I lost my mom to cancer when I was 20. I can only tell you the truth - it takes a long time for the pain to subside, but it never truly goes away. The only thing you can do is to talk with friends and family and to tell stories about your dad to keep his memory alive. It's been 13 years or so since then and recently I got married and we had our first kid. We "adopted" a very good family friend to be a surrogate grandmother to our son, not in replacement of my mom but just to fill the void.

I know this goes against the ethos of HN, but life is really not about software. It's about people. Get out there and live life and meet people. A lot of exercise and playing loud angry music was also really good for me for a while.