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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Losing a parent as an adult
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Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
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Posted
I'm sure it's true that stereotyped approaches to the suffering of a grieving person are not helpful. My mum, who is still around and is a caring person, has talked a lot about her experiences following my father's death, and it still has power to move her after 16 years. But she has never asked my brother or myself what the experience was like for us. Perhaps for her that is still a question too far?
My brother and I have talked about the experience a lot. We were there for one another during the immediate post-death time, shared the obligations (to arrange things, support my mum) and it was very good to have one another around. We were able to grieve together, in ways which did not cause my mum further upset. I think that helped us a lot in the adjustment. We both had an immense love and respect for my dad. His death came after a long period of ill-health, during which my mum was the primary carer.
My dad's death was not premature, nor did it seem so to either of us. I think that grief is very different when a parent's death is, or feels, premature. When it came, my brother and I were ready for it. We were also with my dad when he died. These things helped. But I hate it when folks say that "you get over it". We would say that we adjusted over time to the fact that our beloved dad wasn't around any more. These days, when we talk about him, the memories bring smiles of recognition. He was the source of a lovely mixture of funny stories and wise remarks about lots of things.
Many others are not as fortunate as we were, either in their relationship with the lost parent, or in the relationship we have with one another.
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
First, you people have motivated me to call my parents more often. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
quote:
Originally posted by anoesis:
I know they are just being kind/polite, but after the first little while, this started to really get to me. I reply that she seems fine, thanks, and I think to myself either a:) well, you know her, you could ask her yourself how she's getting on, or b:) you've never even met my mother, why are you asking after her? Why don't you ask me how I'm doing?
With the death of her partner, your mother has passed into your primary care and responsibility. Thus many people asking about your mother are likely asking about you: namely you in your new role as her primary support. If your mother was to do really poorly, then the expectation would be that you will be there for her. So asking you about your mother is like asking a mother about her newborn baby - except that with a newborn baby we all know how much work they will require of the new mother, whereas with the new "solo elderly parent" we don't. They could be anything between coping perfectly fine (requiring little extra effort from you) to being in extremely bad shape (occupying your life with worries, causing lots of stress). And it makes sense to ask that question again and again, because of the inverse ageing dynamics: matters tend to get worse with time, not better.
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
But when she did die, a few weeks later I got a constant feeling that I can only describe as being the psychological equivalent of sitting in a cold draught. After some time I realised what it was - my parents had been a sort of buffer zone between me and death, and now they were gone.
I hope it will be a long time still until I come into this situation. But this makes a lot of intuitive sense to me, so I fear that I will feel likewise...
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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Pomona
Shipmate
# 17175
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Posted
Both of my parents are alive and well (and in their 40s so hopefully will be alive and well for a good while longer) but this thread certainly provides food for thought.
I am the closest to my dad, out of my parents, but I can't think of either parent as being my rock or anchor. I think of my church family and friends as that. I mean, obviously I don't want my parents to die, and I would miss them, but there are people I am closer to and would miss more. Is that heartless?
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Consider the work of God: Who is able to straighten what he has bent? [Ecclesiastes 7:13]
Posts: 5319 | From: UK | Registered: Jun 2012
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Hedgehog
Ship's Shortstop
# 14125
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jade Constable:
I am the closest to my dad, out of my parents, but I can't think of either parent as being my rock or anchor. I think of my church family and friends as that. I mean, obviously I don't want my parents to die, and I would miss them, but there are people I am closer to and would miss more. Is that heartless?
Not at all. But you might be surprised how their absence from your life will affect you. They might not be the people you see most frequently, or even the people you get most excited to see. But they are the people you have known the longest in your life and it may well be a shock when they are no longer there (which, in your case, will hopefully be a long, long time from now; I was older than your parents are now before I lost my first parent).
Adeodatus also touched on part of this, and it reminds me of a saying in my family: you never feel old as long as your parents are still alive. Death seems much farther away from you so long as your parents are alive.
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"We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it."--Pope Francis, Laudato Si'
Posts: 2740 | From: Delaware, USA | Registered: Sep 2008
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birdie
fowl
# 2173
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Posted
My Dad died last year. It would have been his 84th birthday last weekend.
I'm the 'baby' of my family - my five siblings are within five years of each other, then there's an eleven year gap, then me. There have been times since Dad's death when I've felt quite alienated from my siblings as they have a treasure trove of shared memories of childhood which I don't share. It hit me, particularly at Dad's funeral, that they are a sibling unit which I didn't feel a part of at all, despite the fact I would describe us all as reasonably close. This has only become apparent to me since Dad died and I am finding it strange.
I never quite know how I feel (or am supposed to feel) about dates etc. As a family we are rubbish at dates, regularly and cheerfully forgetting each others birthdays and other significant events. (Phoning Mum and Dad to wish them a happy wedding anniversary usually got 'oh! is it today!?' as a response.) But I sort of feel I should feel something, and I don't know what others expect. I phoned Mum on the first anniversary of Dad's death but it was all a bit awkward. The one day I found unaccountably difficult last year was Father's Day, which is hilarious, as Dad would have none of Father's Day, saying it was an artificial invention and refusing cards.
I don't think I feel the pain that some people have described in this thread. There are times and activities that unfailingly make me think of him - anything to do with growing vegetables - and I do wish he could see how well my kids are doing after all the health stuff they've been through. But I guess I'd started to miss him before he died as Parkinson's and dementia took my dad away a long time ago. We all knew that he wanted to die at the end, and in many ways his death was very merciful.
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"Gentlemen, I wash my hands of this weirdness."
Captain Jack Sparrow
Posts: 1290 | From: the edge | Registered: Jan 2002
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Esmeralda
Ship's token UK Mennonite
# 582
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Posted
My brother committed suicide in 1975 when I was 22, my father died 15 years ago, mother died last year at one month off 97. Now I have no immediate family at all in the world except the family I've created with my husband and son. There are second cousins in Vienna, Hungary and America, most of whom I've never met. And there could be first cousins in Israel from my mother's birth family - she was adopted, but her eldest brother from her birth family visited her in 1927 to tell her he was going to try to get to Israel with one of his sisters (her adoptive mother wouldn't let him in, so she never saw him). I have enough information to make an attempt to trace that part of the family, but we don't know if he ever got to Israel, and if he didn't, he will almost certainly have perished in the Holocaust and there wouldn't be any descendants.
I had a close but difficult relationship with my mother and my first feeling when she died was liberation, but I find myself left with no woman to talk to regularly - I'm even the only woman in my home group and have been the only woman at church for the past two weeks. It's a lonely position to be in, especially when one of the two men in my life (my son) has Asperger's, and I have my suspicions about my husband too (and all cats have Asperger's...)
It is very strange being alone in the world, especially as my marriage is struggling at the moment. I get very envious of people who can have family reunions with 60 people there. I wanted to join a Holocaust Second Generation group but it was always on Tuesdays, and I had home group on Tuesdays - now just when my home group has shifted to Mondays, and I have Tuesdays free, the Second Generation group has moved to Wednesdays when I go singing! Oh well, one day it will be the right time.
[ 12. June 2013, 09:49: Message edited by: Esmeralda ]
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I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.
http://reversedstandard.wordpress.com/
Posts: 17415 | From: A small island nobody pays any attention to | Registered: Jun 2001
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Panda
Shipmate
# 2951
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Posted
I'm finding a lot of posts on this thread very helpful, in different ways. My dad died relatively suddenly (from fairly fit to cancer diagnosis to death in six weeks) at 64, two years ago. My sister and I both noticed the number of queries of 'how's your mum?', as if this were an original line of questioning. We both felt like saying, 'not too bad, thanks. I'm a wreck, of course, but she's coping quite well.'
Someone mentioned the nanosecond in which you still think 'I must tell Dad' before you remember you can't. I find that happens a bit less now, or else the nanosecond is shorter. Sometimes I remember he's dead at the same moment as thinking what I want to tell him, so it doesn't happen. And oddly, that's almost worse. It means he's not alive in my mind, even for that nanosecond that he was.
It turns out a blunted grief is no easier than a raw-edged grief, but of course you only know that when you get there.
Posts: 1637 | From: North Wales | Registered: Jun 2002
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anoesis
Shipmate
# 14189
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Panda:
It turns out a blunted grief is no easier than a raw-edged grief, but of course you only know that when you get there.
Yep. And after about two years, you start to realise that 'there' is a big, and above all, formless place. You don't know how long it will be until you get out of 'there', but then, you don't know if you really want to get out, either.
I guess, really, that it looks from the outside as though people 'go through' grief and 'come out' the other side, whereupon they resume the threads of their former life, but from the inside, it is not so much 'going through', with all its implications of being a mere train station in life's journey, as learning to accommodate to or live with a new kind of reality - not a transient one. And to the extent that you are successful at that, people looking on feel that you are 'coming out' the other side of your grief.
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The history of humanity give one little hope that strength left to its own devices won't be abused. Indeed, it gives one little ground to think that strength would continue to exist if it were not abused. -- Dafyd --
Posts: 993 | From: New Zealand | Registered: Oct 2008
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Nenya
Shipmate
# 16427
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by anoesis:
learning to accommodate to or live with a new kind of reality - not a transient one. And to the extent that you are successful at that, people looking on feel that you are 'coming out' the other side of your grief.
Yes. Things are never the same again but you find a new "normal."
Nen - hugs to you.
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They told me I was delusional. I nearly fell off my unicorn.
Posts: 1289 | Registered: May 2011
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