How to lose a parent
We don’t generally spend a lot of time thinking about losing people, it only becomes a regular visitor to our thoughts once we have experienced a great loss of some kind. For everyone it is different, for me I entered the “Dead Parent” club much earlier in life than I would have liked. I am 41 now but I was once a young 23 year old, with a 2.5 year old son trying to graduate from University when my Dad died of a Heart Attack. It was sudden and unexpected, the man we all thought was invincible was in our lives one day and gone the next, snap - just like that. My Mom took a different path - when I was 29, she started to demonstrate early signs of Dementia at 69 years old. I watched as my loving Mother slowly slipped away, she forgot that she loved gardening, to call her children on their birthdays - her joy and personality disappeared into a fog of aggressive dementia, forcing my siblings and I into the role of caretakers instead of children. Within 5 years she was no longer my Mom; she was no longer verbal, or able to feed herself, aside from a sparkle in her eyes every once in awhile that I would connect with, or a squeeze of my hand she was mostly absent. And then she was gone. With that, I was snapped back into being a daughter, a child allowed to grieve the loss of the woman who raised her, the woman she watched slowly disappear in front of her - I was no longer the caretaker putting on a brave front for her sick Mom, just a little girl who lost her Mommy.
The loss of each of my parents came in very different chapters of my life, but I was still young at each of those moments. At 23 years old I didn’t have the tools or maturity to fully comprehend or deal with the loss properly - I made decisions following that time that I look back on with a great deal of empathy. At 35 I was in the dizziness of being a divorced, single Mother of two boys aged 7 and 12 and I didn’t have the means or as much time to dedicate to taking care of her the way I would today. Slowly watching a parent slip away vs. experiencing the abrupt ripping away of a parent are both horrible in their own way - each of these experiences has “gifted” me with the unique perspective that life is short but it can be long and lonely, don’t waste it - live it in a way that doesn’t feel regretful.
My evolving relationship with my parents will be a common thread that comes up at various points throughout my writing - it is a theme that I would not invite in willingly but it is a part of my life that I have had to work through and better understand as it impacts so many moments in my story.
K