The Sorrow of a Grown-Up Goodby : Parent’s Death Stirs Unexpected, Deep Grief for Many Adults

The parent-child relationship remains part of human identity throughout adulthood. Why should the death of a parent not leave its mark, and a deep one?

--”When Parents Die,” by Edward Myers

“It happens without you even consciously thinking about it,” 44-year-old Ernestina Higuera said. “Maybe you’ll be driving to work months afterward, and suddenly you start crying in the car.”

For Art Leatherman, 60, “Whenever I use his old power table saw, the memories come back, such as when I was young and he would take me to the beach.”

“Almost a year later, I still have dreams about him,” Gina Pack, 32, explained. “In one dream, I was standing next to him at a party, and I was so glad that he had recovered.”

“Don’t let them tell you time makes it better,” 39-year-old Jewel Novack said. “It doesn’t.”

All of these adults are talking about an almost universal human experience: the death of a parent.

It would probably come as a shock to hear that the experience that has so imprinted their lives has been relatively ignored by social scientists who study the human condition.

But where much attention has been paid to how a parent’s death impacts a child, and there is study after study describing the grim fallout from the death of a child, and what it means to lose a spouse, there seems far less concern about the more common event of an adult finally “orphaned” by the loss of a parent.

“In our society,” observed Andrew E. Scharlach, assistant professor in the USC School of Social Work, “it is more legitimate to talk about the problems of taking care of an elderly parent than to talk about one’s feelings for that parent after death.”

That’s something of an anomaly, Scharlach added, in that while a human can have many spouses and many children, everybody gets only one mother and one father. As one woman confided tearfully to a USC researcher after her surviving parent died: “I’m no one’s little girl anymore.” She was 59.

Higuera had the privilege of living parents for more than 40 years. Then, three years ago, she said, both died within a little more than a month of each other.

Her 84-year-old father had suffered strokes, but, shocking to Higuera and her two sisters, it was their 80-year-old mother--with no signs of illness--who died first.

“When she said she didn’t feel well, we took her to a hospital. Three days later she was gone. Our father was in a convalescent home, and we never told him, but we could tell he knew,” she said.

“And all three of us were present, releasing him when he left. We told him Mom was waiting for him. There was no response, but I feel he understood. He finally let go.”

To this day, Higuera said, she is grieved by the circumstances of her mother’s death: what scholars call a residual grief. Since she was expected to recover, none of the family was present at the time of her death.

“Being with my father when he died was so important,” Higuera said. “I think one of the things we all fear is dying alone. I still hurt because I wasn’t there with my mother. It seems as if that regret will always be around.”

With Higuera as with many children, there was an initial reaction:

“After the deaths, I moved from my apartment back into their house in Valinda. The bedrooms are in the rear of the house. At first, I couldn’t set foot in those rooms. I made the living room my bedroom. That lasted for about a month.

“I also had dreams about both my parents--so did my sisters. In one of my dreams, my parents walked into their house, smiled, and said they were free.”

Higuera, who is single, admitted to a corollary feeling of release: “There was a part of me that was actually relieved because of a new-found freedom. When my parents passed away, it was like a new beginning.”

Permeating this, however, was a realization: “That unconditional love is gone forever.”

Higuera, whose mother died Feb. 20, her father March 24, recalled that: “At first, I went out to Rose Hills Memorial Park on the 20th and 24th of every month. I also went there on their birthdays, on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas. This went on for the first year.

“Now I just go on their birthdays, and on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. With time, it becomes easier not to have to go through the ritual. I know this is part of letting go.”

Eighteen months ago, Andrew Scharlach embarked on a study of this little-examined but much-experienced part of life.

Two hundred twenty people responded to a newspaper brief seeking adults who lost a parent one to five years previously, and all of the respondents filled out questionnaires. Scharlach and his assistants are conducting in-depth interviews with 100 of the participants, and the study is still in progress.

But Scharlach said these preliminary findings have emerged:

* Initial reactions to a parent’s death included difficulty sleeping, working, keeping up with normal activities, and getting along with certain people.

* One to five years after a parent’s death, at least 25% of the respondents indicated that they still cry or become upset when they think of the deceased parent. More than 20% continue to be preoccupied with thoughts of the parent.

* Other oft-cited residual reactions included finding it painful to recall the parent’s memory, and feeling that it was unfair that she or he died.

In an interview, Scharlach (who plans an eventual book based on his research) related other impressions from his study:

“That last contact with the parent remains for many people a metaphor for the entire relationship. People add meaning to it that may not, in fact, have had anything to do with the situation. The person may feel that Dad accepted him or her as he never had before--when that may not have actually been the case.”

As for the spouses and sweethearts of children mourning a parent’s death, the professor said some spouses were singled out for having helped see the survivor through, but in some cases the ordeal led to the breakup of a relationship.

“In those instances, the wife or husband or friend realized the partner couldn’t be depended on in times of need. He or she didn’t understand the depth of the experience.”

‘A Powerful Event’

He observed that “Our culture stresses invulnerability,” that when a parent dies, an adult offspring is expected to take a day or two off, and then be back at work. And generally it isn’t thought to be a legitimate topic for conversation. “The reality is that such a death is a powerful event in anyone’s life.”

As one of Scharlach’s subjects mentioned: “When my parent died, I realized for the first time that this (life) isn’t a dress rehearsal.”

Yet, commented Dr. Edwin S. Shneidman, professor emeritus of thanatology at UCLA, “A person isn’t expected by society to overgrieve, because it is strange to say you are an orphan at 45.”

And realistically, he added, “there is this to consider: When an adult loses a parent, nature is in its proper sequence. You are supposed to bury your parents, not your children. You are born in a march of generations, and it is natural for everyone to die in that order.”

One can take consolation, the thanatologist said, that things have occurred this way. “At a parent’s grave, it is a terrible feeling, but it is better than to be standing at the grave of one’s child.”

Still, as Scharlach said he was told by more than a few study subjects: “They felt they had lost their cheerleader on the field of life.”

And Scharlach believes that today’s baby boomers are much less prepared for it than previous generations. “Previously, it was common for parents to die when their children were relatively young,” said the 38-year-old Scharlach, both of whose parents are living. “Now, because of health advances, parents live longer lives. Baby boomers are less likely to have seen friends of their own go through the mourning.”

For some, when the final chapter with their parents does occur, a life transition follows.

Jewel Novack’s mother died Nov. 11, 1983, her father March 10, 1984. Seven months later, she separated from her husband, and in 1986 the divorce became final.

“When I got married, my Mom gave us six weeks, but it lasted 10 years. I was in a dead-end marriage, though. If my parents had still been alive, I probably would have eventually gotten divorced, but it probably would have taken me longer to get around to it.”

Novack, of Ontario, was the only person in the Scharlach study available for comment, and she readily discussed her initial and residual reactions: “My mother had a degenerative brain disease, and died at age 63. When my father died, he was 72, and my initial reaction then was anger. He had lung cancer, but the doctors said it was in remission. Three months later he was dead.

“After both my parents were gone, I developed insomnia--only two or three hours of sleep a night. I still have it.

“For a long time, I distanced myself from everybody. I didn’t want to see anybody or have anybody around me. I withdrew.”

Years later, such emotions persist:

“If I am watching TV, and the commercial shows a daughter phoning her mother, I’ll burst into tears.”

Novack keeps a few visible reminders of her parents: “Hanging on the wall near my bed are the dog tags my Dad wore in the Marine Corps, and I have Mom’s collection of bells and music boxes.”

The daughter said she has had dreams in which her mother has appeared:

“In one of them we were sitting on a hill in an Orange County park we used to go to. Four of our dogs were with us. My mother said: ‘It’s really hard to get to the top, but you’ll do it.’

“I miss my mother in particular, because I thought Mom would be forever.”

Preliminary research results show that the death of the one remaining parent has a particularly profound impact on adult children, Scharlach said. Especially common responses to that final chapter were:

* An overwhelming sense of feeling orphaned.

* The sense that one no longer fit the role of child, that they not only suffered the deaths of their parents, but had lost “the child within.”

For just about all, the issue of their own mortality came into focus. Now they were next at the turnstile. “As long as a parent is alive, there is somebody between us and what we fear,” Scharlach said. “We are symbolically protected.”

With the passing of both of them, he continued, there comes a realization that time is limited--”some feel the urgency to prioritize all aspects of their lives.”

Author Edward Myers wrote: “It isn’t just your parent’s death that you grieve, but your own.”

Scharlach put it another way: “When they are gone, you are out on a stage alone, and there is no prompter.”

One woman told him that when a friend’s parents died, she said how sorry she was, avoiding any in-depth conversation regarding the loss. She added that it wasn’t until she herself lost both her parents that she realized how the words “I’m sorry” actually trivialized the pain and sense of loss she was experiencing.

Gina Pack, 32, of Los Angeles, remembers well the day last summer when she walked into her father’s room in a convalescent home in Connecticut.

Pack’s father, Carl Cappo, 65, had been in a coma for three years, after complications developed following a bout with pneumonia.

“I closed the door and I was alone with him. He couldn’t respond, but I spoke. I said: ‘I understand it if you have to let go.’ I told him Mother needed a vacation after three years of this. I told him all the other six children were fine.”

Pack had been trying to persuade her mother to go with her to visit another daughter living in Switzerland.

“It took a couple months of convincing,” she recalled. “She finally did agree. I believe he could pick up signals. Just days after I booked the flight, he died.”

Pack remembered the days preceding the passing: “As it dawned on me that my father was, in fact, going, I had trouble functioning. I became disoriented, such as when I was in places I had visited before.

“For a while after his death, I felt I couldn’t keep track of details. If I had a doctor’s appointment, I would get to the doctor’s door and wonder if they were expecting me.”

In the aftermath, there was more: “Because of my enormous emotional burden--being in a coma, he was neither here nor there--I have had to try and get over my adversarial feeling, that the insurance people, and the hospital, and the doctors were all against me.”

“Also, I saw a different side of my mother. I had to step in and handle the financial affairs. I saw her not just as my mother, but his wife.”

As is usually the case, members of the family were affected in different ways: “I think the death has been easier on the three of us who are married. We have a support system. It has probably been rougher on the unmarried ones.

His study reveals, Scharlach said, that after both parents have died, interactions between adult family members often don’t stay as they were.

“If a pattern of closeness (already) had been established, surviving siblings often draw closer; there is an increased sense of family unity, of connectedness, a need for mutual sharing,” one of the educator’s associates has written in a preliminary paper.

“If, on the other hand, there were conflicted relationships between siblings before the deaths, this gap seems to widen after the parents are gone.”

As one woman told an interviewer: “My brother wasn’t around, he wasn’t there for my parents--or me--when they were alive, and we needed him. Now that they are dead, I don’t particularly care if I ever have anything to do with him again.”

Surviving adult children who aren’t especially connected to their siblings, or who are only children, the associate continued, sometimes establish more intimate relationships with persons who were close to their parents--such as an aunt or uncle.

“The death of a parent is like nothing ever experienced before,” Scharlach said. “It is completely overwhelming.”

Many children think about doing it, but few ever do, and now Art Leatherman of Arcadia is glad he took the time:

“Six years ago it occurred to me that my mother and father were getting along in years, and I thought that before something happens, I wanted to tell them how much I appreciated them as parents. I sat down and hand wrote them a letter, four pages long.”

That the son did this has, in a way, softened the melancholy memory of the last meeting with his father, age 84, debilitated by strokes and living out his remaining days in a Marysville convalescent hospital.

“It was six weeks before he died in April of 1988,” the son recalled. “My wife and I went up to see him. But after about 20 minutes, he said he wanted to go to sleep. I felt depressed all the way home.”

Leatherman said he feels his father had lived a good life, longer than is normal. “But toward the end, he was suffering. He had reached the point where he couldn’t even change a light bulb, and he found that difficult to cope with.

“But rather than look back on those final years, I take comfort in remembering how, as a boy, he let me help him with electrical wiring, and how he would take the family to the beach.”

It doesn’t matter how old you are, you’re still affected by a parent’s death.

Gloria Caruso of La Canada Flintridge is 66 years old. Five years ago, her mother died at age 89. Last October her father died at age 100.

“The impact was different for each of them,” Caruso reminisced. “My mother had a stroke five years before her death, and I lost her a little at a time. At the end she could neither talk nor walk. I think the quality of life is important.

“My father had been in excellent health. He took no medications, his mind was alert, he was a happy person. The end came fairly quickly. He developed prostate trouble, and finally pneumonia.

“When he was in the hospital, he asked me: ‘Take away the oxygen.’ I told him I couldn’t do that. He said: ‘My time has come--why prolong the suffering?’ He eventually signed a paper authorizing the hospital people to discontinue the oxygen, and they did.”

Not without emotion, Caruso said she especially misses her father.

“I find I miss him when I want some counsel, when I want help in making a decision. He was important in my life.”