Our 5 Truths
The invisible, silent grief - when a child mourns a parent and grows up with grief
As an adult who lost my father at only 7 years of age, I want to share discoveries I have made on my journey. I believe the world needs to know about us adults who as children were often alone and forgotten in their grief.
We never stop loving our dead parent.
Every day, I think about Daddy. I truly have little memories, and those are precious. I am thankful I had 7 years with my father. I grew up wondering about his illness, his absence, and his love. I know he loved me, and his life was cut short too soon. Many of us, who experienced early parental loss, carry this love with them, deep in their hearts. Just because we do not have them in our daily lives, do not speak about our beloved dead parent, and did not have the honor to spend our adolescent years guided by their wisdom, love and care, doesn’t mean we do not love them. Yes, we love them just as much as we love our surviving parent, siblings, or other relatives. They do not have to be on this plane with us to be loved. They are in our hearts forever, where love and grief reside together.
Our grief lasts a lifetime.
Grief has no age limit. Successful grown men and women who are removed 5 to 6 decades from the loss of a parent, occasionally cry and long for the guiding hand of their beloved Mommy or Daddy. Our grief comes early in life and stays forever. There is no getting over early parental loss, an unimaginable pain we buried deeply. We are reminded of the loss as we achieve major life events, such as graduation, career highs and losses, childbirth, marriage, and divorce. We wonder and dream about how our lives would have been with our dead parent in them. One of the worst moments when grief revisits us and stays longer than usual is when we become the age our father or mother passed away. It is a major moment in which we are reminded of the deepest loss we faced as a child. We question our own mortality and spend time reflecting about the meaning of life. Are we going to die at this same age? Will I face the same fate as Mommy and die in car crash? Will I succumb to the cancer who took my Daddy? These are real questions we face as we mourn this terrible early life loss repeatedly. It is a relentless pain that shakes our core. And many of us will carry this grief to our graves.
The end of our childhood
When my father was buried, I spent many moments in silence, alone. I did not know what to say and did not know how to feel. My wailing mother was comforted by mourning women around us. I was thrust into the endless crying of adults who did not hold my hand, did not comfort me, nor explain that this was Daddy’s final resting place. Heck, nobody explained death to me. I felt lots of fear and wanted to be far away. Unfortunately, an overwhelming number of children had similar experiences. Very few had the emotional support we so desperately needed. The focus is often on the surviving parent, and rarely on the children. But children want to talk about the loss. They are curious and have questions that remain unanswered. We had deep desires to share how we felt but did not have access to the spaces and resources to be held, seen and understood. The silence around our parent’s death was a surefire way to long lasting pain.
The death of our parent shapes the trajectory of our lives.
Many surviving children feel that their parent’s death changed their lives in profound ways. There are now a few studies examining the long-term impact of early parental loss. They detail poor outcomes, as many struggle with school performance, poverty, substance abuse, and serious health issues, such as depression, anxiety as well as cardiovascular issues. Indeed, the death of a parent has devastating consequences on the immune system of a young child that carries trauma in their body. Many of us had to move to a new location, temporarily stay with other family members, and often adjust to a poorer lifestyle. Instead of support and comfort, we faced more adversity and loss.
Tragically, many of us were placed in the impossible situation of taking care of the surviving parent and siblings, effectively making us “little adults” with no place to mourn or cry. It is a tragedy like no other and I experienced it first-hand. Upon my father’s death, my mother and I fell into poverty, moved into government housing, and started life from scratch in a new country. My mother fell into deep, chronic depression, and with no other family around, I became her emotional caretaker, therapist, and confidant. It was a terrible place to be in, and I was always hypervigilant as she slowly but surely developed several mental breakdowns and hospitalizations that left me filled with loneliness, terror, and unspoken desperation. Today, I embrace my own depression and provide grace and love to both my little Hissi and adult self.
We were often unsupported and alone in our grief.
The day my father died my childhood effectively ended. And that is the most tragic part of all our stories. The funeral happens, we go home, never speak about death, never express sadness, anger, despair, or terror. We swallow it all, and like soldiers with heavy armor, we carry our profound and unexpressed grief with us for the rest of our lives. We often wonder if we could have done more, to prevent the death of our parent. We place unimaginable burden on our hearts to make sense of terror. Often, we watch our surviving parent in emotional pain, worry about our sibling’s well-being, and therefore exile our own needs and desires. We cannot imagine losing another close family member and reliving this excruciating pain, so we will do whatever it takes to keep those we love alive. We become overly responsible as we face a new chapter of life that calls us to question the meaning of life. With the death of our parent, we firsthand experienced how hard life can be, even when most of us could not fully grasp the concept of death.
Sadly, we gained wisdom far too early and at a price too high because this devastating loss changed and shaped us forever. And it still does today and will tomorrow.