My wife passed away thirteen years ago after a medical crisis that lasted nearly a month. It was a roller-coaster ride of hopeful news and then hopes dashed. After she died, I reconstructed a timeline from various messages and papers and wrote it into a document. The idea being that I didn't want to ever forget the information but I also didn't want to struggle to keep it alive by constantly revisiting it.

It worked for me. The document exists on several safe backups. It gives me comfort to know I could look at it if I feel the need, but I haven't, not for a long time. Maybe writing out the history of your life with your Mom might help you.

I'm not a healthcare professional. Just someone who tries to get through the day.

I am actually looking at my Dad's Bday Monday, and going to do some grief and family trauma work this weekend to continue healing. We had a contentious relationship for much of my life, he was abrasive and moody, and I get a LOT of my personality traits from him, and passed them on to my son...hopefully we heal those issues.

One of the strange things that really helped my grief was seeing them as separate entities, with their own karma and lifepath that had nothing to do with me. It's gonna sound woo-woo, but I was able to see the separeteness of their life here and then have a 'spiritual' relationship with them as their infinite-souls who were free from all the bullshit now that they had crossed over. No more judgement, no more old anger, no more regrets. If I could see them as humans/souls with their own set of lessons, it made my stuff easier to handle...because I could see how we were necessary for eachother's growth. It also helped me do the deep trauma work of my childhood issues with them, because I was able to still love them and yet say "that was fucked up!"
It's bigger than that, but hopefully you kow what I mean.

As for the Obit. I wrote both my parents' because I'd been a news reporter and I actually worked obits. It was a whole different thinig to do it for my folks...and it was very difficult not getting flowery or creative abut the facts. The facts are like a resume, they don't tell the reality of the person's hardships and growth. It's a good excercise, and you have the added benefit of not writing it for the newspaper, so you CAN include stories or feelings in it.

If you get stuck or need any writing help, feel free to PM. Good for you for doing this grief work! It's not easy and so many people stuff it down instead of giving it light and air to dissapate...

was so remote, in more than one way, that her death qualified as loss only in that it ended any hope I still retained that we might ever have more of a relationship.

But even that loss took me hundreds of pages of journal-writing to process. Maybe I'm slow... but please don't be discouraged.

I'd encourage you to try to keep exploring all your feelings, including all the things you resented or found disappointing as well as the things you loved about her, the good thngs she did and your disappointments when she let you down or hurt you, your gratitude and your resentments and the things you wish you'd said to her about them; to bravely go down all the rabbit trails that may come to mind, even if they seem childish, unfair, or otherwise somehow inappropriate.

Pay yourself and her memory the respect and kindness of trying to "hear" all of them, since they're all part of a natural process, and focussing on them in privacy won't hurt a soul; and feeling/imagining/thinking deeply about them may actually help you see more into how and why things went wrong and what you both might have been struggling with.

And I do believe that writing them all out can help one understand and accept them better, and can help one start to move on.

If writing's really not your thing, maybe you can find some other medium in which to explore and express them?