Every once in a while another of my friends joins me and becomes an adult orphan. It is like a secret club, and should probably have its own password and handshake. No one tells us about this event, this developmental hurdle. No one tells us that it will be a very special kind of hard.
Losing one loved parent is, of course, awful. Losing two is beyond normal grief because it suddenly puts us in a new world -- the world of the parentless -- the world of the adult orphan. It is a world with new feelings in it, new possibilities, new scary bits, new awareness, new responsibilities.
You are now among the familial elders. There has been a shift in generational marker-people. You stand for something different in your family now. Every day in every way you sit in one of the big chairs.
In an instant you no longer have someone around who recalls every minute of your life. Your personal historian, the last one who remembers everything about your life, even the early parts you cannot recall for yourself, is gone.
There will be no more stories of cute things you did when you were two or ten. You don't get to feel like someone's little girl any more.
When I was 32 I went through a painful divorce. The day that I told my mother about the divorce, she asked what she could do. I said, "Brush my hair?" I sat in the living room, at her feet, my head in her lap, and she brushed my hair -- the same way she did when I was little and needed comforting.
There'd be no more of that.
Ones sense of "home" changes. I had my own dwellings over the years, but "going home" always meant coming back to my childhood home and spending time with both or (when one passed) with one of my parents. The guardian of one's roots changes.
Whatever you counted on from your parents -- it was big. Even if it was not all positive. Their lives affect you.
So does their absence.
It may feel difficult when others discuss spending time with their parents. Holidays my feel especially poignant. But in those senses, it will feel like regular grief. But this time you can't discuss it with your parents. You can't call Mom or Dad and just talk it through with them.
For some, parents provide a kind of safety net. If the world falls apart, the parents are still there. If you lose your job your home, your foothold you have them to hide out with for a while. If you have gone through a rough emotional time, you can plug into their love for you to get your soul's batteries recharged. Whatever mooring your parents have provided, emotional, financial, spiritual -- will go.
And you will feel adrift in very particular ways.
I have found that my faith gives me a considerable reassurance that we will all be together again some day. I also do feel a distinct presence in my life -- which I am happy to believe is my Mom watching over me. I have a dozen strange stories that would seem to point to that presence -- so I happily choose to believe in it.
As I put hand to tasks that used to be my parents' tasks, whether it is a certain kind of gardening, or cooking a certain meal, or baiting a fish hook, or nailing a shelf together, I feel their hands over mine, invisible but there in memory.
It is a definite life-position -- that moment when one is an adult and orphaned. It is not like other grief. It has a residual change impact on all of us. I learn every year how different it is to be in this place. And as other of my friends go through it, we are able to comfort each other in specific ways, and offer a special understanding. But make no mistake about it -- the spiritual impact like a deep interior explosion, miles below the surface of the earth. The effect ripples upward for years.
So be brave, feel what there is to feel and share with others who have also gone through it. There are survival tips to share, shoulders upon which you may cry, and many things to learn. After all, like it or not, you are now one of the familial matriarchs.
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