It's weird - I wouldn't have said I was that close to my dad, but he was one of the certainties in my life, I knew he was always there and when it became obvious that he was terminal I found it very difficult to cope with the emotion around it - I would talk to him on the phone or talk about him to my missus and I would find myself in streams of tears. Once my mum called to say that he had died I was kind of numb, but would get triggered by all sorts of things (I commented around the time in the Meanwhile thread how the track Wish You Were Here on the radio, as I was driving down to be with my mum on the day that he died, had completely blindsided me and left me absolutely in pieces) and it continued to be like that through to the funeral. Strangely, I thought I would be a wreck in the funeral but actually coped pretty well, and have mostly been OK since - partly because of closure, partly from supporting my mum, partly from sorting out his estate and I guess mostly through getting on with the rest of my life - my family need me here now and I need to get on with it. That sounds kind of heartless, but it works for me - I'm pretty good at compartmentalising life stuff, for the most part.

Ultimately, there's no right or wrong way of dealing with grief - each of us has to get to acceptance somehow and move on to be there for our other loved ones and for ourselves, however it is that we get there, as long as we don't let it consume us: our departed loved ones wouldn't want that of us and we have to be prepared to give ourselves permission to move on to a different phase of our life.