By
In Jo's Blog

I was 9 years Momold when my father’s mother died. I still remember hearing the phone ring and knowing – instantly – that Grandma was gone. I was already in bed for the night but I ran down to the kitchen where my mother was on the phone with my father who had been with her in the hospice. My older sister had also come running and we held each other tightly in that tidal wave of grief and disbelief. It was the biggest and the worst thing that had ever happened to us.

In the middle of it all, sitting on the couch with Mom, waiting for Daddy to come home, I suddenly realized that my father was now an orphan. He was 45. Years later, in my 20’s, I understood that being orphaned at 45 was not what I thought it was when I was 9.

Now that I am 58 and an orphan myself, I realize that it was worse. But also better.

My mother died eight years ago today.

Daddy

My father died a little less than a year ago. I’m still emerging from those twin losses. I don’t think I will ever be the same.

I still wake sometimes in the middle of the night wondering where they are. I still think of things I want to tell them. I still wonder what they would make of my life, my dreams, my stories.

I miss them. Dreadfully and physically. It is a void in the centre of my heart. I ignore it most of the time and carry on but something has been torn out of me. Yet, strangely, I think I’m a better person.

Does anything ever prepare us for the loss of our parents? When I was a young adult, I believed that by the time you reached your 40s and 50s, you were beyond needing your parents. I was closer to the truth when I was 9.

By the time my own parents died, everything had shifted. They were no longer the centre of my life and their new dependence meant that whenever I was with them, I took on the role of parent myself, guiding them, making their decisions, steering them through life as I saw fit. That somehow made me feel I would be ready to let go when the time came.

But something funny happened when “the time” came. Time sped up or telescoped or folded in on itself – I don’t understand it; I don’t know how to describe it – and I find to my surprise that the immediate past has merged with the distant past to make a coherent present which is whole and entire of itself.

Mom and Dad were young when I first met them. As I grew up, I listened to their stories of times before I was even born, when they were younger still. I lived with them through their middle years and absorbed their lives without even being aware that I was doing so. I got married when they were the age I am now and I remember thinking in my youthful self-absorption that their lives were ending as mine was taking off.

Of course, they weren’t. Their lives remained as full and as busy as mine is today and I can see it now. But it took their deaths for me to fully understand the complete human beings they were – to realize that they had once been children, teenagers, college students, young adults and that all of those selves were contained in the selves I knew as child and took care of as an adult. They had friends, ambitions, secret fears. They had regrets. They had love. I, who loved them unconditionally my whole life, feel as if I am getting to know them at last.

Red sailboat on a silvery oceanNow that they are gone, the complexity and richness of their lives is so much clearer to me. I wish I could talk to them again. I would ask their thoughts on some of the things that I am thinking about. I would join their book club, I would sit with them in front of a fire, I would go with them for long walks. I would introduce them to podcasts; they would tell me about the underground Church. We would discuss politics.

I find myself constantly calculating their ages in relation to my own, as if they are contained within me, living through me and I through them. They are a part of me now in ways they never were when they were alive and my love for them feels deeper and more complete.

St John Chrysostom said:

“Those whom we love and lose are no longer where they were. They are now wherever we are.”

Like a sailor going round the world, I have returned to where I started, but with the whole journey now a part of my soul. I have lost my parents but found the people my parents were.

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