We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape to test our breaking point. We can lose people to life — to conflict, to confusion, to the consequences of their trauma — losses painful precisely because it could be otherwise. We can lose people to death — losses painful because it can’t and never again will be otherwise.
Of all our possible losses, the loss of a parent is the least evitable and the most complicated, for it is the most primal, most charged with the complexities of attachment and individuation, the complexities that shaped how we move through the world, how we suffer, how we love.
But while Hemingway was right that “no one you love is ever dead,” something very real does die when a parent does — a biological tether, a memory storehouse, a fantasy of what the relationship could have been. And even if you know what to do when your parents are dying, even if you do do it with the utmost grace, nothing can brace you for the impact of that loss when it does come.
Still, there are ways you can move through it — things to hold in awareness, subtle kindnesses, small graces with the grief process — that can salve the pain.
One comes from Joan Didion in a fragment from her classic The Year of Magical Thinking (public library):
After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Maryknoll priest, who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”
Another, soulful and imaginative, comes from a team of young animators from French animation academy Gobelins:
Couple with Didion on the art of letting go, then revisit the most important thing to remember about your mother.
