tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66954777566498459372024-03-21T14:22:12.323-07:00Orphaned AdultsDonna Webbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17214711448389767886noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6695477756649845937.post-27627088042093418282010-11-10T14:42:00.000-08:002010-11-10T14:42:28.402-08:00Open to Hope Foundation > Daughter Feels Little Support for Mother Loss<a href="http://www.opentohope.com/2010/10/22/daughter-feels-little-support-for-mother-loss/">Open to Hope Foundation > Daughter Feels Little Support for Mother Loss</a>Donna Webbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17214711448389767886noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6695477756649845937.post-70162704152667252382010-10-23T05:22:00.000-07:002010-10-23T05:22:21.907-07:00Regrets Surface After Losing A Parent By Judi<div class="post-headline"> <h1></h1></div><div class="post-byline"> October 19th, 2010</div><div class="wp-caption alignleft" id="attachment_345" style="width: 225px;"><a href="http://www.desperatecaregivers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Moms-Graduation-Picture.jpg"><img alt="Audrey's Graduation Picture" class="size-full wp-image-345" height="317" src="http://www.desperatecaregivers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Moms-Graduation-Picture.jpg" title="Mom's Graduation Picture" width="215" /></a><div class="wp-caption-text">Audrey in 1939</div></div>I think about Mom a lot. It seems like she crosses my mind most when I am driving. Yesterday I was thinking about her hair. She had the most beautiful wavy hair. When she was younger it was blond. I always wanted blond hair. I don’t know how my sister can say that I was Mom’s favorite when she got the blond hair, not me!<br />
At the end of her life, her hair was white as snow. She had it styled once a week by the beautician at the nursing home and if her bath aide would put a shower cap on her head, her hair would stay looking beautiful until her next appointment. When I would comment on how nice her hair looked she always did this “thing”. She would tilt her head to the side, raise her hand to her cheek, smile and bat her eyelashes like a silent movie star. I sure wish I had a picture of her in that pose. She always made me laugh. I still chuckle when I think about it, like in the car yesterday.<br />
When I think back on the time I spent caring for Mom, I have a few regrets. I didn’t know at the time but it is little things that I miss the most. Little things like the way she used to introduce me to the same people over and over, her elegant taste in clothes and art, her whimsical smile when she was laughing at herself. If I had known before, I would have taken more pictures and videos of Mom while she was alive. I would have recorded more of those moments so I could look at them and chuckle and say “Yep, that is so like her!”<br />
Another thing I would have done is to get her to talk more about her past and her family. I am the youngest in our family, and when I was growing up we didn’t live close to any of our relatives. I look at old family photos now and I only see strangers looking back at me. It bothers me that I do not know much of our family history, and that I can’t share it with my son either.<br />
I think that if there is something about your loved one that reminds you of them, or makes you laugh or cry, or something that defines them in your memory then you should write it down or record it on film while you still have time; get them to talk about their childhood and their memories so that those experiences are not lost. A good place to start is a book like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1563830396?ie=UTF8&tag=desperatecare-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1563830396">Mom, Share Your Life With Me</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=desperatecare-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1563830396" width="1" /> (there is a version for fathers, too) or <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811843270?ie=UTF8&tag=desperatecare-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0811843270"> Memories for My Grandchild</a>. These books at least get the dialogue started, and they start you thinking of questions you want answered. If they don’t mind, you could record or film the conversations, too.<br />
I realize now that I should have spent some of the time that I was visiting with Mom by asking many of the questions contained in these books and writing her history and memories down for all of us to know her better. And while I may regret that I didn’t visit her more often, or didn’t take her more places, or that I didn’t bring her enough flowers, I think what I regret the most is not asking questions while I had the time.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://regrets%20surface%20after%20losing%20a%20parent/"></a><a href="http://www.desperatecaregivers.com/category/death-of-a-parent">http://www.desperatecaregivers.com/category/death-of-a-parent</a>Donna Webbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17214711448389767886noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6695477756649845937.post-83935034663699093632010-10-20T13:05:00.001-07:002010-10-20T13:06:58.542-07:00And Mom Was Always There<div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">In my crib, alone at night… wind blowing the curtains, the closet door a fright…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Thinking I was all alone, calling out in childish terror…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">And mom was always there.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">So many days and nights of illness, bedbound in my early years…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Always needing special care…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">And mom was always there.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Traveling across the country, paper bags carried with her…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">For those unpleasant moments of motion sickness…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Wish we had gone by air!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">And Mom was always there.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Several deaths in the family, dad and big sis were two…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">I asked, how do you go through this?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">“My faith”, she said, “and you need it too”…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">And Mom was always there.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Many years passed by, more then we ever imagined would…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">I became her caregiver, her parent, her mom…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">For over 4 years…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">I was always there…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Go home now mom, it’s ok, dad is waiting for you… </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Jesus too!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Holding her hand watching her breath as her time drew near…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">But mom was always here….</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div>Donna Webbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17214711448389767886noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6695477756649845937.post-37628975830874545472010-10-20T12:24:00.000-07:002010-10-20T12:24:41.738-07:00It's Mother's Day: What Do You Do When Your Mother Is Gone? By: Mata H.<!--[if !mso]> <style>
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Your mom died. You really miss her. And here it is, those media-saturated days just before Mother's Day. You are not going to be doing any of the things for her that the TV commercials, newspaper ads, e-mail sales pitches and florist shops tell you to do. What you are going to do instead is miss her. You are going to miss her, and you are also going to miss the experience of being a mother's daughter.<br />
I know what that feels like. Although it has been a dozen years since my mom died, each Mother's Day still needs some variation of "special handling." No matter how many years pass, when the spring violets appear, I always remember how I used to pick Mom a bouquet of them for Mother's Day every year, and how she would put them in a special small pale green glass vase. I see those early violets, and always remember. It never goes away. <br />
<a href="http://www.blogher.com/frame.php?url=https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf1IuFYXOjfLmGsfKMqm6fUIt-C0Wno_ftERhCNd2zxa5s6E_PMu2OpsJXyD0AZsFPNkmNV0L5-Ke1z_ntT_XGqVtIn3EhdPRIRvW1RSUMbUpa7C4ZK4MR9gP8pREzeQOTuAYlr6jG9hV-/s1600/bigstockphoto_Violets_1162589.jpg"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span><br />
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If you are a mom yourself, part of your day can be taken up with whatever loving things/events your family has devised to make you feel special. But you may also feel a special poignancy at not being able to share that with your own mother.<br />
What can you do to get through this day better for it, as opposed to having to survive it? Plenty.<br />
<h3>Set Aside Some Time To Remember Her</h3>Set aside a designated time and place on Mother's Day to remember your mother who died. This does not have to be gloomy. When you miss your mother, after all, it is the good times that you miss. Now is a good time to call forward those fine memories and revisit what a joy they were.<br />
<h3>The Mother's Day Picnic</h3>For the first few years after my mom died, Dad and I created a picnic in her honor. The last place I wanted to be was in a restaurant full of mothers and daughters. Mom had loved the out-of-doors and had always created spontaneous picnics for us at the slightest whim. Dad and I had a couple of rules about those picnics.<br />
1. They must be in a pretty place, preferably a spot that Mom had loved.<br />
2. We ate at least one food that she really enjoyed.<br />
3. We could only share happy memories of her, preferably ones that made us laugh.<br />
<h3>Share the Wealth</h3>You must know someone else who is also without his or her mother this year. Call them up, and arrange a get-together on Mother's Day. Go for it head-on. Decide to share your favorite memories about your mother with your motherless friend, and ask her to be prepared to share hers with you. Someone who has been through the loss of a beloved mother will understand your need to share stories, and you will understand hers. Think of it as Mothers' Posthumous Introductions. You may wish to suggest that you and your siblings do this if you are not an only child. Every child in the same family has a different "take" on the same parents. The mom you knew may be different from the way your sibling experienced her. Here are some ways to get this started:<br />
1. Bring a few pictures, or a short bit of video.<br />
2. Think up several memories you want to share and discuss the categories with your friend/sibling in advance. ("I laughed so hard when Mom ... ," "I knew she was a great mom when ...," "My mother surprised me so much when ... ," "The best thing Mom ever cooked was ... .") That way you can each take turns sharing these short stories as a way to get the conversation going.<br />
<h3>Write Her a Letter</h3>Maybe you had some unsaid things left over when your mother died. Write them out, saying whatever is in your deepest heart. Say what you need to say in as loving a way as possible. Then, in a safe place, burn the letter and let its ashes free in the breezes and winds. Visualize the ashes finding their way to her spirit. Release the feelings that you had about not saying these things.<br />
<h3>The Famous Gratitude List</h3>I have written before that when I feel least inclined to write out a gratitude list is when I am most in a position to benefit by doing so. It is the odd irony of gratitude lists that even when they are written grudgingly, they help. You miss your mom. And when you focus on why, you can come up with a long list of her qualities that you miss. Write a list thanking her for each one. Look at the list and feel how fortunate you are to have had this woman in your life. Some of the people reading this article were not so lucky. They had very hurtful relationships with their mothers. And although you miss your mom, focus on how fortunate you are to have had her. Say "thank you" to God, the Universe, a Higher Power, your mom, or Lady Luck. But say "thank you."<br />
<h3>A Scrapbook</h3>If you have children, they might want to help you make a "Grandmother Scrapbook." Helping them with their grief will help you with your own. You can include memories, pictures, drawings, anything that reminds you all of her.<br />
<h3>Make a Corner of the Garden "Hers"</h3>Take a small patch of your flower garden and dedicate it to you mother. Plant things you know she would like. This can become a place you can visit when you need to "be" with her.<br />
<h3>Pick an Honorary Mother</h3>Perhaps you have someone in your life that you have always called a "second mother." If she is still living, honor her. Perhaps you have a godmother who would love to spend time with you. Or perhaps some woman has mentored you who would be very moved to hear from you. Your extended family, once you look at it, may yield a variety of "Honorary Mothers."<br />
<h3>Fill the Blank</h3>Do you know any mothers whose children are absent from them for some reason, or whose children have died? Perhaps they live too far from them to get together. You are a daughter without a mother, and they are mothers without children present. Make a match, and two people get to have a happier day.<br />
<h3>Go Do Something Good</h3>Take the focus off sadness and move it over to generosity. There are lots of things you can do:<br />
1. Work at a soup kitchen or food pantry that day. You'll feel better as you give your time to all these children of God or the world who need your help.<br />
2. Donate to a charity your mom valued or one that expresses her spirit. You can do this every year as a new tradition.<br />
3. Ask a local nursing home which of their residents is not getting visitors. Every nursing home has a few people like that, sadly enough. Pack up some flowers or nursing-home-approved treats and go visiting. Become a "visiting volunteer."<br />
Whatever you choose, be kind to yourself. If you are, as I am, a person of faith, spend some time praying or meditating. Ask God, or the Universe, to send you the strength you need to get through the roughest spots of grief. And help that process along by finding ways to turn the sadness into something else. And what could that "something else" be?<br />
When I asked my normally gruff father how he dealt with his own mother's death, he got very quiet. Then he said to me , "It hurt. It hurt for a long time. But after a while, after a few years, something else started to happen. Something else slipped in next to the sadness."<br />
"What was that?" I asked.<br />
He was quiet again, then looked out of our kitchen window at something he saw maybe a thousand miles away from here and now, as he said, "A certain sweetness comes." Then he turned to me, looked deeply into my eyes and said, "Right next to all the hard things, there it is. A certain sweetness." And he smiled.<br />
And so this is my wish for all of you daughters who, like me, will have at least an occasion to pause on Mother's Day because you are "not like all the other daughters who have their mothers." I wish for you that in the midst of all you feel, in the midst of sadness or sorrow or regret, that you feel the beginning, and then the fullness of "a certain sweetness."<br />
I promise you, it can come.<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.blogher.com/its-mothers-day-you-are-now-motherless-child">http://www.blogher.com/its-mothers-day-you-are-now-motherless-child</a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div>Donna Webbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17214711448389767886noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6695477756649845937.post-31955690208107892442010-10-20T12:22:00.000-07:002010-10-20T12:22:23.237-07:00Adult Orphans -- The Secret Group Almost Everyone Joins By: Mata H.<!--[if !mso]> <style>
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<a href="http://www.blogher.com/user/974"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none;"><span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span> <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span><a href="http://www.blogher.com/member/mata-h"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span><a href="http://www.blogher.com/topic/religion-spirituality"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">There'd be no more of that.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Whatever you counted on from your parents -- it was big. Even if it was not all positive. Their lives affect you.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">So does their absence.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">And you will feel adrift in very particular ways.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.blogher.com/adult-orphans">http://www.blogher.com/adult-orphans</a></div>Donna Webbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17214711448389767886noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6695477756649845937.post-65407165245140604412010-10-20T12:19:00.000-07:002010-10-20T12:19:49.355-07:00The Spiritual Journey of the Adult Orphan by: Mata H.<!--[if !mso]> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">For some of us, mercifully not all, the only place where we ever felt unconditionally loved is gone. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">We live in a world full of children and parents of all ages. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">And then, for most of us, eventually, the world is not that way. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Are you an Adult Orphan too? Then you know what I mean. It is a unique place to stand. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Why is it that the world finds this a largely unmentionable topic? To move on in life <i>sans</i> 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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">It is a time of turning, of redefining, of having the presence of ones parents reduced to memory and objects of meaning. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">The two people we generally need to 'work things out with most' are suddenly unavailable for comment.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Yet, chilled though we are, we move on. Life goes on. The rhythm of things resumes, interrupted and changed but familiar. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.blogher.com/node/15288">http://www.blogher.com/node/15288</a></div>Donna Webbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17214711448389767886noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6695477756649845937.post-88621771447316899892010-10-09T14:28:00.000-07:002010-10-09T14:28:05.239-07:00The Peculiar Grief Of The Adult Orphan By: John Mangan<h1></h1><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody>
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<tr><td style="text-align: left;"><strong>Everyone knows their parents are going to die one day, but many people are bewildered by their degree of loss. </strong></td><td align="left"><br />
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</tbody></table>They’re the forgotten grievers, the lucky ones whose parents had a good innings, the people who after a few months or even weeks are expected to dust themselves down, put their pain behind them and get back to a normal, happy life. <br />
Midlife orphans, orphaned adults — there’s no established term for them, yet losing your parents is one of adult life’s most significant rites of passage. And while society recognises the loss that children feel when their parents die, adults are supposed to be fundamentally different, quickly dealing with the grief of losing the people that raised them from the cradle. <br />
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</style> <![endif]--> </div><div class="MsoNormal">If only it were that simple. Psychologists warn that the impact of losing your parents goes way beyond organising the funeral and sorting out the will. It might be the natural order of things that parents die before their children, but the sheer inevitability is no cushion to the pain, soul-searching and sheer feeling of rudderlessness that so often follows. </div>Sue Cooper, who lives in Mt Martha, lost both her parents within 10 months of each other nine years ago. “I remember sitting with my sister crying and saying to each other ‘We’re orphans now’. There was a horrible emptiness, like all our back-up was gone. I felt very alone.” <br />
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Jack, a journalist with a wire service in Melbourne, lost his mother at the age of eight. He was in his early 20s when his father died. “Dad’s death hit me very hard,” he says. “About a month after he died my brother said to me, ‘You know, we’re orphans now.’ I hadn’t thought about it in those terms till then. It made me feel really alone, like I had a huge obstacle in front of me.” <br />
Rob, a bank officer who lives in St Kilda, was 27 when his mother died, 29 when his father succumbed to bowel cancer. “I had this great sense of loneliness,” he says. “I ended up having quite severe depression. There was a lot of reckless partying, a lot of drinking, two phases of depression of about six months. At one stage I was quite suicidal.” <br />
<div align="left" class="pulloutquote">The second parent’s death plunges us into what can feel like a bottomless pit of emotion.</div>Bettina Arndt, <i>Age</i> columnist and member of the National Advisory Committee on Ageing, says she got an “enormous shock” when her parents died one and two years ago respectively, a shock that still affects her deeply. <br />
American author Jane Brooks was almost 50 when her mother’s death stopped her in her tracks. “For a 47-year-old mother of two to admit to feeling like an orphan was somewhat embarrassing, making me seem needy and childish,” Brooks writes. “Especially since everyone assumed within weeks after the funeral that I was fine. I continued to work, to parent, and to go about my life. Internally, however, something was happening to me. The avalanche of emotions churning inside was throwing me off balance.” <br />
Brooks, who has since written a book called <i>Midlife Orphan: Facing Life’s Changes Now that Your <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parent" rel="wikipedia" title="Parent">Parents</a> Are Gone</i>, thought she was an unusual case until by chance she heard a woman voice similar emotions. “When I heard (her) words, I realised that perhaps my reaction wasn’t as extreme or unique as I imagined,” she writes. <br />
“What we’re talking about here is disenfranchised grief,” says Chris Hall, director of the Centre for Grief Education at Monash Medical Centre. “It’s not a grief that tends to be appreciated,” he says. “The first question people ask is `How old were they?’ And because people can say the older parent had a good innings that grief can be disqualified by others.” <br />
“Parents are like repositories of memory. They’re the only ones who hold certain memories of you as a child. It’s like a mirror — we define ourselves in terms of our relationships so our parents’ deaths challenge us to define who we are.” <br />
Jack Lockett was one who had a good innings. Australia’s oldest man, he was 111 when he died in May last year in Bendigo. His son Kevin was thus 74 when he finally became an orphan. “I was lucky enough to play bowls on the same team with him, we went on fishing trips together,” says Kevin. He’s kept plenty of memorabilia, including newspaper photos of his father carrying the Olympic torch through Bendigo. “But it was a milestone (when he died),” the septuagenarian says sadly. “No matter who you lose, it always hurts. I still get emotional about it sometimes. There’s no use dwelling on it too long, but sometimes we certainly have our moments!” <br />
American psychologist Alexander Levy in his book <i>The <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.amazon.com/Orphaned-Adult-Understanding-Coping-Parents/dp/0756756057%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0756756057" rel="amazon" title="Orphaned Adult: Understanding and Coping With Grief and Change After the Death of Our Parents">Orphaned Adult</a></i> describes the despair that can follow losing your parents. “At a minimum, parental death in midlife elicits lingering feelings of loneliness, memories of former losses, unresolved conflicts, and doubts concerning life’s purpose,” he writes. <br />
“Feeling adult, a member of the eldest generation, brings the chilling knowledge that there is now no one between us and death. Without exception, those whom I have spoken to soon after the death of their second parent have said to me, I just realised that I am the next in line to die.” <br />
The death of the last parent can also trigger grief for other losses, in particular reactivating mourning for the first parent. Brooks says adult children often do not fully mourn the first parent because they become so preoccupied with the surviving parent. “Thus, the second parent’s death plunges us into what can feel like a bottomless pit of emotion as we struggle with grief that had not previously been fully acknowledged.” <br />
Bettina Arndt uses that term “a good innings” to describe her elderly parents’ lives. “Before they died I had this sense of dread not being able to contemplate what it would be like, but beyond that I hadn’t thought much about it,” she says. “It’s just been an enormous shock, the extent of the loss, even now over a year or two year later. I’ll just never get over it. Every day it hits me, that they’re not there any more. <br />
“As your parents get older the whole process of dealing with them can be difficult, yet you end up with so many regrets, the things you don’t know, the questions you would’ve liked to have asked, the things you would like to have said. When my mother died I looked at every scrap of paper in the whole house hoping she’d written something for me.” <br />
Arndt has been struck by what she calls the “selfishness of the younger generation”. Parents, she says, are always interested in what’s happening to their children but when the children grow up the interest is not always reciprocated. “The gaps are starting to emerge now in what I’d like to know. I’m rather shocked at what I don’t know about them — when they’re around you’re used to the fact that you can always ring up and ask them.” <br />
Family relationships have changed. Losing her parents has drawn Arndt closer to her brothers, she says. “Organising the funeral was amazing, extremely stressful of course. These experiences do create a bond we hadn’t experienced for many years. There was good as well as bad in all of that.” <br />
Rob has similarly bonded with his three older sisters. “Our parents’ death definitely strengthened my relationships with my sisters,” he says. “As children we didn’t get along so well but we’ve got over a lot of animosity and sibling rivalry.” <br />
Jack, too, says the bereavement has strengthened ties, in his case with his brother and his stepmother. “We’re united now. We’ve all lost the same person, we’re the only people who can help each other.” <br />
Sue Cooper’s parents held the family together socially. “All of a sudden that history was gone,” she says. “From being a very close family that did everything together, suddenly there was this void — our children had no grandparents and we had no parents. All the dynamics had changed. It seems stupid because I had a husband and children, but it felt like I lost my family — you do lose that family that you grew up in.” <br />
Cooper has assumed some motherly duties with her relatives, visiting her mother’s aunt and helping her younger sister look after her pre-school-age children. “I used to ring my mum every day, now my sister rings me every day.” <br />
Family experiences are not always so positive, Hall warns. The bereaved may be exhausted physically as well as emotionally, particularly if they have been looking after their parents. Disputes can arise over a range of matters, including inheritances, drawing in siblings, step-parents and children. <br />
“Every sibling will have a different relationship with their parents,” says Hall. “You can have five people in a room crying for five very different reasons. There can be a lack of communication between siblings, and different ways of grieving.” <br />
Melbourne mother-of-four Karen Rusden hoped that one of her older sisters would step into the role of organiser of family celebrations and events when her mother died 13 years ago. “But noone really did, so we lost all the family traditions and all just drifted apart. The family became fairly fractured. Mum was the link that kept us all together.” <br />
Relationships with partners can also be rocked by a parental death. Brooks notes that those seeking comfort and support might find their partner insufficiently sympathetic, leaving the bereaved angry or disillusioned. <br />
Furthermore, married adults can often experience some resentment of the spouse whose parents are still living. When that happens, she says, its not that the wife, for example, wishes her in-laws were dead, but it’s still “he has his parents and I don’t have mine anymore”. <br />
Brooks concludes that midlife orphans are compelled to examine the past, dredging up both meaningful and unpleasant memories. “Expressing our ambivalent feelings about our deceased parents affords us a measure of comfort, and, at the same time, encourages our personal growth,” she writes. “Really knowing our parents — that’s what enables us to think of them gently. <br />
“Finally we must make conscious decisions to move on, if only with tiny, tentative steps until we find comfort in our own shoes, shoes that fit us better than those of our parents.” <br />
Hall, though, challenges the notions of “moving on” and “letting go”. “There’s the idea that what we need to do is sever the emotional connection, that out of sight is out of mind, which dates back to the early work of Freud that says grief is about disconnecting,” he says. “We now know this is incorrect. After a parent dies we continue to carry their voice in our heads at some level, as an encourager or as an admonisher. Death ends a life, it doesn’t end a relationship.” <br />
Levy describes parental death as a compulsory subject in the school of life. “Everyone is enrolled. Everyone pays tuition in the form of grief. Nearly everyone learns something valuable.” <br />
The primal fear we experience from childhood that our parents might not be there next morning when we wake up, is what makes losing parents so confronting, he argues. Yet, the enormity of the loss can ultimately be liberating. <br />
“After we recover (and, hard as it is to imagine at the time, we do recover), our life and reaction to death is changed,” he writes. “And it is the gradual realisation we will survive the loss that makes parental death so transforming.”<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/07/1062901937647.html">http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/07/1062901937647.html</a><br />
<div class="zemanta-related"><h6 class="zemanta-related-title" style="font-size: 1em; margin: 1em 0pt 0pt;">Related articles</h6><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.caregiving.com/2010/09/adult-orphans/">Adult Orphans</a> (caregiving.com)</li>
<li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998459,00.html?xid=rss-mostpopularemail">Family: The Last Goodbye</a> (time.com)</li>
<li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.caregiving.com/2010/10/rocks-and-sticks-on-the-path/">Rocks And Sticks On The Path</a> (caregiving.com)</li>
<li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.blogher.com/grief-and-me">Experiencing Grief</a> (blogher.com)</li>
<li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2010/09/prweb4496534.htm">How To Find Personal Renewal After The Loss of a Loved One</a> (prweb.com)</li>
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</script></span></div>Donna Webbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17214711448389767886noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6695477756649845937.post-69462111773865348042010-10-08T20:38:00.000-07:002010-10-09T07:08:29.137-07:00When Your Parents Die - LichtensteinJuly 21, 2007 <br />
<h1 class="heading"></h1><h2 class="sub-heading padding-top-5 padding-bottom-15">However ‘grown-up’ you may be, the death of your parents – even when they are aged – is always devastating. So why is it that orphaned adults are given so little space to grieve?</h2><div><div class="article-author"><span class="small"></span><span class="byline"> Olivia Lichtenstein </span> </div></div><div id="region-column1-layout2"><style type="text/css">
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<div id="related-article-links">It’s three years since my father died and almost 18 since my mother did. I am no longer anyone’s daughter. While no one can deny the tragedy of the small child whose parents have died, the fact remains that however “grown-up” you are when your parents die you still feel like an orphan; an adult orphan. It’s not a state that is discussed much or considered seriously and yet it is one that fills the adult orphan with a profound sense of sadness and loss. “There are a number of books on the subject,” says American psychologist Alexander Levy, author of one of them, <i>The <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.amazon.com/Orphaned-Adult-Understanding-Coping-Parents/dp/0756756057%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0756756057" rel="amazon" title="Orphaned Adult: Understanding and Coping With Grief and Change After the Death of Our Parents">Orphaned Adult</a> </i>(Perseus Books), “but it is not the subject of any research or professional interest. Anyone who does research the subject comments on how little research there is and then doesn’t do any more.” <br />
Perhaps it’s because it’s the natural order of things; after all, we all know that we will lose our parents one day. “In some ways,” writes Edward Myers in his book, <i><a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.amazon.com/When-Parents-Die-Guide-Adults/dp/0140262318%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0140262318" rel="amazon" title="When Parents Die: A Guide for Adults">When Parents Die: a Guide for Adults</a></i> (Penguin), “there is no death that can seem less unfair, less outrageous, than the death of a parent whose children have reached adulthood.” The words, “in some ways” are key; they hint at a darker truth, because nothing can prepare us for how we feel when it happens: lost, abandoned, orphaned and crying for our mum and dad. The knowledge that our parents will one day die proves no comfort to the terrible pain we experience when we finally lose them. We grieve not only for them, but also for the place we called home and the passing of our own childhood and youth; those stages that marked our journey to adulthood. <br />
When they die, those around us, trying, no doubt, to comfort, say things like “He or she had a good innings” (actually, my mother didn’t, she died suddenly at the age of 58 and was cheated out of a large portion of her life and missed the pleasure of being a grandparent), or “You’re lucky you had parents as long as you did.” Most people simply don’t know what to say; there is an absence of an effective language that is comforting, and, anyhow, what can anyone say? After all, they can’t bring our parents back. <br />
Without them, you feel you will flounder and miss your footing for, whatever your age, you’re still your parents’ child and your parents are your most profound source of unconditional love; they have been with you from the moment of your birth and, if you’re lucky, have always walked beside you, loving, teaching and guiding you. Even if you haven’t been lucky enough to have an intimate and loving relationship with your parents, the grief on losing them remains acute. As Sara Smythe, the central character in Douglas Kennedy’s novel <i>The Pursuit of Happiness</i>, says after the death of her emotionally distant father, “I think that is the hardest thing about <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grief" rel="wikipedia" title="Grief">bereavement</a> – coming to terms with what might have been, if only you’d been able to get it right.” The finality of death takes away any last opportunity to repair the relationship; it’s as good as it’s going to get and, all too often, that’s far from good enough. Besides the grief, there is the additional pain of guilt and regret. <br />
Whatever the relationship, parental death causes a seismic shift in the foundations of their children’s world. Peter Grimsdale, a thriller writer now in his early fifties, says, “Suddenly there was no older generation. Even though I was in my thirties it was like being on a flight somewhere and going forward to the flight deck and finding no one at the controls.” <br />
Their death is the thing you most feared as a child, so when it happens, even though you’re an adult, you feel once more like that fearful child. “Longing isn’t necessarily a sign of emotional reliance on a parent,” writes Myers. “Instead, it seems just as likely to indicate how deep the parent-child bond is, and how long it lasts.” Notwithstanding the depth of this relationship, a few weeks after the death of a parent we are somehow expected to be getting over it and on with life, and we sense impatience in others when we’re still grieving. As the time passes and the grief fails to lessen, we feel we must be emotionally immature, too bound to our parents, altogether ill-equipped to cope without them. Alexander Levy says, “People who’ve lost their parents come to me and say, ‘I’m having a surprisingly difficult time of it.’ The truth is that no one gets through it easily; you have to pay sooner or later, you have to go through the grief process.” <br />
No one can deny that the release death offers to ill parents who have no hope of recovery is preferable to their continued suffering. But, while it’s certainly better for them, and may be something of a relief for you in practical terms, it doesn’t necessarily prove any easier emotionally. Lola Borg is a journalist and radio playwright in her forties; she lost her mother when she was 21 and her father seven years ago. “I lost them both in different ways, one quickly and one slowly – both were hideous. It doesn’t matter how they die, whichever way it happens it’s not great: the bolt out of the blue or the lingering illness where you’re on an emotional precipice and expect each time you see them to be the last.” <br />
One of the first things that people ask you when a parent dies is their age. It’s as if there’s an age/grief/sympathy equation – the older they are, the less you’re expected, or somehow allowed, to grieve their loss and the less sympathy you’re entitled to. In my experience, the grief is never over, although, with time, it becomes less acute. When first they die there is a terrible, resounding silence. The realisation that you’re waking up to a world that no longer contains them and to a future empty of them hits you the moment you open your eyes. While the fact of your parents’ death ceases, with time, to be your first waking thought, the map of grief has many roads which, I suspect, one travels in some form or another for the rest of one’s life. The one comfort is the dreams you have about them; in your dreams they are alive again and the silence is replaced once more with the sound of their voices, albeit temporarily. It’s this silence that drives people to mediums and clairvoyants in the frantic search to find their parents again and speak to them one last time. You never cease looking for them and sometimes glimpse them in the expression of a stranger, or a face half-seen as a train pulls away from the station, or, more comfortingly, if you have them, in the mannerisms of your own children. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I found it comforting that she would have my mother’s DNA. Now 13, she often reminds me of my mother. <br />
For all that, it’s very lonely being a mother without a mother yourself. “I felt so forlorn,” says Lola Borg. “You can have all the supportive friends in the world, but it’s not the same thing. It’s a tremendous loss. My mother was my great protector.” Lots of people in middle age still have not only their parents, but also their grandparents. To the orphan adult this feels terribly unfair – they have to rely on themselves and have lost the people who would have their best interests at heart. It’s particularly difficult when your own children are small; they don’t have grandparents and you don’t have parents to help you out. You have to pay strangers to help you. “My deepest sorrow is that they did not live to see their grandchildren grow up,” says my brother, molecular biologist Conrad Lichtenstein. “Perhaps such longevity is what we expect now; although, for us as parents, the loss of our own parents at a time when our children leave the nest may be a triple bereavement: loss of our mother and father, our own lost childhood and our children’s too.” <br />
There’s yet another associated loss, for in addition to your parents, you tend to lose access to their social circle and forfeit the company of that generation. “You end up being everyone’s parent and no one’s child,” says Borg. I find myself making friends with people in their seventies and eighties to fill the void. <br />
It is curious that there appears to be no literature on the subject in this country; the books I found were all written by Americans, who even have a website, <a href="http://www.adultorphan.com/">www.adultorphan.com</a>, which provides a forum for bereaved adults. It seems our British upper lip may be too stiff to acknowledge this fate from which no one escapes. For, as Levy writes, “Parental loss is the ultimate equal opportunity experience, requiring nothing other than children not predeceasing their parents.” When your parents die, you find yourself the member of a club that you’d never willingly apply to join. And it’s true, adult orphans feel a sad kinship with each other; we recognise ourselves in each other’s eyes when people talk about their living parents and know how to comfort each other. <br />
When your parents die, there is no buffer between you and the grave and you finally have to grow up. Your anchor has gone and rather than damage yourself further by bashing against the harbour walls, you have to set sail on the unknown seas of a life without living parents. It seems you have to wait a long time to grow up if you can only properly do so once your parents are dead. It’s a terrifying prospect to face life without our teachers and no wonder, therefore, that we internalise the voices of our dead parents to keep ourselves on track, for, reassuringly, your relationship with them doesn’t end with their death. Stephen Nathan, QC, is in his fifties; his mother died when he was 40 and his father, seven years before. “I still use them as a mental tool, a sounding board to examine what I’m doing or saying. It’s quite a useful tool to have and can be convenient to validate what you’re doing. It gives you a reason to say, ‘Yes, I affirm’, or ‘No, I don’t want to do this.’ You may not always be consistent with what your parents would say, it depends how honest you are with yourself.”<br />
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<div id="related-article-links">Long after they’ve died, your parents’ voices reverberate within you. Last year, I worked with the actor Ron Moody and I remember how moved I was when he told me that he could still hear his parents’ voices in his head loud and clear, even though they had died 40 years ago. It was a poignant reminder that he too, although himself advanced in years, is still somebody’s little boy. The comfort is that with time, you somehow absorb your parents into yourself. <br />
With your parents’ death you lose not only them, but also the witnesses to and curators of both your history and your childhood. Neil Geraghty, 41, is a former dancer with the Royal Ballet. “I remember sitting on a bed as a child and my mother showing me photographs and telling me that I had to remember all these people. I wasn’t really paying attention and now I wish I had, because when they die you become the family archivist and now there are all these photographs and I don’t know who anyone is.” <br />
When my father died and my brother and I began the inevitable process of sorting out his belongings, we found we also had to deal with many of our mother’s; the process reactivated the grief that we’d experienced when we’d lost her. This is not uncommon, according to Levy, who says that each subsequent loss reawakens a prior one. As we searched through all our parents’ papers I kept hoping somewhere to find a letter from my father to me. I was fortunate in having no unresolved issues with him. I simply wanted one final message. <br />
Levy’s advice following the death of parents is to put off all that you possibly can: don’t make big, rash decisions; don’t go through all their things at once if you feel it’s difficult; put any inheritance money in the bank. Inheritance, while it may alleviate financial burdens, does so at a terrible price. For me, it felt somehow like blood money. I still have boxes full of my parents’ stuff festering in the spare room. Recently, and with great difficulty, I managed to throw out a misshapen metal cheese grater that I had grown up with. I can clearly see my mother busy in the kitchen making supper after having been out all day at work, grating an onion or some cheese on it. The fact that I’ve thought about it since and harboured the wish that I’d kept it shows how potent inanimate objects can be as the key that unlocks memory. <br />
Relationships among siblings can change: there may be disputes over who gets what, but, says Levy, that’s often not what causes the fracture. It’s rarely who gets the Bentley that causes the fracture lines among siblings who go to war; the death of a parent can be a catalyst for the expression of a conflict that has long existed. Others grow closer to each other. In my case, my brother and I, always close, have become even closer and do parent each other. We give and seek advice and talk often on the phone as well as meeting once a week. I am also conscious that my husband has shifted into a more paternal role, fulfilling, I suspect, a promise he made to my father to look after me. <br />
“You do feel cheated,” says Stephen Nathan. “At the very time you get to understand your parents and where they’re coming from, that’s when they go.” In some ways it makes sense that they should go then; their work is done and it’s time you did grow up. Your life alters: everything becomes divided into before and after and many people change their lives significantly. In Levy’s experience, people often change careers or marital partners. You need to redefine yourself: who am I if they’re not here, who will be proud of me now? “You do sit down and think through your own life; what you’ve done and why you’ve done it,” says Nathan. <br />
It’s often the little things you miss most. For me it’s talking to my mother while she or I cooked, and preparing the turkey for the oven with my father on Christmas Eve. Borg, too, finds Christmas Eve difficult. “My mother and I would sit in front of the presents and she’d say, ‘Go on, open one,’ and we’d egg each other on until we’d opened them all.” <br />
There’s nothing good about losing your parents apart from the knowledge that you won’t have to go through the experience again. And you do, of course, survive. Although, three years on, I still weep most days for my father and have to catch myself as I go to pick up the phone to call him to share a joke or ask his advice. I keep photographs of my parents around me and although I am not religious, find myself asking them for help and to keep my children safe. I have a powerful memory of a scene in the film <i>Truly Madly Deeply</i>: Juliet Stevenson is talking to her therapist and sobbing uncontrollably over the loss of her lover. She says, “I miss him, I just miss him.” How old was my father when he died? Three weeks shy of his 81st birthday. Yes, I know, but he was my father. I just miss him. And my mother. I miss them both.<br />
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<a href="http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article2072049.ece"></a> </div></div></div></div></div><div class="zemanta-related"><h6 class="zemanta-related-title" style="font-size: 1em; margin: 1em 0pt 0pt;"><a href="http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article2072049.ece">http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article2072049.ece</a> </h6><h6 class="zemanta-related-title" style="font-size: 1em; margin: 1em 0pt 0pt;"> </h6><h6 class="zemanta-related-title" style="font-size: 1em; margin: 1em 0pt 0pt;">Related articles</h6><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.blogher.com/grief-and-me">Experiencing Grief</a> (blogher.com)</li>
<li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://socyberty.com/death/grief-loss/">Grief & Loss</a> (socyberty.com)</li>
<li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.caregiving.com/2010/09/adult-orphans/">Adult Orphans</a> (caregiving.com)</li>
<li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998459,00.html?xid=rss-mostpopularemail">Family: The Last Goodbye</a> (time.com)</li>
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<li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.aolhealth.com/2010/07/26/helping-children-through-grief/">Helping Children Through a Time of Loss</a> (aolhealth.com)</li>
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</script></span></div>Donna Webbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17214711448389767886noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6695477756649845937.post-56172029620813481222010-10-08T19:37:00.000-07:002010-10-08T19:37:39.204-07:00Adult Orphans<i>I posted this on a forum I found, it was in response to the topic of <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caregiver" rel="wikipedia" title="Caregiver">caregivers</a>, who have lost both their <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parent" rel="wikipedia" title="Parent">parents</a>, and now feel like adult orphans.</i><br />
<br />
My father passed away in 1969, I was 17. The past 4 1/2 years, I was my mom's full-time <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caregiver" rel="wikipedia nofollow" title="Caregiver">caregiver</a> as she advanced through the stages of dementia. She passed away the 16th of last month. It is a peculiar feeling to no longer have at least one parent here, even one that did not define what a parent actually is because of an illness, but none the less they were still your parent, and still present. I have spent all this time quite isolated and alone as I have cared for her. My husband has been the only real constant help or support, but he had to be gone most of the time to work. I had no help from brother(s), both sisters died years ago. Now, with mom gone, and my new life, or is it my old life, is unfolding each day, I am feeling more alone then before, abandoned even by the <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospice" rel="wikipedia nofollow" title="Hospice">hospice</a> people who didn't even offer grief support counseling. I have done, and continue to do, a lot of writing since 2006. I have 3 blog sites I work on about caregiving, during and after it, 3 twitter accounts, a facebook, I am involved with another caregiving website, and I have my own <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.blogtalkradio.com/" rel="homepage" title="Blog Talk Radio">Blog Talk Radio</a> show on caregiving, so these things have been my "salvation" through the years of caregiving. They help to keep my busy now too, but there is a gap, a incompleteness, a void, in my day, my moments of the day. Their is so little offered or even written about life after caregiving. A fish out of water? A fish swimming up stream, against the current? It is a struggle each day no matter how I try to define it. Going places, doing things with my husband or others, foreign to me, hard to relax, hard to enjoy them. In the back of my mind is always, I have to get back, have to do this, have to do that...for mom. Hard to reprogram! So, I continue to write, to blog to share, just like I have been doing these past years, but can't find that place in it all that really helps me enter into my new life with strength and confidence...at least not yet. <br />
<div class="zemanta-related"><h6 class="zemanta-related-title" style="font-size: 1em; margin: 1em 0pt 0pt;">Related articles</h6><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.caregiving.com/2010/09/adult-orphans/">Adult Orphans</a> (caregiving.com)</li>
<li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.caregiving.com/2010/10/our-first-council-of-caregiver-talk-show-takes-place-october-14/">Our First Council of Caregiver Talk Show Takes Place October 14</a> (caregiving.com)</li>
<li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.caregiving.com/2010/10/whats-your-favorite-caregiving-memory-so-far/">What's Your Favorite Caregiving Memory (So Far)?</a> (caregiving.com)</li>
<li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.caregiving.com/2010/08/10502/">Just Me.....</a> (caregiving.com)</li>
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