I am so glad I stumbled onto this message board. I understand about the guilt. My mother died Jan. 29 and I loved, still love, her beyond words. We were very close. She was very old and her death was inevitable, but it hit us hard. I have guilt too. Horrible, painful guilt because I failed to get her to the doctor for symptoms of the preventable illness that killed her. If I had taken her to the doctor, I asked myself a thousand times, would she have lived longer? Would she have had an easier death? The truth is, I will never know the answers to those questions. But I learned something about my guilt last night when I met for the first time with a grieving support group offered through our local hospice. We grievers all had guilt. We all felt we'd let the person we loved down. The counselor helped me a lot by letting me see that my self-judgment and my guilt were something familiar I put on myself because I was not yet ready to face the unknown--life without my mother and life with unanswered questions. In other words, it was easier for me to beat myself up than to face my unknown life without my mother. Once this became clear to me, it has been easier to for me to understand that I have to work on letting go of the guilt. This has helped me to write this down.
