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Alexander Levy has been a psychologist in private practice for over twenty-five years. After his parents died, Levy began to think, “someone ought to write a book about this experience.” After speaking with others who had lost parents, and doing some research on the subject, he started to think, “maybe I could write this book.” His book The Orphaned Adult has become an essential resource for those who have lost their parents. He lives in Pennsylvania.
A review from Jennie3298 on a book review site:
When my husband lost his mother (having lost his father 10 yrs ago), I had to find out why he was vacillating back and forth between such incredible high points and low points that caused him to lash out at others one minute and then be the life of the party the next. I felt so compelled to identify the emotions he must be feeling – something I was unfamiliar with since I am still blessed to have both of my parents still living. By reading this book, I gained in-depth knowledge of the roller coaster ride my husband must be on….the extreme emotional tendencies….the sadness….the feeling of not having anyone in his life that was guaranteed to love him, no matter how much convincing I tried to do to tell him that I would guarantee him that I would love him forever. Because of this book, I am better able to understand…and help my husband during this time. I now know how to help him through this grief and through the intense sadness, all the while reassuring him that I am there and always will be. Thank you, Dr. Levy….you have been a Godsend in this girl’s life!!
Although the title of the book does a great job of capturing the feeling of losing a parent, I think these verses from the Bible are more accurate:
“Where I go you cannot follow Me now, but you will follow later.”
– John 13:36b
“I will not leave you as orphans; I am coming to you.”
– John 14:18
Here are some excerpts from some of the chapters in this book:
Chapters
1. HERE WE GO LOOP-DE-LOOP – The Journey into the Unknown
2. GOOD GRIEF! Aspects of Grief Associated with Parental Death
3. JUST EXACTLY WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? The Impact of Parental Death on Personal Identity
4. I’LL BE SEEING YOU IN ALL THE OLD FAMILIAR PLACES – Ongoing Relationships with Parents After They Die
5. DEARLY BELOVED – Changes in Relationships with Others After Parents Die
6. OUR FATHER, WHO ARE IN HEAVEN – Parental Death, the Eternal, and the Divine
7. STORMY WEATHER – The Hazards of Avoiding Grief
8. LEARNING TO SWIM – Techniques of Grief
9. THE LESSON – What We Can Learn from Parental Death
1 HERE WE GO LOOP-DE-LOOP
The Journey into the Unknown
The actual gardening requirements of a six-foot-square patch of real estate are modest: a bit of weeding, sweeping away some leaves that blew there from a nearby tree, and crushing a few clods of dirt back into the soil. I work with bare hands, smelling the earth and feeling the moist ground on my fingers and knees. I hear traffic passing on the road beyond the cemetery fence. Out of the corner of my eye, I see hillsides covered with other stone markers. I don’t go there to garden. I don’t go there to visit my parents, either. There’s nothing of them there. In fact, there’s nothing of them anywhere at all. Maybe that’s why I go to that spot.
I’ll sit for a while and wonder about many things, especially about the strange experience of having become an orphan as an adult.
My father died in 1980, at the age of eighty-two,
There having been only six days between his diagnosis and his death, I struggled to find some meaning in my rapid transformation from a man with a father who was slow moving and alert to a man with a gaunt and disoriented father to a man with a wasted and comatose father to a man with no father at all.
On the day we buried my father’s remains, I was uncertain whether my mother understood that he had died. Earlier that year she had abruptly become forgetful and confused, and by the time my father died, she was quite demented.
In the thick Russian accent I knew so well, she said, “Yes. And I’m so sorry, but I’d like to stay that way.”
Over the next four years, she grew increasingly frail and senile. By the end of her life, in 1984, she was one of those crazy old ladies about whom she had always said with a shudder, “I hope I never become like that.”
Grass was once again blemished by a deep rectangular hole. It was as though this very spot, just like my life, was ruptured again, the once-familiar and continuous now open and raw.
There is no experience quite as stunning as when there is nothing where something has always been. To try and imagine the absence of something is to imagine the thing itself, not the hole left behind. Especially when that thing has the first face you probably ever saw, spoke the first words you ever heard, and whose touch has comforted and guided and corrected and made you safe since the beginning of time.
Parents just are. They are a constant in the lives of their children.
I began investigating the subject of adult parental bereavement. I read most of what’s been written on the subject in the popular, medical, and psychological literature surprisingly quickly—a comment on the dearth of material rather than on my reading speed.
I found the material quite interesting, but what was even more interesting was how little material there was. This was a surprise because, after all, parental death is the single most common cause of bereavement in this country. Nearly 12 million adults, or 5 percent of the population, lose a parent each year. Numerically, parental death has the highest incidence in the “death of a family member” category. Parental loss is not the province of an unfortunate few. It is the ultimate equal-opportunity experience, requiring nothing other than children not predeceasing their parents.
Nonetheless, the term “death of a family member,” at least as it is used in the psychological and medical literature, is most likely to refer to the death of a spouse. It is next most likely to refer to the death of a child. It is significantly less likely to refer to death of a parent, and it virtually never refers to death of a sibling.
When someone writes about the effects of parental death on adults, they typically focus on the ramifications of the loss of parent(s) during childhood.
I have witnessed many people becoming orphans as adults, and they always describe significant life change associated with that loss. The accompanying feelings most often are described as being “surprisingly intense,” a phrase that implies, “I know this isn’t a big deal for most people, but it sure is a big deal to me.”
Parental loss is inevitable, and everyone seems to agree that it is a crisis. So why is it not talked about much, not written about much, not studied much?
“There appears to be impatience with the grief of a bereaved adult child,” writes Catherine Sanders in Grief: The Mourning After, a 1989 examination of types of loss. “People rarely inquire into the personal feelings of these bereaved or acknowledge their grief after a week or two, as though it does not require much attention or long-term reaction. Adult orphaned children must keep their feelings to themselves and mourn in secret.”
Sanders further suggests that little attention is devoted to the study of the effect of the death of parents on surviving adult children because this is regarded as part of the “natural order of universal dynamics.”
Why, however, this would be considered more a part of the natural order than any other more widely researched or discussed subject of less frequency, like the loss of a spouse or a child, is a mystery to me.
Can it be, wonder Miriam and Sidney Moss, among the very few researchers with more than one publication on this topic, that we value youth so much that the lives and deaths of older people decrease in social value? If so, perhaps the expression of grief at the loss of a very old person is considered less socially meaningful, with the expectation being that the mourner needs less comfort.
Or might it be, I sometimes wonder, that the growing value our society puts on the rights and privileges of individuals has progressed to such an extent that we have become preoccupied with ourselves, our own rights, and our own comforts at the expense of any compassionate involvement with one another? Such intense focus on ourselves leaves little room in our hearts for experience other than our own, let alone the disruptive and confusing emotions of others. The suffering of others—to which we cannot relate and from which we therefore believe we will be spared—begins to bear no relevance for us. We are unmoved by it. It is an annoyance and a bother. We just want the sufferer to “get over it.”
We in Western culture currently consider death formidable and avoidable. We avoid thinking about it. We avoid preparing for it. We almost never talk about it, and when we do, we avoid saying its name.
People have told me that they even consider death an insult, the ultimate humiliation, a contradiction to life. Physicians, who on a daily basis deal with issues of life and death, have told me that they don’t like to admit that the best they can do is relieve discomfort and postpone death. Rather, they prefer to call what they do “saving lives.”
We avoid looking at death directly, as if trying to avoid eye contact with the playground bully, in the belief that if he doesn’t notice us, he’ll leave us alone. And yet the more we try to avoid facing the bully, the more menacing he becomes.
I believe our attitude toward death is a fairly recent development in the history of Western culture. As recently as the beginning of this century, death was considered a feature of ordinary life. Families were large, usually tightly knit. Everyone lived close by. Someone was always being born, and someone was always dying. Both happened at home. There was hardly a year during which some close relative did not succumb. Corpses of the young and the old alike were prepared for burial by the family, laid out in the parlor, and collectively mourned.
But we in contemporary Western culture try to have as little to do with death as we can. We exclude the dying from family life; they are dispatched to the hospital. We no longer wash and dress the dead, nor do we surrender our homes to their remains; all that is handled now by the funeral industry. We no longer even suspend our routines to grieve—a few days off and then it’s back to work. Death has been sanitized and institutionalized.
Our economic and political philosophies stress the individual. We cherish ourselves and each other. We celebrate living. We treasure opportunities. We hold that people have rights, paramount among which are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, unfettered by distinctions of class, race, gender, religion, or national origin as in the past. We reject such limits. We reject all limits. We celebrate life, and we leave death out of the party.
We grow up being told, “You can become anything you want to be.” We are never told, “Actually, there is an end to your pursuit, no matter how accomplished or grand or fulfilled you become. Its name is death.” Our image of life, and of ourselves, does not embrace this, the ultimate in equal opportunity.
Traditional limits just no longer apply. The food we all eat is now produced by a tiny fraction of our population. Ordinary people own and control huge tracts of land, factories, or other means of production. Actual work is done by machines. Modern methods of storing and transporting have made accumulation possible—the more, the better. All of this was inconceivable a century ago. Virtually boundless wealth can be amassed. What once would have been called greed is now considered a sign of success.
We grow up being told, “The sky’s the limit.” We are never told, “Actually, there is an outer boundary to your attainment, no matter how much you manage to accumulate, and its name is death.”
Illumination is available to everyone, but we have little curiosity about the contents of life’s shadows. We grow up being told, “Your knowledge is limited only by your imagination.” We are never told, “Actually, there is an outer boundary to what can be known, a dimension of the truth that shall forever evade understanding, and its name is death.”
Travel used to be limited to the physical endurance of a person or the animal on which the person rode. Now, any of us could replicate Marco Polo’s journey and be home in time for supper on the supersonic overnight flight. What was formerly unthinkable has become routine, and the formerly amazing has become ordinary.
Time and space are now malleable ideas rather than absolute limits of reality. If we miss seeing the big play of the game, it’ll be shown on the instant replay. If we wish we’d seen it from another angle, they’ll show that, too. If we’re too busy to go see a movie, it’ll be on television. If we’re too busy to watch the broadcast, we can just program the VCR. Death. Finality. Such unfashionable notions are just too confining for us and our advanced ways.
But inevitably, death comes and takes a loved one. Shocking! A blow to our understanding of our big and powerful masters-of-the-universe selves. And when death first comes, typically, it takes one of our parents.
It is a cultural fiction that parental death is an incidental experience of adult life. If one of the purposes of culture is to provide us with a map—navigational assistance as we move into each stage of life—then this particular bit of misinformation beguiles us.
Imagine a map that failed to correctly show a huge turn in the road, beyond which lay a dramatically different terrain in which many road signs change meaning. Perhaps this cultural falsehood supports and promotes certain social and material values, but it does not serve us well since it so poorly equips us for the actual experience when it occurs.
The maps of antiquity were drawn with borders of dragons and serpents to differentiate the known terrain, with its explored forests and rivers, from the vast and yet unexplored territories beyond, filled with the fearsome dangers that always seem to lurk in the unknown. Our culture does not supply a map with a border of dragons to warn us that things will be different beyond a certain point. As a result, each of us is caught by surprise when we move beyond the limit of our parents’ lives.
Within months of my mother’s death, it appeared I had gotten my life pretty much back “on course.” The financial matters had been turned over to lawyers, my parents’ distant friends had been notified, the “stuff” had been distributed, and both my sister and I were doing fine. About eight months later, however, my mood suddenly began to deteriorate. Ordinarily optimistic and cheerful, I became sullen and withdrawn. I lost weight, developed difficulty concentrating, and became easily confused. Strange and somewhat troubling, this gradual unraveling was best defined by its vagueness. It didn’t appear to be “about” anything. Although I could characterize the mood with words like “vexed,” “woeful,” “melancholy,” and “despondent,” I could neither attribute it to a cause nor organize it around any issues.
I made an appointment with my doctor when this odd feeling persisted into its fourth week. I was concerned that having such a strange and unfocused feeling descend on me for no apparent reason and with no particular form might indicate a disease. Might I have a brain tumor? Was I developing diabetes? Was I going crazy?
The doctor asked, “What do you suppose has been going on?” I unhesitatingly answered, “Nothing. Nothing is going on. Particularly the ‘Nothing’ that remains now that both of my parents are dead. And this ‘nothing’ keeps on going on.”
Only then was I able to begin facing and actively grieving over the losses of my parents and all the precious protective illusions that had died with them.
In these past years, I have been asking and learning quite a lot about what happens when adults become orphans.
Whatever our relationship with them and however well or poorly we get along, parents project an illusion of permanence, a constancy that suggests life to be a knowable, reliable, trustworthy, and, therefore, feasible endeavor.
It’s not that we see parents as impregnable. Throughout our lives, we see them beset by all kinds of life hazards. We watch them get sick—a cold in summer, the flu in winter, headache, sore throat, infection. They may get injured. They feel lousy. For a while. And then we watch them get better. They may not always get completely better. They might limp or have a scar, but for the most part, we see them go beyond injury and persevere, and our belief in parental durability is buttressed every time.
Throughout our lives, we see parental sickness as transient. Parents, on the other hand, are enduring.
But ultimately, the phone rings or a letter arrives or we visit the hospital, and we are told that our parents, sick or injured, won’t bounce back. We may watch them linger, impaired for a while, before they start to decline, or they may go quickly, even unexpectedly.
How ever it happens, without exception, parents die. And as we watch them vanish, slipping beyond our grasp, we feel a part of that innocent sense of safety and security, unwittingly based on a lifetime’s exposure to the appearance of parental permanence, vanishing as well. The playground bully finally gets us.
And then a lot may begin to change. At a minimum, parental death in midlife elicits lingering feelings of loneliness, memories of former losses, unresolved conflicts, and doubts concerning life’s purpose. Interpersonal relationships may be affected. There is frequently upheaval in a love relationship within months of one of the partners’ losing a parent.
How we think and spend time may change. For instance, by 1900, Mary Kingsley had explored and chronicled hundreds of miles of the wild Ogowe and Rembwe Rivers in West Africa, places no European had ever been. She began this unusual occupation shortly after both her parents died. Likewise, Sigmund Freud announced the “discovery” of the Oedipus complex, a theory about the male child’s struggle with the image of his father, one year after the death of his own father.
There is a sudden awareness of no longer being someone’s child, which carries with it a loss of childhood altogether. Feeling “adult,” a member of the eldest generation, brings the chilling knowledge that there is now no one between us and death. Without exception, those with whom I have spoken soon after the death of their second parent have said to me, “I just realized that I am the next in line to die.”
There may even be changes in health and mental health associated with parental loss. There is research that suggests that the death of a parent is a significant precursor to mental disorder for both men and women. There is, in fact, a significant increase in suicide rates within a month of the anniversary of parental death. Mortality rates, in general, among recently bereaved relatives is seven times greater than normal within six months of the death.
Although the process of mourning may gradually approach resolution, the grief is never over. Memories and feelings associated with parents occur many times throughout the years following their deaths.
Sometimes memories occur when the survivor least expects them. While walking to my office recently, I overtook a sixtyish woman who works in the same building as I do. We know each other only casually from seeing one another and exchanging pleasantries in the elevators and coffee shop through the years. I know her name. She knows mine.
It was a pleasant spring day and we walked together, making small talk. Invariably cheerful and outgoing, she innocently inquired about the large package I was carrying. Since it contained materials for this book, I answered by mentioning the subject of losing parents as adults. I heard her sucking in breath. She grew quiet and slowed her stride. Finally, clearing her throat and wiping her eyes, she began to speak about the loss of her father, twenty years previously, and the enormous impact his, and her mother’s, death had had on her. I responded with a brief description of my own losses and their effects on me. We walked those last few blocks more slowly, each holding on to and comforted by the unanticipated discovery of our shared experience.
Since that day, I am aware that those I pass while walking to my office may also have already crossed the threshold of parental loss.
What would it be helpful for them to know? Can they be informed that becoming an orphan is part of being an adult, that it is likely to happen to all of us, that many others have gone there, and that the journey into this alien experience is already somewhat charted? Might those of us already traversing the dragon-filled territory beyond the border of life’s map reassure those still in the familiar terrain of living parents that pathways through the unexplored abound and that the land of serpents is not dangerous, however frightful it may appear?
So, twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall, after I travel to a cemetery on the other side of town, I sit against a warm headstone and, looking out where so many others have buried their parents, wonder about many things, especially about how strange an experience it is to have become an orphan as an adult.
2 GOOD GRIEF!
Aspects of Grief Associated with Parental Death
What good is grief? People are supposed to die. Why do we suffer so terribly when they do?
Especially when old parents die, why should that be so difficult? After all, everyone must die sometime, and old parents are, well, old. They have already lived a long time, and their lives are generally as full as they are going to get. They are often sick. They are often living lives of diminished quality and few pleasures. It is time for them to join the dead. And yet, when they die, we grieve.
Grief hurts, too, but does it serve a purpose? Is it trying to let us know something? I believe the answer is yes.
But first, it would help to define grief. What is it? Everybody experiences it, but how can we define it?
In some academic psychological circles, attention has shifted away from defining what grief is. The thinkers of this culture are instead becoming more interested in the component properties of grief, that is, what constitutes grief itself.
how we grieve was adapted from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s pioneering work in the 1960s and 1970s on the experiences of the dying, the theory being that coming to grips with one’s own dying is similar to coming to grips with the dying of any loved one.
I can understand how conceptualizing grief as a phenomenon in such organized and systematic ways is helpful for instructional purposes in college classrooms. I can also understand how such an orderly introduction to some of grief’s dimensions could be reassuring to the bereft, who may be somewhat surprised and horrified by the unattractive and unsympathetic feelings they are encountering. But I don’t think this methodical model, despite its inclusion here, has very much to do with the actual experience of grief.
For what they’re worth, these are the conventional stages of grief:
Disbelief, avoidance, and denial. In grief’s earliest stages, there is a period of vacillation between icy fear and numbness, during which we attempt to retreat from the conflict of, on the one hand, knowing that someone we love has died, while, on the other hand, not being able to believe that they are gone. We may walk around confused or we may distract ourselves by getting busy, making arrangements for the disposal of parents’ things, seeing to legal matters, getting extra busy at work—doing anything we can to get our minds off the losses we know we have suffered and cannot comprehend.
Anger. Next, energy begins to form and gets directed at the deceased (for not taking better care of themselves), at medical people (for not having done more), at family members and friends (for countless real or imagined shortcomings), and at God (for allowing such suffering). Anger also gets deflected into combative attitudes and behavior toward people who have nothing, whatever, to do with the loss. This protest is one of our ways of struggling to comprehend the incomprehensible. We feel a need to make sense of things, even things of which sense cannot be made. We believe we will feel better if we can find a cause, and therefore someone or something to blame, for our loss.
Guilt. Next, the anger is said to get turned back on ourselves. Our mistakes, omissions, and shortcomings toward the deceased, throughout their lives as well as during their final illness, are mercilessly and redundantly examined. We may blame ourselves for their death or their suffering or the lack of attention we paid them. Nothing we have done or omitted escapes our critical review, no blunder is overlooked, no lapse feels forgivable.
Surrender to sorrow. Next, when the protection of denial, anger, avoidance, and guilt have faded, the reality of our loss washes over us. It is a time of fear and sadness, when we feel empty, despairing, and lost. We acutely miss the deceased, and we long for their release from death. We might cry, or at the least, we might wish we could.
Acceptance. Eventually we arrive at a peaceful acknowledgment that our loss is permanent, and the absence of the deceased becomes an integrated fact in our permanent worldview. We no longer acutely and continuously miss or think about those we have lost. We remember and miss them, to be sure, but when we do, it is without the unbearably wrenching distress we felt when grief was new.
In addition to such a paradigm being something of a misrepresentation of what goes on when we grieve, there’s a drawback to creating false expectations of orderly grieving among the newly bereft.
This pitfall was brought into focus for me, years ago, when an impeccably dressed, matronly woman came to see me for a consultation.
She had tried joining various clubs, had taken tours to places she had always wanted to visit, and had even enrolled in an adult education course in Italian cooking. When she concluded that none of these steps were producing the desired results of setting her free from the distress of her loss, she decided to seek professional help.
During our initial conversation, I asked how she had mourned after her mother died and what her grief had been like. “Oh,” she said, “that wasn’t so easy. I read a book about it, and really tried to get into it. But every time I would begin, I’d just start to cry, and I’d have to start all over again.”
During our many subsequent meetings, she reminisced about her long and complicated relationship with her mother. She cried a lot. She laughed. She trembled. She raged. There was no order to her emotional states, nor, she found, did she need it.
I did not name any of her emotions, nor did I identify any “stages” as she shared her stories with me. Rather, I received and welcomed whatever arrived. I trusted that when she was remembering, sharing, wailing, raging, laughing, or crying, she was grieving.
Within a few months of coming to see me, she was finding some peace regarding her mother’s life and death.
I have found that whenever people recount stories of their grief to me, no one ever speaks about a sequential, organized experience. They talk about a hodgepodge of moments, given texture and meaning by emotions like fear, pain, shame, and joy, and they call this jumble “grief.”
They speak about such terrible fears as the fear that they will never feel better or the fear that they will never stop crying or the fear that something is wrong with them because they really do not feel all that upset and have not yet begun to cry.
They talk about their confusion over other people’s impatience with their sadness. They tell me how surprised they are by how much they miss the deceased.
More shamefully, but just as frequently, they talk about how surprised they are by how little they miss the deceased.
They describe night terrors in which they abruptly awaken and find themselves drenched in sweat, standing beside their bed, screaming at a rapidly dissolving vision from a fading dream.
They speak with embarrassment about the unattractive qualities they are discovering in themselves like pettiness, greed, or moodiness.
They talk about how weird everything now seems, even though only a little bit has changed.
Sometimes they can’t talk to me at all. Instead, they can only sob the heartbroken sob of the inconsolable infant or scream the frightened scream of the newborn or rage the purple breath-holding fury of the frustrated toddler.
Pretending that grief—which really is a fundamental and primitive experience—takes place in our minds or that it can be conceptually organized and “understood” is to risk misrepresenting grief’s chaotic power and to risk missing grief’s point altogether.
So, what is grief? And why do we grieve? I think grief is an expression of our fundamental inability to comprehend, conceptually or any other way, that a loved one has died. Our brains don’t work that way. We can’t help it.
We are accustomed to a person coming back into the room after that person has left it. We cannot form an affirmative mental image of someone who has always been there no longer being anywhere. We simply cannot imagine someone whom we once knew alive being not alive.
And so, leaning forward to reach out and embrace the familiar image of someone who is no longer there, we fall into the abyss their absence has left behind. We tumble into endless emptiness, and we are enveloped by the dark and suffocating uncertainty of life’s most confounding and distressing dilemmas: that despite comforting illusions of vigor and youthfulness, our lives are fragile, and we are attached to them by no more than the slender thread of fortune’s whimsy; that regardless of how self-sufficient, successful, and clever we may be, we are profoundly dependent on those we love; that no veneer of professional expertise, adult accomplishment, or social self-confidence can effectively camouflage our underlying and awesome terror of the unknown; and that no matter how much we know or how strong our faith, we stand powerless and helpless in the face of life’s impenetrable mysteries.
This plunge into, and temporary consumption by, life’s fragility and mystery is, in my opinion, grief. A time of distress and disorientation, it also has the capacity to be one of life’s most liberating and transforming opportunities.
Sometimes bereft people who feel stuck in grief come to me for help. They say, in essence: “I think something’s wrong. Someone I love died, and I have been upset about it for a long time. I know they’re dead, and I should be feeling bad for them, but I’m just feeling bad. I’ve got to stop being so upset. It’s not doing me any good. I’m not the only one who thinks so.
Everyone says that it’s time for me to get over it, get back to my real life, and put all this behind me. But even though I agree I should be done with it, I can’t seem to get over it. What’s wrong with me?” My response is: Welcome to the world of the bereft. This is not a diversion from your real life.
This is not an exercise made up of a set of stages—one, two, three, four, five—that you have to go through before getting back to your real life. This is your real life.
You really have sustained that loss. You really are going to live the rest of your life without that precious person.
Neither I nor anyone else can help you put that behind you. No one can help you to get “over it.” You don’t need to. Grief is something you get through, and if you let it get through you as well, you will eventually find that you have enough room in yourself to contain it.
And when you come out the other side of this terrible time, without needing to understand how it happened any more than you need to understand how you digest food and distribute nutrients throughout your body in order to be well fed, you will find that you are able to face, and conduct, your life in a new way.
People rarely understand these words when I say them. Most of us are not accustomed to thinking about grief at all, so the idea that there is a “world of the bereft” seems strange—to say nothing of being welcomed to it. It’s not even always so easy to know when we are there.
Grief is not always easy to recognize. Like a fingerprint, each person’s grief is unique. There are no standards for grief, no natural history. Some may experience acute grief for only twenty minutes, and it may make their head feel on fire. Others’ grief may last for twenty years as a persistent dull ache.
For one person, the prevailing emotion that emerges may be sadness, for another it may be anger, and for yet another it may be blessed relief.
Grief often arrives disguised.
Some people are fine for years after a loss, and then, with no apparent provocation, they collapse into profound depression, and that, too, is grief. A sudden interest in work, lost interest in food, an intense need to shop or even shoplift, changes of any type – all these may be masked grief.
Grief is often characterized by disorientation. We become temporarily lost when a familiar and important part of our world has disappeared.
I have heard people refer to grief as a type of mutilation: “I feel like I’ve lost a part of myself,” “I feel like part of me is missing,” “It’s like part of my heart is gone.” Jason, a fifty-eight-year-old married onetime battlefield medic, told me that this sense of being maimed reminded him of a phenomenon called “phantom limb” among amputees, in which they still experienced itching and other sensations in the missing limb.
Jason told me that after his parents died, he would still start to call them to share an anecdote, only to remember that their number had been disconnected. Like the amputees, he said, he often reaches to scratch what’s missing and is surprised, each time, to discover nothing there.
Not everyone will lose a spouse, siblings, or children, but all of us are guaranteed to experience parental grief if only we live long enough. For this and many other reasons, parental grief is unique from grief in general.
The relationship we have with parents is unlike any other relationship we have in our lives.
Parents provide a unique spot on this planet, which is called “home,” where we can return, if we need to, to be loved and to feel that we belong. This spot, in the parent’s heart and in our mind, has existed from the beginning of our lives, and it has flourished in shared ancestry with roots stretching back to the beginning of time.
This spot cannot be imitated. It cannot be recreated. There is only one spot that is ever the real spot called home.
After parents die, it’s gone. The unfathomable loss of that “spot called home,” regardless of its location or the quality of what actually occurred there when parents were living, is a recurrent theme in many parental bereavement stories.
The time in adult life prior to the first parent’s death is not a time of ignorance: It’s not as though we don’t all know that someday our parents will die, that we will grieve, that then we will live the rest of our lives without them. Rather, it is a time of innocence: Knowing that parents will die does not carry within its wisdom any hint of the impact of the experience will have.
Some people have mentioned to me that it feels like they begin an entirely new life when their first parent dies. And in many ways, they do.
So many details of life change after the first parent dies – and our grief is made manifest with each jolting awareness.
A hallmark of the period after the first parent dies is a change in the relationship with the remaining parent. Grief can get somewhat diffused – or perhaps more accurately, it can be postponed – by the requirements of this new relationship. If parents are married and living together at the time the first one dies, grief is usually considered the domain of the surviving parent. Their needs and grief take precedence. The role of surviving adult children is typically to aid the bereaved widow or widower rather than to be the primary mourner.
The typical inquiry by others is “How’s your mom/dad (surviving parent) doing?” rather than “How are you doing?”
As surviving parents rebuild a life that no longer includes their spouse, they may become increasingly unrecognizable and alien to their children.
When the first parent dies, we begin a distinctive period of adulthood that continues until the death of the second parent. This first death sets up an expectant state, similar to that of awaiting the crash after hearing the screeching tires that herald an imminent collision. This vague anxiety, which can become a low-grade depression if it lasts a long time, generally persists for the duration of the surviving parent’s life.
When the second parent dies, the rest of adulthood begins.
Some parents die quietly and gracefully, smiling fondly at loved ones gathered bedside, who are, tearfully, smiling back as they slip away. Others linger in coma for weeks and months, draining family resources, patience, and goodwill.
We do not get to select when or how our parents die, but as a rule, the more anticipatable and the less violent or grotesque the deaths, the simpler the grief of the survivors. Long periods of illness and steady declines raise different issues than sudden or violent deaths.
My mother’s death was completely different. She succumbed after a very long battle with the ravages of old age, complete with its most unattractive mental and physical decay. Becoming increasingly demented and frail with each passing month, she seemed to meander toward death, taking brutal and tedious years to stroll what seemed, at the time, the short distance from dementia to grave.
The last year of her life was a relentless, and seemingly endless, succession of one false alarm that she was in her final hours followed by another false alarm that she was in her final hours. I was called out of countless meetings to talk to her doctors. I was distracted by worry during many others. I spent several evenings each month walking mile after mile in the hallways outside hospital emergency rooms, putting my children to bed by phone.
This went on for so long that I began to pace myself as though I was in an endurance event rather than at the end of my mother’s life. I don’t remember ever thinking about it, but looking back, I can see that I began to dole out my attention, more and more parsimoniously, as it began to look like her decline would never end.
Perhaps I worried that I would not outlast the ordeal, that I would run out of some unnamed something or other if I didn’t put myself on an emotional budget. Or perhaps I became exhausted by the continual vigilance. Or perhaps I was just too scared by what was happening to stay connected to it.
My mother became unrecognizable to me. I did not know how to be with her in her growing decrepitude, so I began to be with her less. At first, I began visiting her less frequently. Then my visits became shorter. I eventually stopped bringing her to my house for dinner. I stopped bringing my children to visit her. In short, I stopped relating to her as my mom, and, instead, began to deal with her as though she were a problem, one that needed some attending – but not much attention.
When she finally died, I found that I was left with a huge reservoir of love and concern for her. It turns out that my budget had been too severe, and I am left with a surplus, all of which belongs to her. I am so sorry I did not know how to arrange myself so she could have gotten all I had.
Regrets for what was done or left undone are fairly typical of the grief after parents die. Although it is often called “guilt”, in the conventional language of grief, it seems to me that it really is more a type of regret – either that we did not do more when we had the opportunity to do so or that we did not get the opportunity to do more.
I witnessed the ubiquity of this feeling recently when my mother-in-law came down with a terrifyingly serious, albeit not fatal, illness. As I watched my wife, her numerous siblings, and all of us spouses attending to this critically ill woman with such loving kindness, I was momentarily struck by how sorry I was that I could not have done more than I did for my own mother. Just then, my mother-in-law looked up and said, “Why do you think this is happening to me? Do you think I’m being punished for not taking better care of my own mother?”
The world is full of reminders of the loved ones we have lost and the parts of our lives that have ended. Some are predictable and anticipatable: death anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, or visits to favorite vacation sites. Others lie in ambush for us: We smell an odor faintly reminiscent of the nursing home and we are taken back in our memories to a time when our parents were alive; we hear a song fragment and we feel like we rae children again, sitting at a campfire on a family vacation; we see hair dyed a particular color, we taste a distinctive flavor, we touch and feel a particular fabric – virtually anything can take us back and, for a while, make us remember. And for that while, we grieve, however faintly, again.
Our parents’ deaths are most commonly our first exposure to profound personal loss. Thus, our parents end their lives as our teachers—the roles they have played since the beginning of our lives. From the time of our birth, they taught us about living. With their death, they teach us about dying.
Our parents’ deaths can teach us that when a loved one dies, we are left unprotected in the shadow of the primitive truths we dread, reacting much like our earliest reaction to life itself—with the frightened scream of the newborn, the heartbroken sobs of the inconsolable infant, the toddler’s purple breathholding rage.
So now to the question: What good is grief? Does such unpleasantness serve us? Can there be value, or is there only pain, when we confront such frightening imponderables?
I think there is value in the experience. I think that by illuminating life’s impermanence, grief alerts us to pursue those important goals that we otherwise tend to postpone in the naive belief that our time is enduring. I think that by reminding us of the preciousness of our connections to those we love, grief encourages us to reexamine the priorities by which we have been living. I think that by confronting us with the reality of our worst fears made manifest, grief forces us to find, or develop, courage.
But perhaps most important, I think that grief—by plunging us so powerfully into the depth of our fears—teaches us that we contain much power and great depth. Despite how we feel when we are grieving, grief is not an invasion of our bodies, hearts, and minds by some external force. The source of grief’s breathtaking energy comes from within ourselves.
Frightening and dramatic, grief disrupts our lives like a thunderstorm disrupts a summer day. There is always cleaning up to be done after such storms pass; old growth has been destroyed, brittle constructions have collapsed, and some hot spots may continue to smolder. And yet, as so often happens after a storm, the air around us may be refreshingly cleared in grief’s aftermath. We may find that we are breathing easier than we had been for a long time. At last, and maybe even for the first time, we may find that we are able to see all the way to the horizon.
3. JUST EXACTLY WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
The Impact of Parental Death on Personal Identity
4. I’LL BE SEEING YOU IN ALL THE OLD FAMILIAR PLACES
Ongoing Relationships with Parents After They Die
5. DEARLY BELOVED
Changes in Relationships with Others After Parents Die
6. OUR FATHER, WHO ART IN HEAVEN
Parental Death, the Eternal, and the Divine
7. STORMY WEATHER
The Hazards of Avoiding Grief
8. LEARNING TO SWIM
Techniques of Grief
As a psychologist, I am often in a position to talk with people in the grip of transforming
life crises.
“Well, for starters,” I said, “I’d recommend that you be careful to keep breathing.”
This might sound flip, but it wasn’t. There really are techniques to help us get through the frightening and tangled challenge of loss—ways to manage runaway thoughts, embrace unfamiliar emotions, and find the support we need—that are as basic as breathing.
Learning to grieve is a lot like learning to swim.
Eventually, I succeeded. Not by trying harder or thrashing harder. When I finally made it happen, I had stopped trying to make it happen. What we really learn when we learn to float
is, well, that we float. As long as we think there is something else to it, something we do not yet know, we remain too afraid to let go of the side of the pool.
In grief, as in a swimming pool, the way to do it is by letting it happen.
KEEP IT SMALL AND SIMPLE
Many of us make the mistake of trying to predict its course. We want to know how to get through grief, how much time it will take. Despite having no idea what lies ahead, we start doing what we think of as making a plan.
“I feel terrible right now,” we think, “and I know I’m going to feel terrible tomorrow.” Then, we scare ourselves: “What if I still feel terrible next week? Next month?
We are not analyzing our situation or planning or thinking at these times. We are trying to rush ourselves through an incomprehensible and thoroughly unpleasant experience, endeavoring to make it be over faster by pretending ourselves into the future. Understandable though this is, all we actually accomplish is to scare ourselves. Despite the greatness of our imaginations, we cannot get to the future before it arrives.
Imagine all the meals you will ever eat and then try to consume them in one swallow. Impossible! Imagine all the stairs you will climb this year, then try to take them all right now. Exhausting! Imagine all the chores you’ll do next week, but just try getting them done before supper. Hopeless!
Such imagining is meaningless.
Grief must be traversed moment by moment.
When I am working with people who are scaring themselves in this way, I recommend that they keep their imagination in check by setting very limited goals relative to time. For example, a thought like “getting through the rest of my life without mother” is way too big and will certainly trigger one of these terrifying episodes. “Getting through the rest of today” might even be too much. Get focused on getting through a much smaller period of time, instead, and stop the panic.
After you get through the next few seconds, then just get through the next few seconds.
Keep it small and simple.
Trying to figure out how to accomplish all there is to get done after parents die is another way that we inadvertently overwhelm ourselves. We might start out thinking about making some necessary arrangement, such as “I have to call the funeral director.” But then our thoughts take off: “And then I have to notify the lawyer, and then the minister, and then I have to go through their things, and then I have to sell their house, and then there’s the holidays and how will I get through them—and then—” And then, once again, we are aloft on the wings of fear.
I recommend picking one small task and seeing if it is possible to focus on just that. For instance, see if you can focus on just calling the funeral director.
It really doesn’t matter how it’s organized in our thoughts. The point is that we have to control our thoughts in order to be able to gradually move from one moment to the next.
If we get ahead of ourselves, simultaneously thinking about the next moment and the moment beyond that, we stop being able to move altogether.
HEALTH
The bereft are exhausted. Emotions activated by grief—sorrow, anger, fear, remorse, and so on—require a lot of energy. Expressing emotions, whether by crying, raging, or sulking, uses energy. Suppressing emotions to conceal them from ourselves and others uses even more energy.
Grief is hard work.
In modern times, we neither have to chase our food or avoid becoming dinner. Instead, we are challenged by stressors, like the emotions of grief, which, although hard work, are psychological in nature and therefore last much longer than the few minutes of a hunt or a chase. Even though they are no longer adaptive, our primitive emergency mechanisms still take over when we are performing this type of hard work: Our bodies still become more efficient; energy still gets diverted from more complex systems to more primitive ones; and the immune system, one of our most complex, is suppressed.
With immune functions compromised, we become extra susceptible to contagious illnesses carried by other people, as well as to the viruses and dormant diseases lurking within our bodies. That’s why people often get sick in prolonged periods of high stress.
In fact, getting sick is one of the most probable complications of grief.
“Whoa!” some people have said. “You want me to make sure I eat a balanced diet, take vitamins, call my doctor and my dentist, and work out? Oh, please! It’s all I can do to get to the couch with my bag of potato chips and figure out which channel my soap opera is on.”
Remember the guiding principle: Keep it small and simple. If all you can do is pop a vitamin pill on your way to the couch, good enough. If you can munch on a carrot along with those potato chips, that would be good, too.
And then there’s breathing. Making sure to breathe deliberately, carefully, and regularly is an example of something small and simple that is both crucial and immediately beneficial. But breathing seems so elementary. You inhale, then you exhale. What’s the big deal?
When we are distressed, most of us start breathing erratically without realizing it. Sometimes we hold our breath. We actually stop breathing for periods of ten, fifteen, or twenty seconds at a time, creating a state of mild oxygen deprivation similar to suffocation. At other times, we begin a pattern of rapid and shallow breathing that creates a hyperventilated state, producing light headedness and nervousness. Whether we hold our breath or pant, our thinking becomes clouded, and we become more frightened.
SUPPORT
Nobody gets through grief alone. The expectation that we be able to single-handedly traverse the unfamiliar and frightening terrain of parental death, or any other loss for that matter, has no more basis than that we should be able to fly to the moon without knowing how to operate a rocket. Like any other journey into the dark, what most of us need when we grieve is a combination of reassurance, information, and support. We need to know that the crossing upon which we are embarking is survivable. We need some guidance from those who know a bit about it. And we need the support and affection of those who love us.
We need other people because we need to be reminded that we are connected to humanity when fundamental attachments are severed by death. We need to borrow courage from other people—to be “en-couraged” by them—when we become afraid. We need help from other people because grief is just too big for most of us to get through alone.
There are so many ways people can provide relief—if they know you need it. Ask a friend to come along and sit with you while you do an unpleasant task like going through your parents’ closets. Ask a neighbor to watch your children for an afternoon so you can have some relief. Ask the group at church to prepare a meal and spare you that responsibility for a day. Ask a colleague to go for a walk with you at lunchtime to get you away from your telephone. Ask a friend who has been parentless for a while to talk to you about what was helpful, what got in the way.
Ask. Ask. Ask.
Almost everything that comes up can be postponed without consequence. How to dispose of parents’ things, what to do with inherited money, and getting back to work do not present the urgency that they seem to. Put off all you can. Make as few decisions as possible for as long as possible. Remember, keep it small and simple.
Others may insist that you make decisions. Tell them to wait. It is not at all uncommon for heirs to close up parental homes for a year or longer until they feel more able to confront the contents. Park the parents’ car somewhere until its disposition can be calmly decided. Deposit inherited money in a savings account, where it will be safe, until you feel ready to
make other choices.
Get help. Don’t try to do this alone.
Occasionally, people will disappoint you. Even those who are generous by nature and want to help may just not know how to be helpful, and you may find their well intentioned but clumsy attempts upsetting. Forgive them, and look for help elsewhere. Keep it simple.
How can you respond to such awkward moments? I found that by replying with two stock answers—“Yes, that’s right. Thank you.” or “Yes, this has been difficult.”—spared me from having to plumb my already depleted resources for a new answer each time. And, possibly even more important, I was spared the embarrassment of unloading my mournful wrath on someone whose only transgression was that they lacked skills in expressing sympathy. It is much simpler to forgive them.
If your personal world does not contain enough understanding friends or if you are uncomfortable burdening people you know with your troubles, join a grief support or recovery group. Some types are peer operated, others are facilitated by professionals—either will be composed of warm, caring people, often in pain themselves.
More important, they provide an opportunity to share the burden.
Saying private thoughts aloud to another person helps us gain perspective and evaluate our situation. Saying “My husband has been no help at all” to a friend or another family member, however, can create hard feelings toward the husband, complicating rather than clarifying the situation.
That’s where a therapist can be helpful. The therapist doesn’t know the husband, has no personal stake in the marriage, and won’t take sides. Therapists know how to listen with interest while people talk. And they often ask helpful questions.
A lot of times, mourners really believe they are going crazy. A therapist may be able to confirm or rule this out. Some mourners really do require the temporary use of medication to expedite their grief. For others, medication would just cause a delay. Therapists have diagnostic tests and standardized methods of interviewing that can differentiate between perilous and merely acute grief. They can offer informed guidance.
Be sure to select a counselor who has both personal experience and professional background with grief.
Your first question to a therapist should be: “Have you lost your parents or any loved ones?” Find someone who has been through it.
So go see a counselor, join a support group, get assistance from an attorney or funeral director, reach out to neighbors and friends. We need help to get through grief in so many ways. And in many instances, people really want to be helpful. Offer to be generous with your needs and fears. Give other people the opportunity, and the pleasure, of helping.
MEMORIALS
I have found that having a cemetery plot and a headstone engraved with their name has been helpful to me when I need a place to go, sit, and think about my parents.
Memorials are, of course, not limited to graves. Once a man took me to see the flower garden he had planted in his parents’ memory, where he toils every weekend from late winter to late fall. He told me that he feels close to them again whenever he works there.
Anyone can plant a tree. Or get a stone from a favorite childhood vacation spot, or find something personal among parents’ things and put it somewhere in the house or in the yard, or, for that matter, in the mind, where it can serve as a tribute. Such commemoration is not morbid. Quite the opposite. It can be very comforting. And to the extent that it helps the mourner adapt to the new and complicated fact of parental deaths as well as heal the pains of grief, it is life enhancing and reaffirming.
But here, too, remember to keep it small and simple.
A set of chipped tea cups, a leaf pressed between two books that falls to the floor when bookshelves are dismantled—anything can trigger a flood of memory. A pipe rack, a half-empty bottle of cologne, that screwdriver with the loose handle—these are not just things, they are links to a shared past.
GET A BREAK
Grief is tiring. Emotions wrung out, bodies exhausted, spirits overburdened—the bereft are exhausted. And then there’s grief’s crony, insomnia.
Lack of sleep has a cumulative effect. Its victims start dreading bedtime, knowing each evening that come nightfall, they will probably lie there, yet again, their eyes open, their thoughts racing. Getting some sleep, or at least some rest, becomes a preoccupation, eventually crowding out virtually all other desires.
Turning to alcohol for relief at such times is a bad idea for a number of reasons, chief among which is that it doesn’t help. Alcohol has sedating qualities, so we may feel somewhat calmer shortly after a drink or two. However, alcohol has the effect of suppressing energy and, more significantly, subduing mood. The last thing mourners, already out of gas and downhearted, need is an even lower energy level and darker mood.
Take time for rest, recreation, distraction, and restoration. Not just sleep or nap related rest, either.
Get a break, but remember to keep it small and simple. Find out what inspires and restores you, then go do it.
Any enjoyable or amusing diversion provides fuel for an aching, exhausted heart.
Perhaps, however, the most important break, the one that only you can provide, is to release yourself from any expectation that you get through this chaotic time with any grace. Expect to be clumsy. Expect to be undignified.
Some of us not only cry, we wail. Some feel angry all the time and snap at strangers.
Grief cannot be done skillfully, artfully, or beautifully. The bereft earn no points for style or difficulty; there is no concluding moment to grief, arms raised in triumph like an Olympic athlete awaiting a score.
The goal of grief is neither achievement nor excellence. The goal is to get through it.
PRAYER
I encourage people to pray, by themselves or in prayer groups, for one reason—I see that it works. Prayer causes something unexpectedly restorative and wonderful to happen in healing people’s hearts. Prayer is good for us. Prayer helps us to recover faster and to live our lives more fully.
I simply mean that over the years I have observed that people who have come to me for help who also pray—regardless of their religious affiliation, what they hold sacred, or how dogmatically they observe the doctrines of their faith—seem to get their lives going in satisfying ways and start feeling whole again faster than those who do not pray.
I encourage people to pray because I have observed a direct connection between prayer and recovery.
I don’t know how or why prayer helps. I have just seen that it does.
A growing body of scientific research seems to be coming to the same conclusion. Within the past twenty years, articles in juried medical journals are increasingly reporting an association between greater religious involvement and lower blood pressure, fewer strokes, lower death rates from heart disease, lower mortality and faster recovery after heart surgery, longer lives, and better general health.
Some tell me that they just can’t. They tell me they find it too difficult, too embarrassing, or even repugnant. They say they are too angry or too full of doubt.
“In that case,” I tell them, “ask any of your friends or family who do pray to include you in their prayers.” I tell them this because I’ve seen “intercessory prayer”—one person praying for another—work, too.
Scientific studies support this observation, as well. Probably the best known was conducted in 1988 by Randolph Byrd, a cardiologist at the University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Byrd arranged for nearly 400 heart attack patients to be randomly divided into two groups. All the patients got identical standard medical care. The only difference was that volunteers were asked to pray for the recovery of members of one group. Dr. Byrd was the only person in contact with patients who knew a study was being conducted, and he did not know who was assigned to which group.
The outcome for the two groups was dramatically different: Patients in the group for which prayers were said required fewer antibiotics, suffered less subsequent congestive heart failure, and had a lower incidence of pneumonia.
Prayer really does cause something unexpectedly restorative and wonderful to happen in healing people’s hearts.
TRUST
Getting through a time as painful and demanding as mourning requires that we trust in life’s renewable and sustainable potential. We must have confidence that “this, too, shall pass.” But at first, we don’t. Grief feels like the beginning of some dark new forever. It feels impossible to survive intact, much less come out the other side.
“I’m really afraid that I’m going to feel this way from now on,” people say to me. “I’ve never felt so awful. I never even imagined I could feel so awful.”
Whether we are aware of it or not, getting through life in its most ordinary times takes a lot of trust. Why don’t we panic at night when the sun goes down and the world becomes dark? After all, we don’t think, “Oh, no! The light is going away and darkness shall forever now prevail!” Instead, we trust that the sun will rise the next morning and the light will return.
Why don’t we collapse in terror that the earth is dying every winter when plants shrivel, the nights get long, and the air gets cold?
We do not become afraid when we descend into that darkness because we are familiar with the cycles of the sun and the seasons. But we are not familiar with the rhythms of grief, so it’s hard to trust.
Fortunately, recovery from grief provides one. “It’ll come to you some morning after you have been awake for about a minute or so,” I told her. “Suddenly you’ll start feeling lousy. And then you’ll realize that you had been awake for a minute or so before feeling lousy.”
That’s the sign: for the first time, not waking up already clenched in grief’s oppressive embrace. It takes a minute or so to remember our misery.
Until that morning, keep it small and simple. If you need to struggle with something big and incomprehensible, ponder the sun, the moon, and the millions of stars that nightly arrive and depart, and then next night arrive again, in a tempo as familiar as the rise and fall of our own abdomens as we inhale and exhale. Reliable, trustworthy enigmas, they are as unknowable as the secrets that wound and heal our breakable and infinitely renewable hearts.
9. THE LESSON
What We Can Learn from Parental Death
Life provides each of us with ongoing opportunities for learning, but the instruction is never free. Typically, the more valuable the lesson, the higher the price.
Parental death is a required course. Everyone is enrolled. Everyone pays tuition in the form of grief. Nearly everyone learns something valuable.
COURAGE
One of the most persistent and inconsolable fears of childhood is that our parents might die, leaving us abandoned. This is one of the reasons bedtime is so frightening for children. Nightly traditions, often devised originally to help children settle down, come to represent unspoken but heartfelt assurances that parents will still be around in the morning. Whether it is a cookie and a bit of juice before bed, reading a book together, saying prayers, or some ritualized exchange of I-love-you’s, such recurrent practices of childhood bedtime help ease our primitive terror.
It doesn’t seem to matter how old we get, how accomplished we become, how close we are with our parents, how many scary ordeals we have already survived, or how unwavering our religious faith. Fear of parental death continues to loom, and it becomes more threatening as parents age and become more feeble.
This dread, coupled with our culture’s inclination to avoid dealing with death altogether, renders most of us uncomfortable in the presence of those who are grieving.
It isn’t that parental death is the most tragic loss we can suffer. It often isn’t. The loss of a child, sibling, or spouse can be much more emotionally devastating.
It’s not even that parental death is necessarily our first encounter with the death of a loved one. Many of us lose grandparents, family friends, even children, siblings, or spouses before our parents die.
I think it is the fulfillment of this most primal fear that makes parental death so profound. And it is the gradual realization that we will survive the loss that makes parental death so transforming.
After we recover (and, hard as it is to imagine at the time, we do recover), our life and reaction to death is changed. The power of our childhood dread of abandonment is vanquished—not because we are no longer afraid of death or because we no longer fear abandonment. That’s not it.
It’s that we have learned a lesson: We can transcend the enormity of loss, even our most feared loss, by grieving and growing larger ourselves.
From then on, whenever someone we know dies, we are more comfortable sitting with survivors—we may even want to.
In the past we showed up because it was the right thing to and because we hoped it would be helpful. We now share in the common experience of vulnerability, sorrow, and confusion in the face of death that affirms our membership in the human community.
That capacity—to willingly go where we are afraid to go and find a bit of ourselves there
—is courage.
THE MAP
Gradually, we accumulate enough life experience to know, or at least to wonder in a more meaningful way, who they were.
I have a photograph that was taken of my parents and me on the day I was leaving for college. At the time, I was excited and a bit apprehensive, completely unaware that anything might be going on for them.
Now when I look at that picture, my attention is drawn to my mother’s face, her unusual smile, and her sorrowful eyes. I can only imagine what was going on for her that day.
We may identify various qualities of our parents emerging in ourselves, perhaps in our mannerisms and attitudes, certainly in our reflections in the mirror.
Our behaviors may become more similar to theirs or more different, over time. Their conduct may become more understandable to us or less so. We may begin to better appreciate their lives.
Our journey begins with, and for a long time overlaps, their map. After they die, we can find some of the rest of our map by studying the one they left behind. We evaluate some of their pathways and shortcuts, choosing which ones to follow, which ones to avoid.
THE BIG PICTURE
There is a car for each generation on that train—our siblings, cousins, and friends are with us in one car; our parents, aunts, and uncles in the car ahead; maybe a grandparent car even farther ahead; eventually perhaps a car of children behind our own. All of us lined up in a row.
Our view of what is ahead is blocked by that parental car in front of us. We can only gaze through the side windows, through which reality scrolls past, a flat, two-dimensional picture—endless, and safe.
Then our parents die. The car ahead of ours is gone. For the first time, we can see out the front. Life, reality, and time look dramatically different in the bright light of this new panorama. It may be all we can do, at first, just to not avert our eyes to avoid the harshness of that unfamiliar glare. The view now includes the future, and it is not endless.
Without the protective illusion of our parents’ timeless presence, the future begins to have urgent meaning. We may begin to cling to the past for support because it is filled with precious memories that contain our roots, and, we discover, they’re what is holding us up.
Past, present, and future were all the same now. All at the same time. All part of my reality.
It’s everywhere I look. I am simultaneously the baby whose picture is in the old family album, the boy of my childhood memories, the middle-aged man I am today, and the feeble old man I will someday become.
Life, we discover, is so much more involved and amazing than what we can see out of a train window. More, even, than the view out the front and back.
In fact, it is no longer as though we are passengers looking out the window of a speeding train, at all. We are the engine, the caboose, and all the cars in between, clickety clacking along the tracks that stretch, sparkling in the sun, all the way to the horizon.
We are the tracks. We are the rocky path along which those tracks meander, the tiny weeds growing along the edges, the countryside of rolling hills, and the infinite sky above in endless shades of blue.