When We Lose A Parent

 December 30, 2010

Interview with Alexander Levy, author of the book The Orphaned Adult: Understanding and Coping with Grief and Change After the Death of Our Parents

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Mike Carruthers:
The way we as adults deal with the death of our parents is very different than it used to be.

Alexander Levy:
It's really only in the last fifty years that parental death was a person's first experience with death.
 

Alexander Levy, author of the book The Orphaned Adult, says in previous generations, people were exposed to death younger and more often, but that's not the case anymore. So when our parents die, it can often be extremely devastating.

It is a very unique kind of loss. A subtle shift occurs in a person's identity, whether they know it or not. As long as their parents are alive, they're someone's child. And after their parents are gone, they aren't, and that's a pretty profound change in how you see yourself and how you understand the world to be.

What often makes losing a parent so difficult, says Alexander, is what other people around you keep telling you.

They're saying, "Oh, they were old, it was time. You still upset about this two weeks later?" that they feel nuts. They feel like, "Geez, I'm the only person in the world that ever had a problem with this." No, actually, this is something that everyone has trouble with, but its trouble had in private.

Alexander says it's very important not to discount your feelings or minimize the effect it has on you when your parents die.

That's a paradox. If you honor this as a profound loss, you can move through it. If you keep trying to keep it at arm's length, you get stuck in it.