I lost my daughter twenty days ago. I feel as if my heart has been torn out.

It has been just over three weeks since my daughter died. She was thirty years old. Only a few months earlier, she had had a baby girl and her life finally seemed to be taking a bright turn.

Since that day, I feel like I am moving through some kind of bad dream. I wake up in the morning and for a few seconds I think that nothing has happened, then reality returns and overwhelms me again.

My daughter lived abroad, in another European city. When I heard she was ill, I tried to leave immediately, but I didn't manage to get there in time. This thought torments me: I didn't get to see her again, I couldn't hold her hand in her final moments.

What's more, due to a series of bureaucratic complications, we have not yet been able to organise the funeral as we would have liked. Everything seems suspended, unfinished, as if reality itself is struggling to accept what has happened.

Just a few months ago, we said goodbye with the promise to see each other again soon. We were happy about the birth of her baby girl. I thought we would share so many things together, that I would see her grow as a mother.

I keep asking myself why this happened. Why life can be so cruel. I find myself thinking that years ago I had already lost my mother at a very young age, and now it seems that life has taken something essential from me again.

I cannot understand what sense all this makes. I feel as if someone has torn a piece of my heart out.

Reading your words, one can sense how raw this pain still is, almost physical. A few weeks have passed, and everything you describe – the feeling of unreality, the thoughts that keep returning to what happened, the need to understand why – is something that many people experience when a loss comes so suddenly and so deeply unnatural.

For a parent, the death of a son or daughter is an event that throws the very order of life into crisis. It is as if the world suddenly ceases to have the logic it had before. This is why the mind continues to seek explanations, to wonder what design there might be behind it, to retrace the last moments and dwell on what could not be done.

In your case, there is also a very specific pain: not being able to get there in time. When something like this happens, it is easy for the mind to get stuck on that point, as if that moment encapsulated the entire meaning of the relationship. But the love between a mother and daughter is not measured in the last minutes or days. It is made up of the whole life shared before. Even if you could not be there physically at that moment, the bond you have built does not disappear and is not erased by that absence.

It is also understandable that you feel lost because everything seems to be in limbo: the fact that you have not yet been able to hold a funeral, that you have not had a clear moment of farewell, often makes it more difficult for the heart and mind to realise what has happened. Rituals, even when they seem like mere formalities, serve precisely this purpose: they help to give shape to loss and to share grief with others.

There is another very powerful element in your story: the presence of that little girl who came into the world just a few months earlier. When birth and death are so close together, emotions can become even more confused. On the one hand, there is life going on, on the other, the enormous void left by the person who is no longer there. Many people in this situation say they feel torn between love, pain, nostalgia and disbelief.

At this moment, it is not necessary to find an immediate answer to the questions about the meaning of all this. Some questions about grief remain open for a long time, and sometimes they change shape over time rather than finding a real answer. What can help now is to allow yourself to go through the pain without feeling obliged to understand everything right away.

If you can, try not to remain alone in this pain. Talking about your daughter, remembering her, recounting who she was, what she loved, what bound you together, can be a very concrete way to continue to give her a place in your life. The bond with her does not end with her death: it changes form, but continues to exist in the memories, words and gestures that you will carry forward.

And perhaps, over time, even in the eyes of the child she left behind in this world.

Finally, we suggest you download our guide 'Coping with the Loss of a Child', which contains worksheets to help you recognise your emotions, cherish your memories, deal with guilt and loneliness, and learn to take care of yourself during the grieving process.