Death of a Parent

Full Title: Death of a Parent: Transition to a New Adult Identity
Author / Editor: Debra Umberson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2003

Review © Metapsychology Vol. 9, No. 36
Reviewer: Sundeep Nayak, M.D.

The old order suddenly changeth, yielding
place to new as it must follow the night, the day. Pardon the mixed metaphor
but a parent’s death invokes within fears of our own mortality, often
intercepting as it does our middle adulthood when our personal pre-morbid fears
are already on the rise. Middle adulthood is a prolonged period where we obsess
about generativity, a rabid concern to procreate and commit to the next
generation before the genetic pool runs dry as there is obviously a very real
fear that it might.

A parental loss event changes everything. Adults
feel closer to their own children as the sense of grief and loss brings them
together on common ground, not certainly but more likely so. Children are more
prone to extend support and solace at these trying times that link generations,
at least in the initial months following the loss event. However, there is more
loss to follow. The bereaved feels palpable vulnerability: you worry more about
your children and you are more concerned about how your partner and children
will be affected by your own death. It alters forever your parenting
strategies, perhaps for the better. Fragile spousal relationships almost never
weather the stormy grieving process, a poorly understood mechanism variously
attributed to the license for release of parent-induced obligation or
insufficient unquestionable love from the partner to replace the parental.

Long-term
problems in relationships with one parent often become more salient and
disturbing in the wake of the other parent’s death with the strange absence of
awareness that the surviving parent too will inevitably die. These chronic
issues however may also produce parental insensitivity to the child’s pain and
loss — having to cope with a surviving parent who continues to despise the
deceased spouse effortlessly and permanently alienates the adult child.
Siblings may react dissimilarly to a loss event, tempered by individuality of
relationship with the parent and the awkwardly distracting settlement of
property that often follows. Inter-sibling discordance in processing both the
grief experience and economic details contribute to further souring of
relationships. Life experiences, temperaments and tempers view different
siblings to view the same deceased parent in different hues: each view is
visionary and unique.

The
death of a parent is a wake-up call to confront the reality of mortality as the
adult child joins the next generation in line for death. Step up to the line.
This book will not help you deal with the grieving process — no book possibly
could — but articulates it pretty well. The strongest advice the book gives is to
those who want to help the bereaved by suggesting: don’t give advice, listen,
and acknowledge the loss. Specifically, do not tell people how they should feel
or how to grieve. It is presumptuous and upsetting.