A shared universe › Blog › When your father or mother dies · Español
You may be fifty, with children and a life built far from the house where you grew up. And yet, when your father or mother dies, something stirs in a very old part of you, as if for a moment you were small again.
The sociologist Debra Umberson, of the University of Texas, spent years studying what happens to adults when a parent dies. She combined in-depth interviews with national surveys and published her conclusions in 2003 in a book titled “Death of a Parent”.
Her starting point is a paradox. In midlife, the death of a parent is about the most predictable thing that can happen, and yet most adults experience it as an unexpected crisis, one that can change what they believe, what they look for and how they see themselves. Umberson also studied why that loss leaves some people more exposed to depression, alcohol or health problems, and what protects others.
Even if there has been a long illness and time for saying goodbye ahead of time, knowing it was going to happen is not the same as living through it.
When a parent dies, the person goes, and so do other things that are not seen at the funeral:
Umberson devotes a chapter of her book to what she calls symbolic loss: what the death means beyond the absence. For many adults it is the moment of realising that they are now the generation out in front, and of asking themselves what they want to do with the time they have.
In 1999, after losing his own parents, the psychologist Alexander Levy wrote a book about what he called the orphaned adult. The word sounds exaggerated when you already have grey hair, and yet it describes well what many people feel when the second parent dies: that there is no one left behind.
That is why some well-meant phrases hurt so much. “They were old”, “they had a long life” or “it’s the way of the world” may be true and still console nothing. The age of the person who dies is no measure of the love of the person who is left.
In 2015, Thomas Leopold and Clemens Lechner analysed data from a large German panel study that asks the same households every year about their satisfaction with life. They followed 2,760 sons and daughters aged between 17 and 70, before and after the death of a parent. The effect varied greatly: the deepest drop was among daughters who lost their mother, and the fall was greater when the death came early, in the first years of adult life. Daughters who lost their mother early had not fully recovered even several years later.
These are averages, and every family is different. But they help to explain why one sibling experiences it one way and another differently, or why this death has hit you harder than you expected.
Not every parent was a good parent, and not every relationship was at peace when death came. In those cases grief can be confusing: sorrow for who they were, sorrow for what they never became, anger, relief and guilt at feeling relief. Umberson also found people who, after the death, were in better mental health than when their parent was alive.
None of that makes you a bad son or daughter. You can mourn someone and, at the same time, recognise that their absence lets you breathe. If that mixture weighs on you, telling someone you trust or a professional can help you sort it out.
When one parent dies, the one who is left often needs more company, and the children begin to worry about them: who rings them, who goes with them to the doctor, whether they can stay in their own home. When both have died, there is the family home, the paperwork, the inheritance and everything they kept. Umberson’s book devotes chapters to the surviving parent and to siblings: two areas in which some families grow closer and others drift apart.
What to do with their things has ideas for when the time comes to face the wardrobes and drawers.
With time, many people discover that their parents are still present in small ways: a gesture you make just as they did, an expression that slips out, a recipe you now cook yourself. Telling their stories to your children or nephews and nieces, repeating one of their habits or going back to their places is a way of keeping the bond with them.
If, after months, the sorrow does not let you live, or if the death was sudden and you cannot take it in, look for help and lean on the people close to you. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free and answered 24 hours a day. If you are in another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
Perhaps there is something they used to say that you still repeat to yourself, or a way of doing things you inherited without noticing. It fits on a “For someone who is gone” star. It will shine for seven days, and those who pass by will leave words of remembrance.