I used to apologize for making people cry.
I don’t anymore…at least, not if they’re crying when they read my book or when attending a reading I’m doing from They Live On: Saying Goodbye to Mom and Dad. Because it’s likely that the tears they’re shedding have been bottled up for too long, releasing a grief that has not been culturally permitted to be publicly expressed.
Such disenfranchised grief is often experienced by an adult who loses a parent, especially an elderly parent. A 70-year-old woman told me that she didn’t even get a sympathy card when her 95-year-old mother died. Instead she heard comments like, “You didn’t think she would live forever, did you?” and “You’re lucky you had her for so long.” What seems to be implied by such comments is “Get over it. You’re an adult.” Yet, no matter our parents’ or our own ages, we still need to grieve such a momentous loss – a loss that is greatly compounded by the death of the second parent, making us orphans. Tough at any age.
There is much in the literature about the emotional impact on young children when they suffer parental loss – and we all recognize that as a tragedy. But since losing your parents is considered “the natural order of things,” there are few resources to help adults through the intense grieving process. Although there are self-help books, there are few resources that enable adults to emote about the experience. And we need to emote.
After one of my first readings soon after my book was published, one clearly annoyed woman approached me to say, “If you’re going to make the whole room sob, you should at least provide tissues!” I didn’t realize then that my words could make a whole room sob…but they do. And I have provided tissues at my readings ever since.
I get emails from readers all over the country telling me how therapeutic my book was for them because it made them cry. One reader told me that her mother-in-law gave her the book after her mother died. She started sobbing as soon as she looked at the cover, and her mother-in-law apologized profusely. She told her mother-in-law that she needed to cry and was grateful to have her grief acknowledged. Imagine – a book’s cover can make you cry. That’s because there’s not a great deal of appreciation in our society of the pain that adult parental loss can generate and how long it can linger. As I wrote in my book’s Prologue, “The grieving process is similar for any significant loss, although I believe that the intense grief of an adult losing a parent needs a stronger voice to be appreciated in our culture. Most of us will bear witness to our parents’ final days – a task for which I was woefully unprepared.”
Most of us are unprepared. An estate attorney asked me rhetorically why his clients are so often caught by surprise when their elderly parents become incapacitated or die. The answer is that we never expect our self-sufficient, independent parents to fail. After all, they took care of us! The publication of The Live On, based on the journal I kept during my parents’ last 18 months of life, clearly tapped into an unmet need for adults to talk about caregiving for and losing parents. This is a significant void in the area of grief work.
I was interviewed live on NPR in Philadelphia last August. A therapist was the host, and listeners called in about adult parental loss. Hearing such desperation from the callers confirmed for me that the death of our parents, in a society that doesn’t fully honor that loss when you’re an adult, can lead to unresolved residual grief that must be addressed or it comes out sideways in our health, relationships, and/or work. Following that radio interview, I received a call from a 65-year-old man wanting to retain me as a consultant to help him and his wife get through the final days with her 93-year-old infirm mother. They’re falling apart individually and as a couple because of the emotional strain. And no one seems to understand. While I declined this opportunity, it again demonstrates the desperation that we can feel during this time and how few resources are available to us.
And it’s not just women who need to release the grief. A business man from Chicago emailed me that he bought the book for his wife and decided to leaf through it while on the plane home. Before he knew it, he was sobbing – in first class, all dressed up in his business attire. He was concerned over what his fellow passengers might have thought but wrote to thank me for helping him get in touch with the loss of his parents and in-laws.
I didn’t set out to write a tear jerker, a “crying catalyst” as some have called it – I simply wanted to give voice to what it feels like to helplessly watch your parents slip away. And I understand our reluctance to allow ourselves a good cry because once the flood gates open, it feels like we’ll never get them closed again. Yet we do, and the therapeutic benefits of cleansing ourselves of bottled up grief – simply by crying and talking about it – are immeasurable and essential to a healthy mind and body. So, go ahead and cry. It’s good for you. I’ll provide the tissues.
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As originally published in The Healing Journal, 2012. Still true.
Journal Stories 