Dealing With the Loss of a Parent
Why we should take time to grieve
It doesn’t matter how old you are, losing a parent is a traumatic event. For those of us who are close to our parents, it is particularly emotional, regardless of our age or theirs. Even if one has a negative experience with a parent, it doesn’t necessarily lessen the grief. The emotions experienced might be more complicated.
Society seems to expect adult children to get over the grief quickly, particularly if the parents were deemed to have lived a ‘long and fruitful’ life. Unfortunately, this is not always true.
My parents both passed away in their eighties, but my grief still hit me hard. When my dad died, I didn’t process my grief properly as I had to take care of my mother and my young daughter. Shortly after my mom died, I became pregnant, and once again, I suppressed my grief so as not to affect the growth of my baby. Not properly processing my grief had led to a number of health issues later on in life.
Many researchers studied the relationship between grief and health. One such study looks into unresolved grief in a national sample of bereaved parents and found that parents who did not properly process their grief have worse mental and physical health than those who did.¹
