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From The Times

July 21, 2007

When your parents die

However ‘grown-up’ you may be, the death of your parents – even when they are
aged – is always devastating. So why is it that orphaned adults are given so little
space to grieve?

Olivia Lichenstein with her father, Edwin, in 1978

Olivia Lichtenstein

It’s three years since my father died and almost 18 since my mother did. I am no longer anyone’s daughter. While
no one can deny the tragedy of the small child whose parents have died, the fact remains that however “grown-up”
you are when your parents die you still feel like an orphan; an adult orphan. It’s not a state that is discussed much
or considered seriously and yet it is one that fills the adult orphan with a profound sense of sadness and loss.
“There are a number of books on the subject,” says American psychologist Alexander Levy, author of one of them,
The Orphaned Adult (Perseus Books), “but it is not the subject of any research or professional interest. Anyone who
does research the subject comments on how little research there is and then doesn’t do any more.”

Perhaps it’s because it’s the natural order of things; after all, we all know that we will lose our parents one day. “In
some ways,” writes Edward Myers in his book, When Parents Die: a Guide for Adults (Penguin), “there is no death
that can seem less unfair, less outrageous, than the death of a parent whose children have reached adulthood.” The
words, “in some ways” are key; they hint at a darker truth, because nothing can prepare us for how we feel when it
happens: lost, abandoned, orphaned and crying for our mum and dad. The knowledge that our parents will one day
die proves no comfort to the terrible pain we experience when we finally lose them. We grieve not only for them, but
also for the place we called home and the passing of our own childhood and youth; those stages that marked our
journey to adulthood.

When they die, those around us, trying, no doubt, to comfort, say things like “He or she had a good innings”
(actually, my mother didn’t, she died suddenly at the age of 58 and was cheated out of a large portion of her life
and missed the pleasure of being a grandparent), or “You’re lucky you had parents as long as you did.” Most people
simply don’t know what to say; there is an absence of an effective language that is comforting, and, anyhow, what
can anyone say? After all, they can’t bring our parents back.

Without them, you feel you will flounder and miss your footing for, whatever your age, you’re still your parents’ child
and your parents are your most profound source of unconditional love; they have been with you from the moment of
your birth and, if you’re lucky, have always walked beside you, loving, teaching and guiding you. Even if you haven’t
been lucky enough to have an intimate and loving relationship with your parents, the grief on losing them remains
acute. As Sara Smythe, the central character in Douglas Kennedy’s novel The Pursuit of Happiness, says after the
death of her emotionally distant father, “I think that is the hardest thing about bereavement – coming to terms with
what might have been, if only you’d been able to get it right.” The finality of death takes away any last opportunity to
repair the relationship; it’s as good as it’s going to get and, all too often, that’s far from good enough. Besides the
grief, there is the additional pain of guilt and regret.

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Whatever the relationship, parental death causes a seismic shift in the foundations of their children’s world. Peter
Grimsdale, a thriller writer now in his early fifties, says, “Suddenly there was no older generation. Even though I was
in my thirties it was like being on a flight somewhere and going forward to the flight deck and finding no one at the
controls.”

Their death is the thing you most feared as a child, so when it happens, even though you’re an adult, you feel once
more like that fearful child. “Longing isn’t necessarily a sign of emotional reliance on a parent,” writes Myers.
“Instead, it seems just as likely to indicate how deep the parent-child bond is, and how long it lasts.” Notwithstanding
the depth of this relationship, a few weeks after the death of a parent we are somehow expected to be getting over
it and on with life, and we sense impatience in others when we’re still grieving. As the time passes and the grief
fails to lessen, we feel we must be emotionally immature, too bound to our parents, altogether ill-equipped to cope
without them. Alexander Levy says, “People who’ve lost their parents come to me and say, ‘I’m having a surprisingly
difficult time of it.’ The truth is that no one gets through it easily; you have to pay sooner or later, you have to go
through the grief process.”

No one can deny that the release death offers to ill parents who have no hope of recovery is preferable to their
continued suffering. But, while it’s certainly better for them, and may be something of a relief for you in practical
terms, it doesn’t necessarily prove any easier emotionally. Lola Borg is a journalist and radio playwright in her
forties; she lost her mother when she was 21 and her father seven years ago. “I lost them both in different ways,
one quickly and one slowly – both were hideous. It doesn’t matter how they die, whichever way it happens it’s not
great: the bolt out of the blue or the lingering illness where you’re on an emotional precipice and expect each time
you see them to be the last.”

One of the first things that people ask you when a parent dies is their age. It’s as if there’s an age/grief/sympathy
equation – the older they are, the less you’re expected, or somehow allowed, to grieve their loss and the less
sympathy you’re entitled to. In my experience, the grief is never over, although, with time, it becomes less acute.
When first they die there is a terrible, resounding silence. The realisation that you’re waking up to a world that no
longer contains them and to a future empty of them hits you the moment you open your eyes. While the fact of your
parents’ death ceases, with time, to be your first waking thought, the map of grief has many roads which, I suspect,
one travels in some form or another for the rest of one’s life. The one comfort is the dreams you have about them;
in your dreams they are alive again and the silence is replaced once more with the sound of their voices, albeit
temporarily. It’s this silence that drives people to mediums and clairvoyants in the frantic search to find their parents
again and speak to them one last time. You never cease looking for them and sometimes glimpse them in the
expression of a stranger, or a face half-seen as a train pulls away from the station, or, more comfortingly, if you
have them, in the mannerisms of your own children. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I found it comforting
that she would have my mother’s DNA. Now 13, she often reminds me of my mother.

For all that, it’s very lonely being a mother without a mother yourself. “I felt so forlorn,” says Lola Borg. “You can
have all the supportive friends in the world, but it’s not the same thing. It’s a tremendous loss. My mother was my
great protector.” Lots of people in middle age still have not only their parents, but also their grandparents. To the
orphan adult this feels terribly unfair – they have to rely on themselves and have lost the people who would have
their best interests at heart. It’s particularly difficult when your own children are small; they don’t have grandparents
and you don’t have parents to help you out. You have to pay strangers to help you. “My deepest sorrow is that they
did not live to see their grandchildren grow up,” says my brother, molecular biologist Conrad Lichtenstein. “Perhaps
such longevity is what we expect now; although, for us as parents, the loss of our own parents at a time when our
children leave the nest may be a triple bereavement: loss of our mother and father, our own lost childhood and our
children’s too.”

There’s yet another associated loss, for in addition to your parents, you tend to lose access to their social circle and
forfeit the company of that generation. “You end up being everyone’s parent and no one’s child,” says Borg. I find
myself making friends with people in their seventies and eighties to fill the void.

It is curious that there appears to be no literature on the subject in this country; the books I found were all written
by Americans, who even have a website, www.adultorphan.com, which provides a forum for bereaved adults. It
seems our British upper lip may be too stiff to acknowledge this fate from which no one escapes. For, as Levy
writes, “Parental loss is the ultimate equal opportunity experience, requiring nothing other than children not
predeceasing their parents.” When your parents die, you find yourself the member of a club that you’d never willingly
apply to join. And it’s true, adult orphans feel a sad kinship with each other; we recognise ourselves in each other’s
eyes when people talk about their living parents and know how to comfort each other.

When your parents die, there is no buffer between you and the grave and you finally have to grow up. Your anchor
has gone and rather than damage yourself further by bashing against the harbour walls, you have to set sail on the

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has gone and rather than damage yourself further by bashing against the harbour walls, you have to set sail on the
unknown seas of a life without living parents. It seems you have to wait a long time to grow up if you can only
properly do so once your parents are dead. It’s a terrifying prospect to face life without our teachers and no wonder,
therefore, that we internalise the voices of our dead parents to keep ourselves on track, for, reassuringly, your
relationship with them doesn’t end with their death. Stephen Nathan, QC, is in his fifties; his mother died when he
was 40 and his father, seven years before. “I still use them as a mental tool, a sounding board to examine what I’m
doing or saying. It’s quite a useful tool to have and can be convenient to validate what you’re doing. It gives you a
reason to say, ‘Yes, I affirm’, or ‘No, I don’t want to do this.’ You may not always be consistent with what your
parents would say, it depends how honest you are with yourself.”

Long after they’ve died, your parents’ voices reverberate within you. Last year, I worked with the actor Ron Moody
and I remember how moved I was when he told me that he could still hear his parents’ voices in his head loud and
clear, even though they had died 40 years ago. It was a poignant reminder that he too, although himself advanced
in years, is still somebody’s little boy. The comfort is that with time, you somehow absorb your parents into yourself.

With your parents’ death you lose not only them, but also the witnesses to and curators of both your history and
your childhood. Neil Geraghty, 41, is a former dancer with the Royal Ballet. “I remember sitting on a bed as a child
and my mother showing me photographs and telling me that I had to remember all these people. I wasn’t really
paying attention and now I wish I had, because when they die you become the family archivist and now there are all
these photographs and I don’t know who anyone is.”

When my father died and my brother and I began the inevitable process of sorting out his belongings, we found we
also had to deal with many of our mother’s; the process reactivated the grief that we’d experienced when we’d lost
her. This is not uncommon, according to Levy, who says that each subsequent loss reawakens a prior one. As we
searched through all our parents’ papers I kept hoping somewhere to find a letter from my father to me. I was
fortunate in having no unresolved issues with him. I simply wanted one final message.

Levy’s advice following the death of parents is to put off all that you possibly can: don’t make big, rash decisions;
don’t go through all their things at once if you feel it’s difficult; put any inheritance money in the bank. Inheritance,
while it may alleviate financial burdens, does so at a terrible price. For me, it felt somehow like blood money. I still
have boxes full of my parents’ stuff festering in the spare room. Recently, and with great difficulty, I managed to
throw out a misshapen metal cheese grater that I had grown up with. I can clearly see my mother busy in the
kitchen making supper after having been out all day at work, grating an onion or some cheese on it. The fact that
I’ve thought about it since and harboured the wish that I’d kept it shows how potent inanimate objects can be as the
key that unlocks memory.

Relationships among siblings can change: there may be disputes over who gets what, but, says Levy, that’s often
not what causes the fracture. It’s rarely who gets the Bentley that causes the fracture lines among siblings who go
to war; the death of a parent can be a catalyst for the expression of a conflict that has long existed. Others grow
closer to each other. In my case, my brother and I, always close, have become even closer and do parent each
other. We give and seek advice and talk often on the phone as well as meeting once a week. I am also conscious
that my husband has shifted into a more paternal role, fulfilling, I suspect, a promise he made to my father to look
after me.

“You do feel cheated,” says Stephen Nathan. “At the very time you get to understand your parents and where
they’re coming from, that’s when they go.” In some ways it makes sense that they should go then; their work is
done and it’s time you did grow up. Your life alters: everything becomes divided into before and after and many
people change their lives significantly. In Levy’s experience, people often change careers or marital partners. You
need to redefine yourself: who am I if they’re not here, who will be proud of me now? “You do sit down and think
through your own life; what you’ve done and why you’ve done it,” says Nathan.

It’s often the little things you miss most. For me it’s talking to my mother while she or I cooked, and preparing the
turkey for the oven with my father on Christmas Eve. Borg, too, finds Christmas Eve difficult. “My mother and I
would sit in front of the presents and she’d say, ‘Go on, open one,’ and we’d egg each other on until we’d opened
them all.”

There’s nothing good about losing your parents apart from the knowledge that you won’t have to go through the
experience again. And you do, of course, survive. Although, three years on, I still weep most days for my father and
have to catch myself as I go to pick up the phone to call him to share a joke or ask his advice. I keep photographs
of my parents around me and although I am not religious, find myself asking them for help and to keep my children
safe. I have a powerful memory of a scene in the film Truly Madly Deeply: Juliet Stevenson is talking to her
therapist and sobbing uncontrollably over the loss of her lover. She says, “I miss him, I just miss him.” How old was
my father when he died? Three weeks shy of his 81st birthday. Yes, I know, but he was my father. I just miss him.
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my father when he died? Three weeks shy of his 81st birthday. Yes, I know, but he was my father. I just miss him.
And my mother. I miss them both.

Do you think the grief of adults who lose their parents goes unrecognised? Go to www.timesonline.co.uk/debate.
Olivia Lichtenstein’s novel, Mrs Zhivago of Queen’s Park, is published by Orion at £9.99

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