Paula Joye knows there are two types of people. One of them has lost a parent.

The world splits, they say, into two types of people: those who live in the before it happens, and those who live in the after.

For Australian magazine editor Paula Joye, that moment — the "after" — arrived at 11.29pm on a Saturday with a phone call from paramedics.

"I could just hear Dad crying in the background. It is a surreal out-of-body experience," she told Mamamia's MID podcast.

Paula assumed her mum, Carole, who had been living with Parkinson's, had suffered a fall. Instead, paramedics told her her mum had died from a heart attack.

"I was waiting for the shoe to drop. I didn't expect it to be death," Paula said.

Two years on, Paula is still trying to work out how to live without her mum. She's grappling with the "everything hole" that loss leaves and the fact that you can be "compassionate and kind" but still say all the wrong things until you're in 'the club' yourself.

First, listen to Paula's chat with Holly Wainwright on MID. Post continues below.

The club Paula talks about is one "you never wanted to be a part of." It's made up of those who know a specific kind of grief.

"I thought I was compassionate and understanding, and I'm certain that I was, but until you've gone through it, you actually can't just give any advice," Paula said.

"The words that you say are wrong."

It's the part of the brochure of life we all gloss over, which is why when the time unfortunately arrives, we're all absolutely clueless.

For Paula, the depth of this loss was amplified by the person her mother, Carole, was: a highly intelligent woman who never complained, despite living with Parkinson's Disease from the age of 48.

"My mother was so brave," Paula said. "She was the smartest woman I've ever met… and that was with her til the end.

"She didn't really ever want to be identified by [Parkinson's]. She was really sort of raged against it till the end."

When Carole died, Paula inherited a monumental, urgent task.

"Nothing prepares you for organising the funeral of your mother," she said.

Fortunately, Carole had provided a roadmap: a "death drawer" with detailed instructions for how she wanted her funeral to be.

This preparation meant they could give her mother exactly what she wanted: a great funeral.

"It can't be too over the top," Paula remembers thinking. She and her sister created a service worthy of the 57-year love story Carole and her husband shared.

"I had massive, massive easels made... collages of photos. And I had them put on easels, like a gallery in the space for the wake," Paula said. "Every single person that was there was there in some space on [the collage]."

These visual tributes, dominated by joyous memories, were a deliberate way to fill the space with life. They now sit in her father's house.

The chaos of that first month eventually gives way to quiet, and it's in that quiet that the real, lasting grief sets in. Paula found herself doing things she never expected.

"I never thought I would go to the cemetery," she admitted. "The whole industry of death kind of appalled me."

But now, she goes.

It's a gentle ritual, something solely between Paula and her mum.

"I have found myself on her birthday, I take flowers," Paula said.

"I think I will always do it. And I think that's something I've learned about grief is that rituals are important."

These private rituals are the "little breathtakers in the whole sort of chasmic, wide open, desolate, Wuthering Heights-ness of it".

Riding the "seismic" wave of grief isn't easy. While some people feel the urge to "blow up marriages, people change jobs, people move house," Paula's advice is simple: be gentle with yourself. It's something she's had to learn.

"Self-care is not selfish in grief, it's essential," she stressed. "Whatever it is you need to do to get through."

Paula's most profound takeaway is the realisation that we generally don't know how to support someone after the first rush of sympathy.

"People are incredible in the first instance," she said, noting the texts and casseroles.

"And then life moves on as it should. It's not their mother, it's not their father."

But for the person who's grieving, life moves on "with a forever hole".

Instead of shying away because you fear saying the wrong thing, just a simple check-in is enough.

It's only once you go through it that you realise how "seismic and huge and monumental" losing a parent is.

"Remind them you haven't forgotten," Paula said.

Two years on, Paula is finding moments of enduring connection.

One of the most beautiful came through music: Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now. Paula's mum played it for her years ago, and then Paula's daughter, Ella, sang it for her HSC.

"I could see when she was singing the words, what I saw in them when I was her age when my mum played it for me," she said.

"I saw when I looked at her with the wisdom of life and everything that had happened, what my mum felt when she played it for me, and it was such a crazy kind of thing."

In the end, the journey isn't about healing completely; it's about learning to live with the scar.

"You can talk about a scar, but you can't talk about a wound. So you've got to work out the way to stitch yourself back up," Paula said.

Feature image: Instagram/paulajoye.