[exasperaited]

My sympathies for what must be just an awful time for you —- sporadic pancreatic cancer is just a lurking evil.

My mother died of an unusual form of it, just a little older than yours, when I was in my early twenties. It was terrible.

The only unusual thing was some prior surgery near her pancreas, from twenty years earlier, had apparently had severe scarring that was noticed during surgery to fit a stent.

[olologin]

I am sorry for your loss as well, it was even harder for you in twenties.

[exasperaited]

The thing is that as awful as it was, maybe I personally got through it initially without doing all the grieving, because I thought so much of my grieving had happened after she was diagnosed with such an awful, bleak thing.

In reality I was still dealing with it ten, fifteen years later. Because pre-death grief and post-death grief are different things.

This only really came home to me three and a half years ago when my (elderly) father died after years of moderate dementia; this hit me so hard and continues to weigh on me, and I realised I'd tried to avoid grief when my mother died. I miss my father in a way I never allowed myself to miss my mother, and he had the good long life.

Grief is there whether you want to acknowledge it or not.