one last on loss

So, one more post about dying parents and then we’ll move on to lighter fare. I’m not actually as sad as my last post seems, but I’m processing. Dad was almost 91 years old and he died in his sleep. It was his time. Man, woman, birth, death, infinity. Everybody has experienced loss, or will. It is a guaranteed common experience that I think we should talk about more.

The day after my Dad died, I apologized to a friend who lost her mother a few years ago, leaving her without a living parent. I’d tried to be supportive at the time, but I realize now how little I understood. Not really. I understood “sad” and "loss," but not all this. Until it happens to you, the full impact of losing both parents is incomprehensible. Parents anchor us to the earth, they are our most essential touchstone. With them gone, the world tilts off-balance.

My relationship with my parents was fraught and distant. This is a sad fact of my life and I have come to terms with that. My loss does not actually affect my day-to-day or even week-to-week. But my world has profoundly changed.

I’ve heard people say that even as adults, they felt orphaned when their parents died. That is not my experience. Rather, I feel untethered, like a wagon broken loose from the horse. How do I know where I’m going now? Whose approval am I seeking?

And when you lose your parents, your most essential and concrete past slips away, with all its textures and complexities. Your parents are now photos, memories, mementos and whatever you carry of them in within yourself. They become ephemera.

You'll understand when it happens to you. And, very sadly, it will.