I'm sorry for your loss, OP. I think the biggest thing we lose when an NParent dies is that hope that I think a lot of us harbor: that our parent will magically become a good person and love us the way we needed. I think many of us have that and when that NParent dies, so does that hope. My NMom died a few years back. For a while, she instantly went on that pedestal that only the perfect and the dead can stand on. I mourned the mother I never had SO hard. I cried myself to sleep for months and would randomly cry for over a year later. We were on what I thought were good terms when she passed (she'd apologized for all of the abuse a few months prior to her death and I thought we'd been working at building a real relationship...ha), but that was more N bullshit and she was still a horrible person.

I spent a couple of years over-analyzing everything and I'll give you the Cliff's Notes version, OP: you deserved a better mother than what you got. You deserved a mother worthy of mourning. You deserved to be loved. You're probably going to spend an endless amount of time thinking about "what if" and wondering if your NMom would have become a better person/parent eventually, if you could have had the mother you always wished you'd had. It's years later and I still miss the woman my NMom could be when she was in a good mood, as rare as it was. I miss the mom that could be nice. It's all bullshit, of course, because the damage she did with her abuse is pretty much a permanent scar on me that I can never get rid of, no matter how much I try. Her death put a finality on things; there's no more "hope" that things can be different, they are as they were. They were disappointing and hurtful and damaging. Looking back, I think that's one of the biggest things I grieved--that hope. Ugh. Sending hugs your way, OP.