Grieving the Loss of a Parent
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Grieving the Loss of a Parent - Silas Henderson
CHAPTER I
Grieving the Loss of
Your Parent
By Judy Ball
My mother, lying in a darkened hospital room, was close to death. But as she reached for my hand and looked at me intently, she was fully aware that her youngest daughter was at her side.
Judy, is it raining?
she asked. No, Mom, it’s beautiful outside—and it’s even more beautiful where you are going,
I answered as confidently as I could despite the tears in my eyes and the quiver in my voice.
She was almost ready to begin her journey home to God. Will you be my partner?
she asked, her fingers still wrapped around my hand.
Before I could assure her that I would stay with her as long as I could, she was dead. The woman who had given me birth, nurtured me from infancy to adulthood, taught me how to pray and read and cross the street, and protected me from harm was gone.
Working your way through
It had been a long, agonizing 14 months watching my mother go from stubbornly insisting she could continue to live on her own to needing more and more care as a series of small strokes, and finally cancer, took her mind and body. My family and I had been on a forced march, trying to do our best but never feeling adequate to the task.
But with my mother’s death, memories of the months of exhaustion, fear, self-doubt, second-guessing—and, yes, complaining, When will all this end?
—instantly vanished. I had experienced the death of loved ones before, but never did it hurt like this. I was almost 44 years old, but I felt orphaned.
Ironically, our society shows very little understanding about the unique pain of losing a mother or father, even though close to 12 million Americans bury a parent annually. What a powerful support group we could be if we were organized!
Perhaps the following strategies will be a support as you cope with a parent’s death.
Remember, you have every reason to grieve. A parent’s death often leaves adult children with a sense of abandonment and even panic that catches us by surprise. But why are we caught off guard when the death of the ma-ma
or da-da
whose name we struggled to utter as tiny tots leaves us reeling or depressed or sleepless?
We may have lived enough years to be an adult but we will always be a child in relation to our parents. Even if we find ourselves "parenting our