BioMed
Sudden parental death makes grief physical, disordered, and resistant to public language.
Loss teaches how much mourning depends on words: words fail, and the bereaved keep grasping for new ones. Even ordinary grammar wounds, as when you must write about someone you love in the past tense and cannot believe you are doing it.
Grief is not steady sadness but a churn of moods that change into each other. A family laughs remembering the dead person's humour, and the laughter slides into tears, then sadness, then a roaring anger the mourner was not ready for.
The common advice that you should face grief, talk it out and pass through it falls apart at grief's core. The mourner finds herself stuck in the middle of the churning, with no exit on the other side, and regrets ever being so sure there was one.
Death puts a lasting "never" into everyday life, and it feels like a punishment. The bereaved go on reaching, hands held out, for things that are no longer there, and the reaching does not stop.
When a bond was very precious, the mourner may hold back from showing her suffering until she understands its shape herself. This can clash with a culture that expects loud, outward, performed mourning, and with a society that wants the bereaved to look calm.
Each formal act that records a death makes the mourner admit it has really happened. So the practical business that follows a death is itself painful, and part of the mind resists it.
Grief marks the body first, then seeks a lasting form, such as words on a page that say "I am my father's daughter." The dead live on through what they shaped in the living, so a work made by the child keeps the parent present.
Mourning shows up first as bodily injury, not as a feeling: sides sore from crying, a bitter tongue, a crushing weight on the chest, a heart beating out of step with the self. Crying turns out to be muscular work, and the shock is less the pain than how physical it is.
The stock phrases others offer the bereaved can feel hollow and even grating, because they are fitted to grief in general rather than to this one loss. The mourner learns how thin polite consolation sounds from inside the loss.
Losing a parent brings one's own death close and makes life feel temporary. That closeness creates urgency: the mourner feels she must do her work now, because she may not have long.