ADULT LOSS OF A PARENT

As I am typing this in my home office, I am looking past my computer monitor and out the window behind it. Just beyond the glass, two American Robins, a male and a female, are tending to a nest of chicks.

I have been watching them come and go. They work tirelessly. They leave the nest, search for something that will provide nourishment, and return to feed their young. Then they do it again. And again. Back and forth throughout the day.

The chicks are completely dependent on them. They wait with open mouths for their parents to return with what they need to grow. The work of these two birds is simple and enormous at the same time: nourish them, protect them, strengthen them, and prepare them for life.

As I watch them, I cannot help but think about the relationship between a parent and a child.

A Bond Unlike Any Other

There is no single kind of parent-child relationship. There is the bond between a mother and daughter, a mother and son, a father and daughter, a father and son. There are adoptive parents, stepparents, foster parents, grandparents who became parents, and others who stepped into that role. Some relationships were warm and secure. Some were complicated. Some were distant, strained, or painful. Many contained a mixture of love, hurt, loyalty, disappointment, gratitude, anger, and longing. Still, for most of us, the word parent occupies a place unlike almost any other word.

For those who have carried a pregnancy, science offers one remarkable example of just how physical the connection can be. During pregnancy, cells can pass from the developing fetus into the mother and remain in her body long after the pregnancy ends. This phenomenon is called fetal microchimerism. In a landmark study, researchers detected male fetal progenitor cells in mothers as long as 27 years after birth. This does not prove a mystical connection, and it should not be used to define motherhood or measure the depth of love. But it is a striking reminder that, in some parent-child relationships, connection can leave a literal biological trace. Yet, biology alone cannot explain the bond between parent and child.

A father and daughter may have no shared pregnancy experience, yet her mind and body may know his voice before she consciously realizes she needs comfort. An adopted son may carry his mother’s sayings, gestures, values, and ways of seeing the world. A daughter may be sixty years old and still instinctively think, “I need to call mom.” A son may face a decision and immediately know, “Dad would know what to do.”

There is something almost archetypal about this. Mother. Father. Home. Safety. Origin. Belonging. These relationships can become woven so deeply into us that we do not have to consciously think about them. We simply live with an underlying assumption that these people exist somewhere in our world.

Until they do not.

The Brain Has to Learn What the Heart Already Knows

Neuroscientist and grief researcher Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor has spent years studying what grief does to the brain. One of the most helpful ideas from her work is that grieving can be understood, in part, as a form of learning.

O’Connor and researcher Saren Seeley propose that after someone we are deeply attached to dies, the brain is trying to reconcile two realities. One is our autobiographical knowledge: I know my mother died. I was there. I attended the funeral. I understand what happened. The other is the deeply learned, enduring knowledge of the attachment: My mother exists. She is part of my world. She is someone I can find.

Those two realities can remain in conflict for a long time. It helps explain something many grieving people experience. You know they are dead, but…

You reach for the phone daily or multiple times a day.
You hear a piece of news and think, I need to tell Dad.
Something happens with your child and, for half a second, you think, Mom will know what to do.
You walk into a store and see something they would love.
You start to send the text.
You turn toward the chair.
You hear a voice in a crowd.
You wake from a dream and, for one brief moment, the world is as it was before.

Then you remember. Again. This may be one of the cruelest parts of grief. We do not lose a parent only once. In many ways, we encounter the loss over and over as life presents us with new moments in which they should have been there.

The first birthday.
The first holiday.
The first crisis.
The first piece of wonderful news.
The first time you need the kind of advice only Dad would have given.
The first time you become ill and want your mother.
The first time your own child does something and you suddenly understand your parent differently.
The first time you realize you have forgotten the exact sound of their laugh.

Each experience asks the brain to learn again what it does not want to learn, they are not coming back in the way I have always known them.

A Club No One Wants to Join

I often hear people who have experienced a profound loss say, “You don’t know until you know.” It reflects both a realization of what they did not understand before and, at times, a frustration with others who cannot fully grasp what they are experiencing.

There are some experiences we can understand intellectually, and others that we understand only after living them. The death of a parent can place us in what feels like a club no one wanted to join. We may look around at people who still have a parent or both parents and feel something we cannot fully explain. Envy. Distance. Sadness. Irritation. Longing. Sometimes all of these at once.

This is one reason being with others who have experienced a similar loss can matter so much. Similar does not mean identical. No one in this room had your mother. No one else had your father. No one else lived your exact history. But there may be less explaining here.

Someone may understand why a grocery store can undo you. Someone may understand why an ordinary Tuesday can be harder than the anniversary of the death. Someone may understand why you can laugh at lunch and cry in the parking lot. Someone may understand why an elderly person holding their adult child’s hand can suddenly feel unbearable. Someone may understand why you are tired of being asked whether you are “doing better.”

Sometimes there is comfort simply in being with people who do not need the entire experience translated for them.

When Grief Is Not Fully Seen

The loss of a parent in adulthood can sometimes be what is called disenfranchised grief. That is, a loss that is not fully recognized, validated, or supported by others. There are many reasons this can happen. Sometimes people see it as the natural order of life. Parents are “supposed” to die before their children. Because it is expected, it can be treated as less significant. Sometimes we are seen as competent adults who no longer need our parents. We have careers, families, responsibilities. From the outside, it may look like we should be able to absorb this loss and continue on without too much disruption. Sometimes people believe we should have been preparing for this our entire lives. That because we knew, in some abstract way, that this day would come, we should be more ready when it does.

And sometimes, we internalize these messages ourselves. I know I did. I told myself this was how life works. I told myself I should be able to handle it. I told myself I had time to prepare. Heck, I was my mom’s in-home caregiver for the last three months of her life. And when the loss came, I found myself asking, Why is this so hard? In doing so, I unintentionally minimized my own grief. I questioned its legitimacy. I treated it as something that should be smaller, quieter, more manageable than it actually was.

So, sometimes we disenfranchise our own loss. We tell ourselves we should be stronger. We compare our grief to others and decide it does not measure up. We dismiss our pain because someone else had it worse. We rush ourselves because we believe we should be “further along.”

But grief does not respond well to being dismissed. It does not shrink because we think it should. And when it is not acknowledged, by others or by ourselves, it can become even more isolating. Part of what we are doing here is giving this loss the space and recognition it deserves.

It Is Hard, No Matter the Age or Circumstances

The death of an older parent is sometimes minimized. People say, “At least she lived a long life,” “At least you had him for so many years,” or “You knew this day would come.” Perhaps all those things are factually true. They may also be completely inadequate.

Having a parent for many years can be a tremendous gift. It can also mean there have been many years for the relationship to become woven into the structure of daily life and identity. An expected death can still break your heart. A peaceful death can still leave an enormous absence. A parent can be ninety-five years old and their child can still feel unprepared to live in a world without them.

And circumstances matter. A sudden death may bring shock and disbelief. A long illness may bring exhaustion, anticipatory grief, difficult caregiving memories, and sometimes relief followed by guilt about the relief. A complicated relationship may leave grief not only for the parent who died, but also for the relationship that never became what we hoped it would be.

Sometimes death closes the door on the possibility of repair. No final conversation. No apology. No reconciliation. No chance to finally hear, “I am proud of you.” That is grief, too.

Who Am I Now?

The death of a parent can create an identity disruption that surprises us. Who am I now? Am I a motherless daughter? Am I a fatherless son? If both of my parents have died, am I an orphan?

The phrase motherless daughter was brought into wider conversation by Hope Edelman’s influential book, Motherless Daughters. Edelman, who lost her own mother at a young age, interviewed hundreds of women to explore the lasting effects of mother loss across a lifetime. Although her work focuses specifically on mothers and daughters, it raises a question that reaches across parent loss: Who do we become when the person who helped shape us is gone?

Some adults find the word orphan painfully accurate. Others dislike it and feel it does not belong to them. There is no correct label. What matters more may be the larger task of learning how to understand ourselves when someone who has been part of our identity for our entire lives is no longer physically here. Even in adulthood, a parent may remain one of the few people who remembers our beginning. They remember us:

Before the career.
Before the marriage.
Before the divorce.
Before the children.
Before the successes and failures.
Even before we remember ourselves.

They may know the story of our birth, our first steps, the childhood illness we barely remember, the nickname no one else uses, the person we were before the world began asking us to become someone else. When a parent dies, we may lose not only the person. We may lose a witness to our life.

And when one or both parents have died, some people describe a profound shift in their place within the family. Their roles may change. Relationships may suffer. Perhaps they lost the glue that kept the family together. On the flipside, some relationships might grow stronger and more committed.

Of course, the death of a parent does not erase the relationship. You do not stop being a daughter or a son because a parent died. But you may have to discover what it means to continue being their child when the relationship can no longer happen in the familiar way.

Back to the Robins

I keep returning to the nest outside my window. American Robin eggs are typically incubated for about 12 to 14 days, and after hatching, the chicks remain in the nest for only about 13 more days before fledging. In other words, from the beginning of incubation to leaving the nest, the process may unfold in only about 25 to 27 days. Less than four weeks. I find that astonishing. It’s why I’m working from home. I don’t want to miss a minute.

Most of us, fortunately, have our parents much longer than that. Our relationships are measured not in days, but in years and often decades. Still, as I watch these robins, I keep thinking about what a parent does. They feed. They protect. They teach. They worry. They repeat themselves. They show us what to do. Sometimes they show us what not to do. They make mistakes. They try again.

And, little by little, the child becomes more capable of living beyond the nest. The robins do not nourish their chicks so that the chicks will remain with them forever. The nourishment is meant to become strength. The protection is meant to give the young time to grow. Eventually, the fledgling must carry what it has been given into a larger world.

Perhaps there is something here for us. For those of us who were fortunate to be nurtured by our parents, maybe part of what they gave us was always meant to outlast their physical presence. And for those whose parents could not give what was needed, the story is different but no less worthy of care. Part of the journey may involve grieving what should have been received and slowly learning to offer ourselves the protection, compassion, steadiness, and nourishment we deserved.

I do not believe the death of a parent becomes easy simply because it is part of the natural order of life. Natural does not mean painless. Expected does not mean easy. And being an adult does not mean we stop feeling the need for our parents. But perhaps, for some of us, part of a parent’s legacy is that they spent years placing things within us that we would one day need when they were no longer physically here. Maybe they could not stay, but something of them did.

I am a parentless child. I lost my father in 1997 and my mother in 2010. I don’t use the word orphan, but I am in the club. If you are, too, you understand. And if this loss is still new, I am so sorry. It hurts. It changes the shape of your world and can leave you wondering who you are without them physically here. But I also believe this: the relationship continues. It changes, because it has to, but it does not end. I promise.