Families and Bereavement

Last night, for a reason that shall remain private, I was thinking about how it feels when, as an adult, your parents die.

Both of my (our) parents died at fairly ripe old ages, but it's not possible to anticipate how you'll feel when you have lost this layer of family: not at all. What I found most profoundly shocking was the physical feeling of loss that I felt when our Dad died. You'd probably expect this to happen with a mother, because for nine months your were as one, sharing the same body. But no: this physical feeling of something torn from my being happened when Dad died.

It was as if I had assumed that I was a tree rooted in family genetic and empirical history, only to discover that instead, I was a branch ripped from the strength of the tree and its roots, cut adrift from the sense of belonging and validation that I'd had before.

I sat in a chair and looked out of the window for a whole day. I saw nothing. I was having to be strong for many other reasons too, and as grief poured out of my body and I wept, I could feel the beginning of a recalibration that would grow slowly as years passed.

Making sure our Mother was OK became a project. Informally, we took it in turns to visit and later, support her. She became gravely ill quite suddenly, and I got news about her death when I was heading back home from a visit to the hospice in Scotland, and just about to do a talk at a cinema about punk. 

A quick call to my daughters to pack a bag for me, and I turned straight round and went back to help to organise things. This time, there were a lot of practicalities that helped with the process of grieving.

But yet again, a link to the complicated idea of our family had been broken. You realise that your personality consists of a lot of construction of a past made of stories about you and your siblings- told by other people. Do your own memories and sense of self tally with these accounts of family history? Often, they don't, and you realise that your siblings had entirely different experiences of being parented than yours. 'The past' begins to look rather wobbly, and your identity wavers. How can you exist if the underpinning roots of yourself are cast in doubt by the chief storytellers no longer telling their stories?

It's back to that idea of validation, of people rooting for you through thick and thin. Exposed, you start to consider the times you might have been wrong despite being loved and accepted by an older generation. Worse, you consider the times when they might have been wrong. You realise that they were far from perfect, and that they too were rooted on shaky ground.

Gradually, you peel yourself away from the past and start to understand who you are. No longer the subject of projections and guilt, your sense of self consolidates. You're not clothed in the costumes of the past, but constructing your own garments so you can wear your selfhood as you progress through the rest of life.

There is a combination of fear, confidence, relief and wisdom that can never take the place of the parents who brought you into the world, but adds to an understanding of what it means to be a human being: unexceptional yet unique, frail yet resilient, impermanent. Not a rooted tree, not even a branch: just an idea of what it means to exist in a nanosecond of the planet's life.