The death of parents

One reason you are stricken when your parents die is that the audience you’ve been aiming at all your life – shocking it, pleasing it – has suddenly left the theatre.

Katherine Whitehorn, the Observer, 1983

We have the greatest opportunity and the longest time to prepare for the deaths of our parents.

More than anyone they are usually the people we expect to die before us. From an early age we will unconsciously have imagined what it will be like for us to be alone in the world. It sounds an overstatement for someone in middle age, successful and worldly wise, to have an anxiety about coping without their parents. However, we all have an unconscious emotional dependency on them – dramatically created in early childhood when we were most vulnerable to possible abandonment.

When they die this long-forgotten infant fear of desertion is triggered and we may not understand why we suddenly feel so strangely vulnerable and depressed.

We also didn’t realise how much we have depended on mem throughout our lives. We may rarely see them but they will usually have stood in the background as the main authentic, unselfish provider of love; we could always depend on this whether we deserved it or not. They were the people who were always interested in what we were doing.

We are the product of their genes and one of our main aims in life will have been to demonstrate what good use we have made of their genetic material.

And yet this most important of relationships is so often taken for granted – because it has been the most complex and difficult to describe. All sorts of resentments, jealousies and rivalries are mingled with love, comfort and protection. In our emotional filing cabinet our parents have by far the thickest file.

This is also the relationship that we are most likely to have neglected because we’ve never had to work at it to keep it going. The shock of loss will usually bring home to us how central our parents have been in making us who we are – and almost inevitably – how little appreciation we have shown.

If we’ve had a difficult relationship with them, we are likely to have cut ourselves off from them. Their death in these circumstances will be hard for us to take. There will be the remorse that we didn’t make our peace but there will be another sense of loss. Bob Monkhouse wrote about the death of his mother:

I collapsed with sorrow and loss, grieving not so much for her death as for her life – racked with regret for the lack of all that could and should have existed between us.

Crying with Laughter, Century 1993

On the other hand if we’ve never been very emotionally involved with them we needn’t necessarily have any regrets. Jonathan Miller had a cool, distant relationship with his father; there was a distinct lack of attachment. In a voice showing no sign of resentment or guilt he told Anthony Clare: ‘I didn’t miss him at all when he died.’ (In the Psychiatrist’s Chair’, Radio 4, September 1999.)

If we’re grown up when they die we’re not likely to get the support from others that we need – after all they’ve been taking their parents for granted too.

Losing a parent when you’re a child

It’s true to say that the main business of childhood – growing up – should have little concern with death. However, our attitudes to death and dying will have a subtle, but important, influence in shaping those of our children. If we have a healthy acceptance of mortality they will have fewer problems: if, as most us do, we find it hard to face our own death, it will be inevitable that our children will develop the same confusion. ‘Don’t be morbid!’ is a learned attitude, not a genetically inherited one.

This is not to say that we should dwell on the precariousness of life and the imminence of death. We do have a responsibility, however, of being clear with our children that death is a normal, natural and inevitable part of life. Adults are able to spread their emotional investments across many people – friends, partners, children, lovers. Children have everything invested in their parents. They are short of resources in other ways too:

• the whole concept of death is unknown territory
• they have only a muddled vocabulary for expressing feelings
• they have not come upon grief before and don’t know that the pain will diminish in time
• they can’t be independent and find it hard to become emotionally dependent on someone else.

As they develop, the reality of the death comes into focus and the new information may bring its own grief. Hope Edelman in Motherless Daughters (Hodder & Stoughton 1994) describes one situation where a 4-year-old had been told that her mother had died in her sleep because of petrol fumes. It didn’t occur to her until she was 20 that it had been suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning; she then had to go through a new cycle of recurrent grieving.

Young children fare badly when the surviving parent:

• has a slow recovery
• is exceptionally depressed
• appears totally unaffected
• becomes tired and disorganised.

The baby’s response to a parent’s death

If another major carer continues with her care she will be unlikely to experience any great sense of loss if a parent dies.

By the age of six to eight months, however, she will have become bonded with her mother or carer and will be unsettled with strangers. From then on if that carer disappears she will grieve for their loss: this may show itself in lack of interest in food, whimpering and apparent withdrawal. A child of this age will retain no conscious long-term memory of a lost parent.

Toddlers

Toddlers, are sensitive to the mood of the home and may need a lot of warm, reassuring cuddles. Explanations about death will be useless – but it’s wise to watch what we say: ‘gone to sleep’, ‘gone away’ and ‘gone to heaven’ are too fanciful and open to all sorts of mistaken conclusions. It’s best to be factual and accurate about what has happened. Later the toddler will come across the concept of death and will begin to grapple with its meaning.

We can help children by – tentatively – putting clear words to their feelings. They won’t yet have learned to understand the loss – so any hurt is likely to be directly and strongly expressed. We should listen for the ‘message’ behind the words.

They also have a crude sense of morality and may think that the death was caused by ‘badness’ – they know that sometimes they, too, are ‘bad’... so ...

The best way to explain someone’s death is to do it in very concrete terms – ‘... and he became so ill that his heart stopped working and he died: he will not be alive ever again, even though we are all very sad.’ Although it sounds simplified – even brutal – at this age the physical truth about death is clearer than the use of concepts of religion, responsibility or blame.

At this age feelings are often expressed through play and we may be able to allow a child to talk about how they feel or to give reassurance by becoming involved in their play activities.

The older child

By the age of 7 the growing child will be less focused on himself and more interested in the rest of the world. The ‘awful truth’ about the inevitability of dying and the possibility of his own death will take a hold. He will also begin to be able to imagine what it would be like if his parents died (at a time when he is so dependent on them).

His mind may dwell gruesomely on what happens to the body after death or what fears there might be in an imagined afterlife. This could all be complicated if he has concepts of ‘naughtiness’, guilt or blame.

Our first thought may be to protect a young child from the pain of grief and we may mistakenly try to play down the distress of bereavement. We are also likely, unfortunately, to be in no fit state ourselves to be able to give attention to other people’s needs. The result may be that feelings of loss and confusion in children are overlooked. This may be an occasion when someone other than the surviving parent could take a special interest in the children.

Children should generally be fully involved with the funeral and, far from needing protection, they need to be able to talk about their fears, anxieties and questions.

It’s sometimes hard for us really to believe it, but honest expression of feelings is always positive:

A child can live through anything so long as he or she is told the truth and is allowed to share with loved ones the natural feelings people have when they are suffering.

We should not be surprised if children often ‘leave off’ apparent grieving for periods of time – behaving as if nothing has happened. This can seem heartless and unnerving, but it is as though the grief was too intense to sustain and ‘short rests’ are required.

The older child’s experience

By the time of puberty a child will have a clear idea of death. However this will remain theoretical and untroubling unless she actually experiences the loss of someone close. This will bring home the reality of mortality and may be frightening. She may only get to grips with the loss six to nine months after the death when the surviving parent is beginning to recover the strength to feel better. It is as though the child puts things on hold until they can be assured of positive attention to their emotional needs.

If we lose a parent before we’re ten there is a markedly increased tendency towards depression, low self-esteem and emotional breakdown later in life.

Some people think that children are too young to understand about death. Sadly they are not too young to misunderstand.

Virginia Ironside, You’ll Get Over It!, 1996

Adolescents

Losing a parent in our early teens is especially hard. The whole point of adolescence is to develop physical, and emotional independence from our parents; there’s a lot of dressing up and play-acting involved but the teenager’s task is to ditch childhood and its ignorance, impotence and dependence and get down to being a self-sufficient, worldly-wise grown up. The truth, of course, is that both parents and child secretly know the rules of the deadly serious game and conspire to keep good faith.

When a parent dies in these circumstances it is an emotional catastrophe for an adolescent. It’s against all the rules.

• They need to seek out good reasons to alienate themselves assertively from parents; dealing with death involves expression of selfless, positive feeling and empathy.
• If there’s any ‘leaving’ to be done, it’s their job – not their parent’s.
• Their ‘grown-up’ maturity is embarrassingly challenged by their sudden overwhelming, tearful neediness.
• Their surviving parent, absorbed by their own grief, may have little stomach for the ‘adolescence’ game.

For a period of time the loss of their parent will be foremost in their mind – the most significant thing about them:

My mother died when I was 19. For a long time, it was all you needed to know about me, a kind of vest-pocket description of my emotional complexion:

Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes – I have long brown hair, am on the short side, have on a red coat, and my mother died when I was 19.

Anna Quindlen, Chicago Tribune, 1986

The bereaved younger child or adolescent has been denied a grown-up relationship with the dead parent. It is only through time that we can get to know our parents as adults. As we have children of our own we begin to see their point of view and cringe at our remembered behaviour. By the time we grow older we know them as rounded people whose death we will be able to mourn lovingly and with understanding.

Considering how little your parents knew when you’re 15, it’s amazing how much they’ve learned by the time you re 21.

Anon

In our childhood and youth, however, these parents were different people. Our childish judgements are sharp, prejudiced, quickly formed and rapidly altered. Mostly we idolised them unreasonably. However, there were times when we hated them bitterly. They didn’t know it (neither did we) but we were aware of their faults. They were overprotective (”but I’m thirteen and a half, mum!’). When they were unfair we didn’t know it was unintended. When your younger sister got a better bike than you, you didn’t know it wasn’t favouritism.

After their death, with no possibility of getting a more balanced attitude to our mother or father, we are left with frozen, muddled, highly coloured ‘fairy-tale’ memories. The good things will be idealised but there may be some dark feelings in the shadows. Overall there may be a vague feeling of resentment at being ‘abandoned’.

We never really gave much thought to the differences between our parents; we didn’t necessarily notice how different their roles were. When one of them dies our surviving parent has to take on both roles. They may not be suited to this and their consequent altered behaviour may be experienced as another loss. We may even realise with a shock that the parent who has died was the one that did all our parenting and we may need to re-assess our relationship with their survivor.

Our total ‘family grief may be complicated more if our surviving parent remarries: a subtle further loss, which can shake our dependable home base.

There are such complex and profound forces at play here that the ‘safest’ and most usual way of dealing with things is for surviving families to show some ‘acceptable’ restrained grief and then to collude with each other to heal over the wound as delicately (but firmly) as possible. It is no criticism that this should be so – it would be amazing if the family had the emotional and psychological resources at such a time of crisis.

And yet such avoidance is unhelpful and counter-productive in the long run. Grief will not go away if ignored – it must be attended to. The only alternative to not dealing with grief is to risk allowing it to disable us – perhaps for years to come.

For a young person this level of grief is only just the beginning. Youth always misjudges how much their future life experiences will add to it. The 16-year-old may think that nothing worse can happen. But when they are being married they will sadly regret their dead parent’s absence – and they have yet to produce a child who will never know its grandparent. As they themselves grow close to the age their parent died they will be struck by how young that parent had been when they died. As they pass the same age they will wonder how it is that they are still alive. (How curious it is to become older than your parent ever was.) The calendar will give an automatic feed to our memory; we will think of them on the their birthday, deathday, wedding anniversary and Mother’s (or Father’s) Day – every year for the rest of our lives.

It is urgent that the bereavement of children is attended to. No child ever copes well with grief on its own. They don’t necessarily need counselling or outside help – it is normally sufficient to create an atmosphere where it is easy to talk –without pressure – about the lost parent. The task is to help the child build up a picture of the parent’s identity – constantly updating it as they grow up to replace any out-of-date fantasy. They should be encouraged to talk with their grandparents, aunts and uncles – although it may be these other relatives that need the encouragement.

It’s important, however, that we should make such support as natural and informal as possible. Psychiatric help should not be foremost in our minds – young children’s grief is much better handled within the family with warmth, reassurance and closeness. Formal analysis of feelings is usually inappropriate; children are resilient in their capacity to recover from a death, given background attention and support. In fact, children separated from a parent by divorce have a higher risk of mental illness than those who suffer parental death.

The idea that a child will eventually ‘come to terms’ with the loss of a parent is probably wrong. The parental relationship will always remain incomplete and there will be a constant striving to preserve something of the lost parent’s identity.

Another unfortunate spin-off of childhood bereavement is that, having had the worst experience of our life in our early years, a shadow is cast over our future life – we don’t need imagination to anticipate future disasters; if it happened once it could happen again. There may be a temptation to expect everything in its worst-case scenario. If another severe loss does happen later on – loss of job, divorce, another bereavement – we may well be reminded of the difficulties of our earlier grief and find it harder to cope.

When a child loses a parent to whom they were very close they learn the sad lesson that relationships are temporary; maybe it’s not safe to make a long-term commitment to someone because ‘they’ll probably die’. These children, when they grow up and have children of their own, may become morbidly obsessed with their own health and safety and overprotective in their child care.

It is rare for a child to lose both parents but it takes no imagination to see the enormity of the potential consequences: his or her history disappears and the child suddenly becomes the next person in line to die in their family: brothers, sisters and other relatives take on a new significance.

This is a loss that will be a shadow behind every other we experience.

How an adolescent or adult copes with the death of a parent may be affected by any earlier family losses –grandparents, other relatives – or, more crucially, if your other parent died when you were younger. It is also important to remember that dealing successfully with your present bereavement may also have a strong effect on your ability to cope with future losses.

When you’re a young adult and a parent dies...

There is a fallacy that adolescence is more or less complete by the time we’re about 20 but as Anna Raeburn said:

Adolescence ends about a quarter of an hour after rigor mortis sets in.

Talk Radio, 1999

As we mature into our twenties our vulnerability becomes less visible: we develop sufficient skills and gain just enough experience to give the appearance of adulthood. There is an important period of several years when, although we seem established as a grown-up, we still retain a strong background emotional dependence on our parents.

The sense of loss experienced by a young adult if a parent dies can, therefore, be as great as that of a younger child.

Many people would say that young adult grief is worse. When a parent of a young child dies, their need for support and substitute care is immediately recognised. With a young grown-up, however, there is often an outward appearance of strength and resilience, which may hide much of their loss.

Indeed, far from receiving sensitive care, others may look to them to give support. They may be called on to take responsibilities for which they are not ready – arranging the funeral, dealing with the estate, disposing of possessions. They may be seen as the natural ‘comforter’ of the surviving parent or they may be pushed into a substitute parental role towards younger brothers and sisters.

Young adulthood is a time for establishing ourselves in a job and learning how to live in a long-term relationship. There is a powerful need to project an image of positive competence, optimism and strength. Our investment in these aspects of our lives may mean that we ‘postpone’ our grieving needs for the more pressing needs of others.

The result is that there are thousands of older adults showing signs of chronic, unexplained depression, which can be linked to inadequate attention to their personal need for grieving many years earlier.

There’s also the regret – the anger even – that the dead parent will never see the promising future we have in store for ourselves; our children will never know their grandparent. There may even be an unconscious, lingering, ‘little-boy-lost’ feeling of abandonment – even though we’re 63 years old.

We may also have been denied an ‘adult-adult’ friendship with them as we grow out of the complications of the parent-child relationship.

The time following a parent’s death is often a time when we gain a fuller picture of them. We may meet distant relatives and friends who may throw a new light on their personality and their past. Their completed life will now be ‘whole’. For the first time we may be able to look back and reflect on life in general – ‘Was that all... ?’ We may become interested in researching family history as we take on our new role of ‘descendant’.

While our parents lived, we never quite escaped from defining ourselves as ‘somebody’s child’. Now we switch to being ‘somebody’s mother’ or ‘somebody’s brother’ or, for someone without relatives, alone in the world.

If you are pregnant when a parent dies it is likely that your normal grief reactions will be affected. Your body knows its priorities and it won’t allow you to shift your focus and emotional attention from the new baby. It may not be until after the birth that your bereavement hits you. This can then be a bleak, depressing time, for not only are you mourning your loss but you are aware that your parent never saw their grandchild – all this when you should have been benefiting from their physical and emotional support as you adjust to your new role. This can be a strong underlying cause of postnatal depression.

In one study (Jacobson and Ryder 1979) it was found that 20 per cent of older women who lost their mother found that they became unable to enjoy their sexuality. They also found that it’s not uncommon for some men to ‘retreat into childish and effeminate activities’ following the death of their father.

Being in a long-term relationship will provide a massive support to us when a parent dies. Being a carefree bachelor may have its advantages, but, among single men who commit suicide, an amazing 60 per cent have been found to have lost their mother in the previous three years (only 6 per cent of the general single male population will have had a similar loss.)

Often a mother is the ‘mediator’ or ‘communicator’ in family relationships; she may be the one who has always encouraged discussion of feelings or calmed down conflicts. When she dies a vital component of the whole family may die and things may never be the same again. Who’ll ever remember your sister’s wedding anniversary now?

Although the death of both parents can bring feelings of loneliness and abandonment that can turn us in on ourselves, it can also be the jump-start for us to move on in our personal development. For the first time we are free of some of the restraints on our feelings and behaviour inherited from our childhood: through the loss and abandonment we can emerge to positive independence for the first time.