals and decisions and sitting with a grief that hadn't technically happened yet but was already consuming you from the inside.

I was not in a good place during those eight weeks. I was in the middle of the toxic relationship I've written about elsewhere — emotionally unsupported, running on empty, carrying more than any one person should carry alone. And one day, taking a break from the hospital, I fell on the road. Not tripped slightly. Fell. Hard. My entire leg was swollen and black and blue for weeks.

I've thought about that fall a lot since. I think I was punishing myself because my relationship with my mum had never been what she wanted it to be. The grief I was holding inside came out through my body and was visible for everyone to see. Grief — especially complicated grief — has a way of making itself known, one way or another. You can't hold that much inside indefinitely.

I felt utterly alone during those eight weeks. Unsupported. Broken in a way I couldn't articulate to anyone around me. And yet I kept going. Because that's what we do, isn't it? We keep going. Not because we're superhuman, but because stopping feels impossible when people need you.

The Guilt Nobody Talks About

When you lose a parent you had a complicated relationship with, the grief comes tangled up with guilt in a way that is almost impossible to separate. You grieve them. And then you feel guilty for all the times you kept your distance. And then you feel guilty for feeling guilty, because you know you kept your distance for good reasons. And round and round it goes.

I have sat with the question of whether I was the daughter she needed. Whether I could have given more, been more present, bridged the gap between us more often. And the honest answer is: I did what I could with what I had at the time. We both did. She was doing her best with the trauma she was carrying. I was doing my best with the emotional landscape I was navigating. Neither of us was failing. We were both just… human. And yet, even with all of that, there are things I want you to know.

What I Want You to Know

We are all just flawed, beautiful, struggling humans.

I have also come to recognise a thread that runs through her story and mine. Men who took. Men who damaged. What was done to my mum left her fractured in ways that rippled into our relationship. And that fracture — that absence of the steady, safe maternal grounding I needed — left me more vulnerable to the relationship I eventually found myself in.

Damage travels through generations. Ancestral trauma is real — not a buzzword, not a concept, but a lived, inherited reality. The trauma of the people who hurt her. The trauma she carried and that I absorbed growing up. The trauma of the relationship I found myself in as an adult. It is all intertwined. It does not exist in separate boxes. It is one long thread running through lives and generations, touching everything it passes through.

As human beings, we have a responsibility to look at the past and understand how it is shaping the present. To ask ourselves honestly — what have I inherited? What am I carrying that was never mine to carry? How is my unexamined trauma affecting the people around me, my children, the next generation? These are not comfortable questions. But they are the most important ones we can ask. Because the only way the thread ends is if someone has the courage to look at it clearly and say — this stops here. This stops with me.

Here is what I know: complicated grief is far more common than we admit. Parent and child relationships over the past hundred years have been shaped by war, poverty, addiction, abuse, and trauma that was never spoken about and never treated. Most of us are carrying more than we let on. Most of us loved imperfect people and were loved imperfectly in return. That is not a failure. That is the human condition.

The problem is that we are not very good at looking at our shadows. At sitting with the uncomfortable truth of who our parents were, what they carried, and how it shaped us. And if we struggle to look honestly at our parents and what they carried, we are even less willing to look at ourselves. At our own shadows. At the ways our unexamined pain leaks out into the people we love most — our children, our partners, our friends. We don't mean to pass it on. But we do, until we stop and look. Really look. Because those locked away parts don't disappear. They just come out sideways — in our relationships, our bodies, our children.

Complicated grief deserves to be talked about — not tidied up, not made palatable, but spoken honestly. If you are carrying something like this, you are not alone. And you are not wrong for feeling all of it at once.

I'd love to hear your story in the comments. Let's stop pretending grief is simple. It rarely is. 💙