Before Father’s Day, many of us are riding waves of grief

Each night, sitting on my son’s bed, I read the Harry Potter books out loud; it has become a tradition. While I love the series, having lost my own mother at 15, there are many times when I have been profoundly affected by something Harry says or feels about the loss of his parents.

Last summer, on the night after Father’s Day, that connection deepened when my father succumbed to corticobasal degeneration, a form of dementia.

Without my parents, I find myself connecting to Harry’s narrative of being an orphan. Like Harry, I have no one to return to and celebrate family holidays.

I recently came across a quote by the grief expert and author Hope Edelman: “When one parent dies, the world is dramatically altered, absolutely, but you still have another one left. When that second parent dies, it’s the loss of all ties, and where does that leave you? You lose your history, your sense of connection to the past. You also lose the final buffer between you and death. Even if you’re an adult, it’s weird to be orphaned.”

Since my father’s death, I’ve felt entirely unmoored. As an only child, I have no living members of my nuclear family. When a question about family history comes to mind — How did my grandparents meet? What was I like as a young child? — I have no one to ask. Even shared memories don’t exist without siblings.

Grief is an acute form of emptiness that stays just below the surface. Merely seeing a friend embrace their parent can make it bubble up inside, leaving my heart aching for the arms of my mom and dad. And when I’m having a tough day, grief sits in the pit of my stomach, making me feel just a bit worse than usual.

Last month, as Mother’s Day approached, I was heartened to see many businesses offer customers to opt out of Mother’s Day messages — whether they have lost a mother or child, struggle with infertility, or just have complicated feelings toward the day. Having spent the last 29 Mother’s Days without my mom, I appreciated that opportunity to opt out.

But this year, the relief of getting past the big day is not subsiding. There is yet another Hallmark holiday on the horizon: Father’s Day.

When my father died last year, I knew the day would take on a whole new meaning. Over this past year, I have ridden the ocean of grief daily. I have found myself missing my father, wishing that I could pick up the phone to tell him about my daughter’s role in the school play, or share that I had made homemade fried catfish for dinner — his favorite. In these moments, I just want to hear his deep, bass voice and his Southern drawl.

What surprised me the most, however, was how my father’s passing made me reexperience the grief of my mother’s loss some 29 years later. It was fresh, raw, and disorienting. As someone who has worked in the field of children’s grief for over 15 years (drawn to this calling by my own young loss), I have long known that the death of someone significant in our lives can reignite a prior loss, resulting in compound grief.

While many of us will experience the death of both our parents, as I did, the impact of this loss is rarely discussed or acknowledged. Perhaps this is due to the fact that parents dying before us is the expected norm. But I’ve been surprised at what some of my peers have shared with me about their own experiences after losing their final parent.

In a catch-up phone call recently, a friend told me that she struggled for years after her father died, finding herself mired in the grief of his loss as well as her mother’s death years before. She shared that she was surprised by the residual grief she still had for her mother. My friend said it took over a year of sadness, low energy, and struggling to pull onto the other side before she felt like herself again, even if changed.

The one-year anniversary of my dad’s death and Father’s Day are on the near horizon, blinking like neon signs. I am trying to be gentle with myself, allowing the emotions to come as they will. I have enlisted my husband and close friends for support. But I have often found that the anticipation is often worse than the actual day.

One day, my son asked me why I get so sad about my parents being gone. “You have us,” he said.

He’s right; I do. So this Father’s Day, my kids and I will celebrate my husband with a big meal. Fortunately, he, too, likes fried catfish.

Darcy Walker Krause is the former executive of Uplift Center for Grieving Children and is a board member and past president of the board for the National Alliance for Children’s Grief.