Oh heavens no, you are not a loser at all. However that feeling that you "should" have been over it by now, is also common to many who are still morning over a loss even a few years after a loss.

We tend to think that we are supposed to experience something upsetting have a short time to get over it and then we are supposed to pick our spirits back up and continue on with life. Well, people don't always "just" have the capacity to do that.

And what many people do is when a loss like this happens, they disassociate and go numb. They go through the motions of a funeral etc, but they just feel empty inslde.
And this avoidance of having an imediate emotional response can last a year or two, and maybe more. Then all of a sudden they can see it and they think, my god, dad is gone and they see the reality and finality of it. And then the anxiety and fear and sense of loss comes forward. And yes, that statement you have about thinking "I should be over" it also comes forward too. And there can be the kind of guilt you are discribing as well in wonder about why you are just now having a reaction to that loss. This is something that happens to a lot of people, so you are not alone.

People tend to think that they are "supposed to know" how to morn a loss. Well, when a loss happens, often we have genuinely not learned the "emotional response" to attach to that experience. The whole time we are growing up, we slowly learn about emotions and how to have emotions to certain events and situations. And unless we go through a loss during our childhood years where we see how adults react emotionally, we don't really know how to respond.

You have to realize that the part of our brains that has emotions is not a part of our brain that is the thinking intelligent part. Our thinking intelligent part learns how to attach these emotions to whatever information comes into the brain the whole time we are growing and developing. So when I made the comment about "life experiences" that is what I mean, you have not had time to establish that part of your emotional responses by being around that kind of loss to a point where you have developed the knowledge of the emotions that are supposed to take place.

A child growing up learns how it is "ok" to be happy and "ok" to cry when something is wrong or there is an unanswered need and they also learn about anger when something happens that is not good or not right for them. There is so much developing in the brain of a young child where they are imprinted with emotional responses according to their environment. And children pick up emotional responses by watching their parents express these emotions as well, and a lot of times children pick up things that later on they don't realize they pick up.

Here is an example I noticed myself. I taught a child private riding lessons and she would express constantly in the lesson how she needed to stop and take a rest. She had all the facial expressions in order to this presentation of suddenly being tired and had to take a break. Now this child was young, about 6 years old and she had a lot of body language that was really beyond what I would call normal for a child that age.
And what I had learned about how she developed that was that her mother battled breast cancer while she was developing her emotions and senses which takes place the most up to age five when a child then developes their ONE personality in their brain. And what this child learned and saw in those early years was her mother turning to her constantly and saying, "not right now, I need to rest a bit" and she also saw the mothers whole body language that expressed that need. So what this little girl did, was imprint that same behavior in herself. And this is what parents do not understand happens when they are raising children.

People learn all their lives about emotions and how to "feel" and respond. And they pick up messages about "how" to react in all kinds of messages they take in. They pick it up in Movies, advertizing of all kinds as well as in each person they observe and interact with. And from that we develope our own unique knowledge about how we "feel" and react to our environments.

And for people who present with PTSD who have experienced, childhood tramas, they often review these childhood events with much more guilt and shame and wonder about how that child in them didn't know better and may have even participated in something bad. They carry guilt and shame, not realizing that when they look back on that child in them that that child did not really know "how" to respond to whatever they were experiencing yet. Often they do not "know" that when they are recalling difficult childhood events much later in life, they have had many more years to develope thier ability to attach emotions, including guilt and anger and fear to life experiences.

So, I hope that helps you understand what I mean by "life experiences" where you have had time to develope your own "sense of emotional responses" to a loss. And what you are feeling now?, that sense of confusion about you and your life and how you are afraid and confused? Well, you have not really "learned" yet how to deal with this either. And that is why it is so helpful to spend time with a therapist so you can learn how to come to a personal way of settling this confusion and then moving on with your life.

Open Eyes