A friend of mine recently lost her sole surviving parent. In speaking to her through this time, I made sure to tell her that there is an added grief, a new developmental place that will emerge in this grieving process -- the sudden realization that she no longer has any parents at all. She is, like so many of us, an Adult Orphan.
No one really prepares us for this. When it hit me a bit over a year ago when my Dad died, I was totally unprepared. (That was also the death of my last blood relative, which was another cauldron of grief entirely.)
But there is something unique to the Adult Orphan position. It forms an added empty space around us, a place where our history was lodged, down to the earliest detail. Gone.
For some of us, mercifully not all, the only place where we ever felt unconditionally loved is gone.
Mostly, it just is an oddly awkward feeling, like having to wear someone else's shoes that have been broken in in all the wrong places.
We live in a world full of children and parents of all ages.
And then, for most of us, eventually, the world is not that way.
Are you an Adult Orphan too? Then you know what I mean. It is a unique place to stand.
Why is it that the world finds this a largely unmentionable topic? To move on in life sans parents is to live a peculiar sort of life, at least at first. I confess I still feel somewhat more un-ordinary than usual, and I am not entirely sure why.
It is a time of turning, of redefining, of having the presence of ones parents reduced to memory and objects of meaning.
The two people we generally need to 'work things out with most' are suddenly unavailable for comment.
It is a brush with the Big Bad Finite. It is the cold air that rushes through the open door in the dead of winter.
Yet, chilled though we are, we move on. Life goes on. The rhythm of things resumes, interrupted and changed but familiar.
But there are mornings that we open our eyes to see ourselves in an eerily different surrounding, as though someone had moved the furniture ever so slightly while we slept.
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