Nobody’s Baby Now

The Encino house is big and new, bought with money her father left when he died three years ago. But the woman inside, at age 51, feels abandoned. “I have nobody left. . . . I’m an orphan,” she wails at her husband when life frustrates her. She’d gladly give up the house if she could have her dad back, she tells him. He understands. He still phones his 86-year-old mother whenever he’s troubled. “I like to get Mom’s perspective on things,” he says.

Experts say such behavior is typical among baby boomers, who make up one-third of the U.S. population and who are once again on the brink of making history. This is the largest generation ever to hit its 50s in the U.S., most with at least one living parent. That makes them the first to become middle-aged--with full-blown careers and families of their own--while still viewing themselves as “somebody’s baby.”

Within the next decade, huge chunks of this population will become adult orphans, losing the second parent in a timeless continuum that is undeniably expected, but for which many seem unprepared. Boomers--the eternal adolescents who bungee jump and rock ‘n’ roll well into middle age--refuse to acknowledge their own advancing years, let alone their parents’. They are accustomed to having Mom and Dad around to co-sign their home or car loans, to watch sick children while they work, to pull strings at Paramount, the post office or anywhere they have clout. Or just to offer that “chicken soup” kind of love that makes a middle-ager feel like a kid again. Because so many of today’s older parents appear forever young, their grown children tend to live as if they themselves will be forever alive.

Also, in a society in which elder death is removed from life’s normal ritual and relegated to hospitals, hospices or old-age homes, boomers seem to suffer a kind of super-shock when they experience the inevitable loss.

In fact, a wave of middle-age angst is sweeping the land, psychologists and researchers say, as boomers discover that the biggest turning point in life may not be marriage, the birth of children, or the success or failure of a career. It is the death of the second parent, which puts a person indisputably in charge of his or her own life, and removes the last buffer between the boomer and his or her own mortality.

Whether the relationship with the parents was good or bad is not the operative factor, these observers say. The very existence of a parent to love--or react against--can alter the way we live. If the relationship was good, there is no one left to offer unconditional love, ceaseless attempts to assist and encourage. If it was bad, there is no one left to defy, create feelings of guilt, or drain our energies.

A Time for Reevaluation

Either way, the absence of that last parent usually produces a reevaluation of all our major relationships and the choices we made while a parent was around to exert either real or imagined influence.

It’s an undeniably sad subject, but one that need not be totally enveloped in doom and gloom, researchers say. Parents are meant to precede their offspring in death--it’s the natural order of things. And the period after the death of the second parent actually offers the opportunity for what some now call “the last great growth spurt” in life, the time when an individual can take total possession of who he or she truly is or wants to become.

A spate of new books on the subject is now reaching stores. Many are poignant, anecdotal manuals that offer insight on grief and recovery for middle-agers who lose parents.

“Fathers Aren’t Supposed to Die,” by T.M. Shine (Simon & Schuster), is a witty and moving gem about the author’s unexpected reunion with his four middle-aged brothers at their father’s deathbed. Grown distant over the years, the four “boys” realign relationships as they make medical, moral and legal decisions for which they are unprepared because their biggest decisions until then had been “whether to buy or lease.”

Bill Moyers is quoted on the back jacket: “I’m going to die one day--an experience my three grown children have trouble imagining.” He hopes Shine’s memoir will help them understand “what is hard to explain and impossible to escape.”

Writer Jane Brooks was the divorced mother of two sons when her mother died recently. She says she felt like “a deserted child. I sat up for nights thinking, ‘I’m an orphan, I’m an orphan.’ ” Her book, “Midlife Orphan: Facing Life’s Challenges Now That Your Parents Are Gone” (Berkley), weaves her own experiences with those of 52 others she interviewed who had lost their second parent.

After psychologist Alexander Levy lost both his parents in midlife, he wrote “The Orphaned Adult: Understanding and Coping With Grief and Change After the Death of Our Parents” (Perseus). Levy agrees with other writers on the subject that the death of each parent is very different: “The first heralds the beginning of the transition, but the second is the beginning of real adulthood.”

Because parents “project an illusion of permanence,” he writes, their grown children have difficulty grasping the inevitability of death--both their parents’ and their own. That understanding, when it finally arrives, is part of what causes adult orphans to “grow up.”

One of the newest books stands apart from the rest. Victoria Secunda’s “Losing Your Parents, Finding Yourself” (Hyperion) is unsentimental, even optimistic. It lists, point by point, what changes to expect when Mom and Dad are no longer there to protect, defend, encourage, nag, offer love or withhold it. These changes can affect relationships with siblings, spouses, children, even career goals.

Interviewed on a recent visit to Los Angeles, the author stood firm in her belief that losing a second parent can be viewed as beneficial by both generations involved. For those who become adult orphans, it is what she calls “the defining turning point in life, the last great opportunity to grow.”

After two years of research and interviews, Secunda says, “the ‘Bingo!’ of my findings is that the period of life between your parents’ death and your own is as big a developmental stage as adolescence or any other phase.”

When adult children “are thrown back on their own resources, when they don’t have the real or imagined safety net of the unconditional love of their parents nor the possibility of emotional or financial rescue--when that generation is gone, you have no choice but to survive. You either grow up or grow old--and the two are not the same thing.”

At that point in adulthood, Secunda says, people should realize the whole job of parents is to prepare their children for life without them. “That’s what Darwin is all about. It’s what happens in nature. When you prune a tree, new shoots emerge. And when the bottom falls out for the adult child, and he or she realizes that no one will ever love them as much again, not even their husbands or wives or children, then new shoots emerge so that the person can thrive without the parent.”

This no-nonsense approach may even bring some relief to aging parents, whose major fear is often that they will leave behind adult children who aren’t quite finished yet, who still need their help. Forget it, Secunda says. “Some parents will not be able to see their good work come to fruition because some adult children don’t fully grow up until their parents’ death, which jump-starts an assessment of their own lives and they realize they are not kids anymore.”

Secunda, 60, whose father died years ago and who lost her mother before starting the book, says she thought of herself as an orphan when she began writing. By the time she finished, however, she says she started identifying with the generation that has passed on. “I realized that my last chance to help my own daughter [age 30] is to make sure she doesn’t need me.”

There are as many individual family dynamics as there are families, Secunda says. In her own case, she was born into a wealthy, upper-crust East Coast clan (“They came over on the Mayflower, everyone went to Harvard, etc.”). But both parents drank too much, her biological father sexually abused her, and she ultimately severed relations with her mother, who never believed her tales of abuse and so never stepped in to stop it.

Problems With Siblings

Until her mother’s death, Secunda thought she had a great relationship with her only biological brother, two years younger. She was wrong. He took care of their mother during her final illness and, afterward, withdrew totally from Secunda.

Unexpectedly, Secunda formed a close bond with a half-sister 10 years her junior, with whom she was not close before her mother’s death. “The only rule my sister made after my mother’s death is that, if we were going to be close, we could never discuss our mother.”

That’s because Secunda and her half-sister did not actually experience the same mother, even though their mother was the same person. This is true in most families, the author says, although not always to an extreme extent. Every child remembers the same parent differently, because every child experiences a different relationship.

She says 85% of her interview sample “knew exactly which child in the family was favored by the parents.” After the parent dies, there are all these issues for siblings to work out, she adds. And that’s only one of the issues siblings deal with as a result of the death.

Sometimes parents exacerbate problems between brothers and sisters: telling tales that shouldn’t be told, showing favoritism, leaving more in the will to some than to others, or leaving a will that does not allow grown children to do what they want with the inheritance.

When no parent is left, Secunda says, “there is no earthly reason for siblings to stay in touch. They need only do so if they want to--not because a parent tells them to. About half the siblings she interviewed became closer, she says, probably because parents were no longer there to pit them against each other, consciously or not.

Relationships with spouses or partners also change, she found. “People who are happily married when the parents die at least have someone to cushion the blow. And that relationship usually becomes stronger when the parents are gone, Secunda said.

Another “benefit” is that there are no more in-law issues to resolve, especially for those who loved their parents deeply and might have felt divided loyalties. “Your mom is calling, your kids are calling, your husband is calling. Whose call do you take first? Whose needs do you tend to?”

Those who married someone to please their parents or to escape dysfunctional families will have a rougher time.

The author also found that changes in careers and goals are common after the deaths of both parents. Some people realize they chose a career for the wrong reason, she says. Others suddenly feel free, with no more need to worry or explain why they want to change their way of life. So they do it.

And Secunda notes changes in relationships with children. “Suddenly you don’t see your kids through the prism of what your parents are saying about them, and whether they’d approve or disapprove. Now you see them through only your own eyes--and sometimes you realize that four ear piercings or a tattoo here and there really isn’t the end of the world.”

The main point Secunda wants to make, she says, is that there’s “a tremendous amount of optimism in everything” she found in her research. Parents who had good relationships with their children can relax into old age knowing that their “tape will never be erased. It lives on in the minds of their kids, and in that sense they will never die.”

Adult kids can relax too. Whether or not you got along with your parents, they probably did the best they could in their circumstances--and their legacy is to let you sort it all out for yourself. In other words, to grow up.

Bettijane Levine can be reached by e-mail at bettijane.levine@latimes.com.

Being Prepared

* Adult children often feel uncomfortable discussing their parents’ finances, but having things in order eases the way down the line. E3