The word “orphan” summons images of bereft children, not middle-age adults, but when Martin Auz lost both his parents in 1997, the then 47-year-old husband and father was struck by the realization that he was now an orphan.
“It never occurred to me that I would feel like an orphan after my parents died, but I did,” said Auz, now 53, a U.S. Customs official who lives in Homewood. “All of a sudden you feel abandoned.”
Auz’s reaction to the death of his last parent is far from unique, according to grief counselors and bereavement experts.
“When my mother died, I just sat in bed for the longest time thinking, ‘I’m an orphan,'” said Jane Brooks, author of the “Midlife Orphan: Facing Life’s Changes Now That Your Parents Are Gone.” As a 47-year-old mother of two, Brooks found her feelings of abandonment a bit embarrassing.
“It was a very discomfiting type of emotion and not one I wanted to talk about,” Brooks said. “It wasn’t until I started doing research for my book that I realized what a universal feeling this is.”
Though all adults realize that the death of their parents is part of the normal cycle of life–11 million adults lose a parent in the United States each year–few anticipate the impact of the last parent’s death upon our lives, according to many grief experts.
“In people’s minds is this idea that ‘I’m an adult, I should be OK with this,'” said Kyle Nash, who as a thanatologist studies aspects associated with dying. He works at the University of Chicago Hospital’s McLean Center for Clinical and Medical Ethics. “So they are probably going to expend a lot of energy trying to look like it doesn’t affect them as much as it does, but how much better would it be if we could just be honest about death and our feelings.”
Instead, many adults struggle to hide their grief because of a societal perception that, unlike the death of a spouse or child, the death of elderly parents is a loss one recovers from quickly.
“On my job, you get three days” when a parent dies, said Kate Marrin, 45, of Chicago, whose mother died in 1989 and whose father died last July. “Three days is not enough to mourn the loss of anyone, let alone the person who brought you into this world.”
The depth of loss depends on the closeness of the relationship between parent and child, but often the intensity of the grief catches people unawares.
“People who’ve been emotionally or physically abused by a parent may feel totally relieved at a parent’s death or may be guilty that they’re so relieved,” Nash said. “Then there are parents and kids who’ve become almost best friends, and the loss of those parents is going to be a huge chunk taken out of the child’s life.”
Many adults experience a deep and complicated grief, according to experts. Compounding the sorrow over the loss of a parent are feelings of abandonment, a loss of a connection to the past and the recognition of one’s own mortality.
“When my father died after a long illness in 1990, one of my first thoughts was when my mother dies, I’m going to be an orphan,” Nash said. “Chronologically, we may be however old, but deep, deep, deep in our core we are still the children we once were, and at times of vulnerability we revert back to that.”
After all, whatever your age, until your last parent dies, you are somebody’s child.
“When they die, you’re nobody’s child,” said family therapist Audrey K. Gordon, preceptor for end-of-life care at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical School. A hospice founder, assistant to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and former professor at UIC, Gordon was a pioneer in the death and dying movement.
“Parents provide a refuge in a way nobody else can,” Gordon said.
When they die, you’re finally a grown-up.
“When Sept. 11 happened, the first thing I wanted to do was call my father and get that reassurance that it’s going to be OK,” said Marrin, a mediator with the Cook County Circuit Court’s office of marriage and family counseling. “You lose that too–that reassurance that things are going to be OK.”
When the last parent dies, adults also lose what often is the only remaining source of unconditional love, Gordon said. “When they die, that’s gone.”
Adults also can associate the death of the last parent with the loss of the past, said John DeBerry, grief counselor and bereavement coordinator for Northwestern University Hospital’s palliative care and home hospice. Increasingly, the people who attend the hospital’s support groups are grappling with the death of parents.
“There is the loss of the sense of connection to the past,” DeBerry said.
For example, according to DeBerry, people will explain, “I don’t have anyone to call and say, `What did we use to do, or how to do you make the recipe for that?'”
Some people find they have a sudden passion for genealogy. Others get an urge to write down the family history, DeBerry said.
“One of the first things I understood was that my link to the past had been severed, and it was no longer in my parents’ keeping,” said John Bowen, 58, a Chicago violin shop owner who attended a grief support group at Northwestern after his mother died last summer.
“I’ve taken a very energetic position–I’m writing a lot, trying to do my best to recall what I can of my own past and my folks’ past,” Bowen said.
Remembering a birthday
Others maintain a link to the past by continuing to celebrate a parent’s birthday.
“Every single year my sister and I make it a day on my mother’s birthday,” said Nancy Freschauf, 50, bereavement coordinator for Loyola University Medical Center’s center for home care and hospice. “We do things that my mother would have loved to have done, and we talk about my mother.”
The first year, she and her sister went to mass in the morning and then headed to Oak Brook to shop for something “we could not afford because my mother always encouraged us to spend money,” Freschauf said, laughing.
The next year, they went to the Morton Arboretum in honor of their mother’s love of nature.
“As the years have progressed, the memories have become happier and the stories we tell are much more enriching,” Freschauf said.
Often, when the last parent dies, adults also are faced with selling the family home. They can confront the painful realization that they no longer have a real reason to go back to the place where they grew up.
“The home I grew up in was the home my father still lived in, and now that it’s gone, I’ve lost that connection too,” Marrin said. “In a way, it does make it hard to go back.”
Refocusing relationships
To ease that sense of loss, Marrin, one of eight children, has found new reasons to go back. Since her father died, she has focused more on her relationships with her brothers and sisters.
“There is a sense of treasuring those relationships with siblings more,” Marrin said.
Siblings often become closer after the death of their last parent but not always, Gordon said.
“If you have a really good solid family, when the dying comes it will be OK, you will become closer,” Gordon said.
“When you have not a good strong family foundation, the dying process will cause friction, it will cause trouble.”
Inheritance disputes can trigger rifts between siblings, but such squabbles, Gordon said, are “only symptoms of fractured relationships that occurred a long time ago.”
Sometimes, people actually will mend relationships with siblings and even spouses after the death of their parents, spurred by a new recognition of their own mortality, Brooks writes in her book, “Midlife Orphan.”
Avoiding regrets
“You realize now that you’re the generation that’s going to go next,” said Joan Saliskas, 47, who co-facilitates the adult loss-support group at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park. “I’ve become much more careful about never doing anything I’ll regret later.”
That “seize the day” mentality often follows the death of the last parent, said Victoria Secunda, author of “Losing Your Parents, Finding Your Self: The Defining Turning Point of Adult Life.”
Along with a new “sense that time is limited” comes the realization that your parents are no longer around to approve or frown upon your actions, said Secunda, who surveyed 100 adults who had lost both parents in the last five years.
“There was the nun who came out of the convent and married,” Secunda said. “Once her parents died that jolted her into a reassessment of all her life.”
There were people who finally filed for divorce after years of discord and those who rekindled troubled marriages. Others switched careers, no longer fearful of hurting a parent or incurring their disapproval.
“People in their 40s, 50s and even 60s still care what their parents think,” Saliskas said. “You certainly don’t anticipate to what extent your parents are still very central to your identity, and when they die, there are all sorts of ripple effects in your life.”
Planning can circumvent regrets
Preparing for the death of a parent before it happens doesn’t necessary lessen the grief an adult child will feel, but it can prevent the pangs of regret that plague so many, according to bereavement experts.
“It’s becoming a reality for a lot of people,” said John DeBerry, grief counselor and bereavement coordinator at Northwestern University Hospital’s palliative care and home hospice program. “It would be nice if in our society we did a better job of planning for it.”
Jane Brooks, author of “Midlife Orphan: Facing Life’s Changes Now That Your Parents Are Gone,” found that people who consulted with their parents about their wishes were able to minimize guilt and often avoided sibling disputes.
“I encourage people to deal with end-of-life issues if you can now, rather than dealing with it in a crisis situation,” Brooks said.
“It’s shocking how many people really do not know what the parents want–families don’t want to talk about it, but if you can do it, it’s wonderful.”
Encouraging a parent to write a living will, discussing inheritance and funeral arrangements can give adult children peace of mind.
“After my father died my mother wrote a living will,” said Joan Saliskas, 47, of Chicago. “She also sat down with me and had me write down exactly what she wanted for her funeral, what sort of coffin, the dress.”
It was a hard conversation, Saliskas said, but worth it.
“When she died, it held a sense of satisfaction for me to go back to those notes and make sure things were the way she’d wanted,” Saliskas said.
It also can be helpful to ask aging parents about family history, even tape their recollections, because when they die, adult children often regret not knowing more about the past, DeBerry said.
“Sometimes we put off talking to Mom and Dad about photographs and stories, but this is really an opportunity to do that,” DeBerry said.
For some adult children, it’s also an opportunity to make peace, said DeBerry.
“If we needed to make amends and we didn’t do it before they died, that can cause a fair amount of guilt and remorse,” DeBerry said. “We don’t want to incur further regrets so let’s make the time to make sure our relationships are in order.”
— Meghan Deerin
