Being Angry at God After Losing Both My Parents

I keep dreaming that Mama is still alive.

In one dream, we were at the burial. The casket was there, the people were gathered, and then she just sat up. Woke up from inside the coffin like she was just sleeping. I walked over to her, calm on the outside but freaked out inside, and said, “Mama, I love the idea that I am seeing you alive, but are you not supposed to be dead? What happened?” I was already trying to logic it out in the dream. Maybe the embalmer didn’t do it right. Maybe the formalin didn’t work. Some practical, fixable explanation for why she was still here. I even started to wonder. Maybe Mama’s death was the dream. Maybe the reality is she is still with us.

In another dream, she had gone missing at sea. We’d waited days with no sign of her, so we decided to hold the funeral anyway. And then Papa showed up. He wrestled a crocodile, opened its mouth with his bare hands and pulled Mama out, fully alive, wearing the yellow shirt I know so well. Again, she looked very casual, like she just got out of the car. I even told everyone the funeral was cancelled. Mama was found. Go eat and take the food home.

If you knew my Mama, you’d know she had this completely unbothered look like nothing weird happened here. That was her face in both dreams.

I want to be clear. My dreams were not like horror movies. They are like suspense comedies starring my parents. Which honestly feels exactly right for who they were. The dreams are heavy and funny at the same time.

Kind of like grief itself.

But every time I wake up, the same question surfaces. Quiet. Almost polite. God, what if Mama’s death was the dream? What if You could still bring her back?

I’ve learned there’s a name for what lives underneath that question. Anger at God during grief doesn’t always arrive loud. Sometimes it arrives as a dream you keep having. A question you keep asking. A silence you keep waiting for Him to fill.

And for a long time, I didn’t know I was allowed to bring it to Him at all.

When It Hit: Numbness Before the Anger

I was not angry right away. I want to say that clearly, because I think we tell a cleaner version of grief than the actual one.

When Mama died in October 2024, what came first was numbness. Reality takes time to sink in, especially when you’ve been bracing yourself and praying and believing for a different outcome. I am a positive person. I know the Scriptures. Enough to know, in my head, that God knew this was coming even when I didn’t.

“Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”

Psalm 139:16

That verse means every day of every person’s life is known to God before it begins. He doesn’t lose track of us. He didn’t lose track of Mama. I believed that. I still do.

But belief and feeling are two different things.

If you’ve been bracing yourself and praying for a different outcome and it didn’t come, you know exactly what that numbness feels like. You pick up your Bible and the words are there but they land somewhere soft, like throwing a stone into water. You believe it but you just can’t feel it yet.

The questions in those early months were gentle. “Why so soon? Why did she have to suffer through so much pain to get there? And why without me beside her?”

I had flown home when she had the heart attack in August, 14 hours in the air and 6 by land, with a troubled heart that we might not make it on time. But we did. She survived, and in those weeks at home she finally got to hold Eevee and meet Peter. There was so much life still happening. I thought we had more time.

And then October 8 came, and we didn’t.

I asked God quietly, “What are You teaching me here?”

I got no clear answer. And then, 9 months later, Papa was gone too.

That’s when the quiet, polite version of anger at God during grief gave way to something more raw. The kind that doesn’t stay gentle.

The Second Loss Is When the Anger Came

The gusty winds were just starting to settle that Friday night, the tail end of a storm passing through. My brother had just started his first real job out of college in Pampanga, a 5-hour drive from home, and it had only been two weeks since he left. He hopped on a bus to come home for the weekend anyway, storm or not. Papa drove out to the bus terminal to fetch him that night.

The next night, Papa was gone.

No warning. No hospital. My brother found him already cold, looking like he had simply fallen asleep. The same boy who went home to spend more time with his father came home to find him gone instead.

I was pregnant with Emman when I got the call. A boy, though Papa never knew that. I hadn’t told him yet. He would have been so happy. He never got to hear it.

And then came the familiar dread of booking the first available flight. I had done this before, rushing home because a parent was dying. My body already knew what this kind of travel meant. But this time our flight got delayed by 18 hours. Pregnant, with Eevee on my hip, sitting in an airport, just wanting to get home. Just wanting to get there before it felt too real.

When we finally landed, neither of them would be there.

And that is when something in me stopped being gentle about it.

Papa passed in July 2025. Less than a year after Mama. I was still grieving while carrying a baby, still trying my best to hold myself together by a thread, and now I had to do it again. And I couldn’t grieve the way grief wants you to, all the way through and unguarded, because I had to watch my emotions for the sake of the baby. I had to contain it. Carry it carefully.

And I resented that.

I hated that I would give birth without my parents there. Eevee, barely 2 years old, and the baby still inside me would grow up without their grandparents. I pitied myself and pitied my siblings. I looked at my life and knew this was not what I planned. None of this was what I planned.

And underneath all of it, the question had changed shape. It wasn’t gentle anymore. It was louder. “God, why Papa too? Why so soon after Mama? Why did You leave me here without either of them?”

If you’ve ever felt that question, not the polite version but the real one, the one you’d be embarrassed to say out loud in church, you’re not alone in it. And you’re not outside God’s reach for feeling it.

“How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”

Psalm 13:1

David wrote that. God put it in the book and left it there, unedited. He didn’t smooth it over or add a disclaimer. The question stays on the page, right next to the praise.

He can hold both.

Postpartum, Nightmares, and the Season I Hated My Life

Emman was born in December 2025. Papa never got to meet him. Mama had already been gone for over a year by the time he arrived. I brought a baby into the world without a single grandparent in the room, and then the postpartum hormones arrived on top of everything else.

The grief dreams, which had been mostly funny up to this point, changed. They became nightmares. The kind you wake from shaking, lying still for a minute just to remember where you are.

I was angry all the time. At Eevee, for being a toddler and needing things. At the relentless chores and the sameness of every day that felt exactly like the one before it. I felt like a slave in my own house. Like someone who just did the tasks and fed the people and kept things running and had nothing left. I felt abandoned. Stuck. Helpless in the specific way that comes from having no one left who is your parent.

I hated my life. Those are the exact words. I’m not ashamed of saying it now, even though it scared me to feel it then.

Maybe you know that feeling too. Maybe anger at God during grief has dropped you somewhere you didn’t expect to land, somewhere past the sadness and into something harder to name. And you’ve looked at the ordinary mess of your day and thought, this is not the life I was supposed to have.

That feeling is not evidence that God has left you. Sometimes it’s the moment just before He meets you.

What the Psalms Say About Anger at God During Grief

I didn’t have the Psalms of lament handed to me when Mama died. I had to stumble into them myself, somewhere between the numbness and the nightmares.

A full third of the Psalms are laments. Complaints. Cries directed straight at God. Anger at God during grief, including anger at God after losing a parent, is not a faith failure. It’s documented in Scripture. God kept it there on purpose.

“I am worn out from my groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.”

Psalm 6:6

That is in the Bible. God kept it there, which means He is not afraid of your 2am. He is not waiting for you to clean yourself up before you come to Him.

Here’s what I noticed about the lament Psalms. They start in the dark, name exactly what hurts and they don’t rush past it. And then, not always quickly, not always neatly, they turn. They end somewhere different than they started.

The turn doesn’t erase the lament. It just means the lament was heard.

He can hold both, the cry and the comfort. That was the thing I had to learn. I kept thinking I needed to arrive at peace before I could come to God. But the Psalms show the opposite. You come to Him in the dark, and peace sometimes comes after.

So I started praying my actual prayers. The ugly ones. “God, I’m exhausted and I don’t understand this and I miss them every single day.” Not the tidy version. The real one.

He didn’t leave. He never once left.

If the Psalms of lament are new to you and you want to understand how scripture became an anchor in grief, the story of my 20-year-old Bible is a good place to start: I Carried This Bible for Twenty Years and Regret Not Opening It on Day One.

The Ezer Moment: When God Shifted Something in Me

About 3 or 4 months postpartum, something shifted. There was no dramatic moment. No vision. Just a quiet settling in my chest, like a hand on a shoulder in a dark room.

God reminded me of something I had known but stopped living: I am an ezer.

That’s the Hebrew word used in Genesis 2:18, when God says He will make a helper for Adam. The English translation is “helper,” and I’d had that picture in my head of a helper as an assistant. Someone in a secondary role.

But that is not what ezer means.

“The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.'”

Genesis 2:18

The same word used for Eve is used for God Himself throughout the Old Testament. Psalm 115:9 calls God our ezer, our help and our shield. Psalm 70:5 says God is our ezer and our deliverer. The word carries the image of a military rescuer. A strong ally. Someone who shows up in the most desperate moment and turns the tide.

That is the word God chose for Eve. That is the word He chose for me.

When I understood that, something in how I saw my own life changed. The dishes were still there. Eevee still needed things. Emman still woke up at 3am. None of the circumstances moved.

But I had been standing in my kitchen feeling trapped, and God was showing me I was placed there. There is a difference between being trapped and being called. That difference is everything.

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

Romans 8:28

ll things. The grief and the anger and the nightmares and the postpartum dark and the season where I looked at my life and hated it.

He was in that too.

If you want the fuller story of how I walked through losing both my parents and what God did in that season — my testimony is here: A Christian Mother’s Testimony of Grief, Faith and Healing.

The Questions Didn’t Leave. They Just Changed Shape.

The comedy grief dreams still come sometimes. Mama sitting up in the casket. Papa wrestling crocodiles. I wake up and the sadness is there, but it’s softer than it used to be.

The nightmares have mostly quieted. Not entirely. Mostly.

The questions are still there too. Maybe they always will be. But they’ve changed texture. They feel less like accusations and more like conversations. I can bring them to God and leave them in His hands without needing a full answer before I can keep going.

He can hold both, my trust and my questions, my faith and my fury. I’ve stopped trying to bring Him only the cleaned-up version.

Pressing in, even angry, even with a fistful of questions. That is where the shift came. Staying in the conversation. Saying the hard things out loud to a God who already knew them anyway.

He didn’t need me to perform peace I didn’t have. He just wanted me close.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

Psalm 34:18

Close. Not distant. Not waiting for your grief to clean itself up first. Close, in the exact place where you are.

I lost both my parents within 9 months of each other. I was pregnant for one loss and postpartum for the aftermath of both. Grief after losing a parent is heavy enough on its own. Losing both, in the same year, while you’re trying to grow a life. That’s a different kind of weight. Anger at God during grief doesn’t make you faithless. It makes you honest. I have been angry and exhausted and lost and numb and deeply, quietly sad. I have looked at my life and hated it.

And He has been here for every single version of that.

If you’re angry at God right now, you are not doing this wrong.

You are being honest. And He can take it.

“Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.”

1 Peter 5:7

All of it. The faith and the fury. The trust and the questions. The dreams where they are alive and the mornings when they are not.

All of it fits inside His hands. He can hold both.

Before you go

Read Psalm 13 tonight. All 6 verses. It takes 2 minutes. Notice how it starts, notice where it ends, and ask yourself honestly: which verse am I in right now? You don’t have to be at verse 5 yet. Wherever you are, He can hold both.