People told you it would be hard when your parent died. They told you grief would come and that you should let yourself feel it. They brought food in the first week and called in the second week and checked in less frequently after that, assuming, as people reasonably do, that grief follows some arc — intense at first, then gradually softening, then resolved.
Nobody told you about the weeks after the funeral, when the casseroles were gone and the calls had stopped and you found yourself sitting in your car in your own driveway at 7 PM, unable to remember what you used to do in the evenings before everything became about your parent.
Nobody told you about the strange loss of purpose. The phantom limb of the to-do list that used to govern your days and suddenly doesn’t. The way you reached for your phone to call your parent’s doctor about a test result before remembering there was no test, no doctor, no parent to call about. The way grief arrived not as the sadness you expected but as a disorienting blankness — an absence not just of your parent but of the person you had become in relation to them.
Nobody told you it might take longer to recover from the caregiving than from the death.