When the Dad who raised me (my maternal grandfather) died, a friend at the time told me that despite approaching my 40th birthday, I was now an orphan.
Technically this wasn’t true. My birth mother was still alive and we were in infrequent, tentative contact. But the Mom who raised me (Dad’s second wife and step-mother to my mother) had died a decade earlier.
What my friend told me about being orphaned was partially true. There was a part of myself that realized I could never go home to Mom and Dad again.
But there is also the part of you that goes through the end of your parents’ life with them, where they are vulnerable in ways you’ve maybe never before seen them. Where they need you to be their advocate and speak for them. A reversal of roles that can be difficult to navigate.
This can be especially hard when your experiences with parents have been ambivalent. Dad’s alcoholism and long hours at his job kept him from being truly present and available as a father. Wrapped in her own grief over the death of her oldest son from her first marriage, Mom was at times so lost in her own depression, she couldn’t cope…with my childhood needs or the rest of the world.
But I knew without question I was loved and wanted in their lives…I was told so over and over by them, however imperfectly it may have played out.
At the time each of them died, I did not have real time to grieve and process that loss. I was a single professional working mother and life had to immediately resume. I had obligations to others.
Perhaps that is why I dreamed of my parents so much during the COVID years. I had piled up a number of other deaths in the interim: my birth mother; my 102-year-old Great Aunt; a friend of 12 years standing; my much younger (half) sister; my dear friend of 48 years).
With all the news of death and the isolation of COVID, the unsettled dreams about my parents and others, I went into a great depression myself that brought suicidal ideation so intensely into my life that I made a plan for killing myself, and I was at peace with it.
Fortunately therapy and good doctors have brought me to the other side. It helped to be able to visualize what I wanted from the next chapter of my own life, particularly now that my son is safely and happily settled into his own married and professional life, and it often feels he doesn’t need me anymore. Which is exactly what you hope your children will have when they are grown. You just didn’t know there will be a measure of loss of your own identity in that shift too.
Watching other friends lose husbands after many decades of marriage, a son before his time and parents after long term assisted care and personal responsibility, I have learned we all process grief differently. While there is help through therapy, support groups and other techniques, grief is ultimately a thicket through which we must each find our own way.
And all the “I’m so sorry for your loss” messages, casseroles, charitable donations and Mass intentions – sincerely well meant – don’t diminish the pain, but add a responsibility on top of death to be socially polite and respond at a time when your body is flooded with such a sense of loss.
So the only truth I have at the end of the day is that love is love, and grief is grief. To try to find gradients on how much grief we think others should feel based on the type of relationship that death interrupted isn’t fair.
It’s the journey, and though it takes many forms, at its core it is the same for us all.
A Senior Moment 