My dad died on January 1, 2006, and my mom died in late March 2014. I’ve had plenty of time to not just incorporate their deaths into my life, but to turn around and examine what their lives meant to me.
Because of social media, we have more access to the events of each other’s lives and I it feels like more often than not, someone I know has had a parent die. I don’t often get to do more than tell someone I am sorry for what they’re going through and to let them know that I’m sending them healing energy.
That’s because I often have a different perspective on loss and I’m careful not to step on the toes of people’s pain. But there is something I see that others don’t because long ago someone told this:
When our parents die, we don’t necessarily grieve for what we have lost than we grieve for what we never had.
I believe that our parents have done the best they could. They made the decisions that they believed in that moment were the right ones to make (and, of course, we thought were totally wrong!). No one is perfect (sorry, to burst someone’s bubble today!) and when we look at the lives of others, sometimes we see what we didn’t get (usually emotionally) from our own parents, but someone else is. Maybe we were abused in some way. Or many our parents were simply emotionally distant. There are a list of things I could put here, but that’s not what this is about.
Instead, it’s about the acknowledge that we are grieving for what we never had, what they might not have ben capable of giving us. Just because people become parents doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what they really wanted, rather than what society said they should do. That might have left them resentful of having to raise these little people they didn’t want in the first place.
When people die, we often get caught on the train of how wonderful someone was. Sure, that’s great for the funeral and having something to discuss with all the people who contact us, but at someone point we need to round out that person to who they really were. Good, bad, and otherwise.
Just acknowledging that the challenges in the relationship open the door to making someone into the rounded character they really were in our lives. And it then that we can fully travel the grief journey that allows us to put that grief in its place so we can truly move forward.