First of all, please accept my deepest condolences for both your losses. I have been through what you went through, and though I am a female and didn’t have the chiyuv of davening with a minyan and saying Kaddish every day, it was a terrible nisayon. My father O”H was niftar 20 years ago this past month. I had yahrtzeit for him just before the new chodesh. We had barely recovered from the klop of his loss, which was very, very sudden, when my mother O”H followed him five months later, having had a stroke on her birthday, four months after his death. He died within a day and a half. She lingered for a month, and died after Pesach on Shabbos mevorchim. I am not sure which petirah hit us the hardest.
There are no words of consolation to really offer when something like this occurs. It is a feeling of aveilus in constant repetition, because you don’t have the closure that the first year brings and must go through it again. I am so sorry for this being the case, as I vividly recall the weight of our sorrow.
It took me a solid three years before I could even think of either of my parents without bursting into tears, and I am still emotional when I speak of either of them (even now, as I am typing this). But life goes on, as it is supposed to do, and you will get through this nisayon, daunting as it may feel right now.
I wish you MANY simchos in the future. Your Rav is right – we do not get a pass in life and never have some kind of tzorah. But the truth is, the sadness helps us to recognize and appreciate the tov, as well.