6 Reasons a Parent's Death Is a Special Kind of Loss By Paula Spencer

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The death of a mother or father can strike an adult child unexpectedly hard. Parent death brings a unique kind of grieving, whether you've been a hands-on caregiver and helper at the end of life or your parent has been living independently and well. The break in the parent-child bond can reverberate for the rest of your life.
Here are six factors that grief experts say can shape grieving over a parent's death:
1. Our parents are our "wisdom keepers." "We spend a lifetime looking to our parents for answers," says psychotherapist Sherry E. Showalter, author of Healing Heartaches: Stories of Loss and Life. They're the repositories of knowledge about our history, our upbringing, family traditions, the names of all those faces in old photos. With their passing so, too, goes the information and insight that hasn't already been transmitted or recorded.
2. Unresolved issues often follow the parent-child relationship into adulthood. The balance of the parent-child relationship shifts several times, first as we gain maturity and create our own families, and then as parents grow older and often need our support. These realities bring plenty of opportunities for misunderstanding or discord. And not all these bumps are smoothed out by the end. Differences that go unreconciled can leave a forlorn sense of unfinished business, Showalter says.
3. Parent death always feels sudden -- even when it's not. People often expect that the death of someone older or someone who's been ill for a long time will feel easier to endure because it's predictable. Yet the disappearance from your life of a figure you've known since birth is, when it finally happens, always a sudden change.
4. Decisions about rituals are up to you. "Suddenly you're the adult preparing the funeral, the viewing, the obituary, the eulogy -- there's nobody older to tell you how to manage, no one to correct you or say, 'No, that's not how you do it!'" says one woman in her 40s who lost both parents within two years. "I felt pushed to a different level of adulthood."
5. Your children lose grandparents. Many people who lose their parents talk about "grieving for what won't ever be" -- being unable to ask their parents for parenting advice, for example, or having their parents attend their children's birthday parties, graduations, and weddings. Parents may also need to help their children mourn, or they may feel a need to preserve the grandparents' legacy for their children.
6. Losing the "buffer generation" forces us to reexamine our own mortality. When a grandparent dies, there's still a whole generation between you and death. With a parent's death, your own eventual demise may feel uncomfortably nearer.

http://www.caring.com/articles/death-of-a-parent

Ways to honor your parent's legacy By Annette Gonzalez

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

I want to continue my family’s legacy, to honor my parents and the lives they lead. In order to do this, it is important to keep their memory alive.
Here are a few suggestions to honor your parent's legacy:
o Maintain an intergenerational link. Your children should hear stories about their grandparents and great-grandparents. They should experience the food of their ancestors. You should share pictures from the past. You should discuss how their ancestors arrived in this country
o Record an oral history of your family and provide it to your children
o Think about a saying or advice your parents once gave you and share it with your children or your family
o Carry a memento of your parent(s). This will keep your loved one close to your heart
I feel it is my responsibility, being the eldest in my family, to make sure the generational link is never severed.

http://orphanat60.blogspot.com

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Adult Orphans

I just posted this on a forum I found early this morning, it was in response to the topic of  caregivers, who have lost both their parents, and now feel like adult orphans.



My father passed away in 1969, I was 17.  The past 4 1/2 years, I was my mom's full-time caregiver as she advanced through the stages of dementia.  She passed away the 16th of last month.  It is a peculiar feeling to no longer have at least one parent here, even one that did not define what a parent actually is because of an illness, but none the less they were still your parent, and still present.  I have spent all this time quite isolated and alone as I have cared for her.  My husband has been the only real constant help or support, but he had to be gone most of the time to work.  I had no help from brother(s), both sisters died years ago.  Now, with mom gone, and my new life, or is it my old life, is unfolding each day, I am feeling more alone then before, abandoned even by the hospice people who didn't even offer grief support counseling.  I have done, and continue to do, a lot of writing since 2006.  I have 3 blog sites I work on about caregiving, during and after it, 3 twitter accounts, a facebook, I am involved with another caregiving website, and I have my own Blog Talk Radio show on caregiving, so these things have been my "salvation" through the years of caregiving.  They help to keep my busy now too, but there is a gap, a incompleteness, a void, in my day, my moments of the day.  Their is so little offered or even written about life after caregiving.  A fish out of water?  A fish swimming up stream, against the current?  It is a struggle each day no matter how I try to define it.  Going places, doing things with my husband or others, foreign to me, hard to relax, hard to enjoy them.  In the back of my mind is always, I have to get back, have to do this, have to do that...for mom.  Hard to reprogram!  So, I continue to write, to blog to share, just like I have been doing these past years, but can't find that place in it all that really helps me enter into my new life with strength and confidence...at least not yet.

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Traveling On The Road Called Grief

Grief, it does not happen only when a person passes away. It is an emotion that accompanies some type of loss or tragedy that has taken place or is taking place in our lives.

"I recently had a moment, where I allowed myself to look into mom’s eyes, and linger there for a minute or so. That moment opened up those feelings of grief, the loss of the person mom once was. I do not allow myself that moment very often because it is painful; however it is a release to let the tears flow even for a few minutes."    I wrote this months ago, and felt it fit into this post on grief, because that was what I was experiencing, even though mom was still with me.

As your caregivers journey takes you on this road called grief, it is important to recognize and share with others these moments.
 
On Friday, August 9th mom stopped eating.  I managed to give her a few bites of pudding, but most of the time she just shook her head no, didn't want anything.
It is Saturday, August 14.  Last Friday mom, stopped eating.  I in my desperate need to feed and nurture her, would continue to offer her some of her pudding.  I managed a few times through those days to get her to take some of it.  But most of the time she would give me a little no head shake.

With mom’s passing on 8-16-10,  grief moved into my life in full force.  I do have the assurance and joy of knowing mom is in heaven and I will see her again.  She is strong, straight, free of wrinkles, and has thick beautiful hair.  But, I miss her. 

We have her remains here in a beautiful scattering tube that was purchased so we could scatter her remains along the Ohio River, her favorite place to swim when she was young.  I go into her room and pick up the container at least once a day, and I cry and I tell her how glad I am that she is in heaven and is perfect and whole now and with dad.  But, I say, I miss you mom.  So much has happened in these days since she left, wonderful things, but on the days that I am home all day, just me and the cats (and now we have a ferret too), I feel the loneliness and emptiness all around me, so keenly aware of the absence of her presence.  I miss her.  Grief is hard to bear yes, but how worse it would be if I did not know where she was and that I will see her again.  Faith and hope, more powerful then grief.

For a season, there will be grief, mourning the loss, missing here and I will go on.  As I was told about 2 ½ years ago, when mom is gone, I will continue on without skipping a beat.  That is so.

For those who have not yet followed my journey as mom’s caregiver these past years, you can do so on my first blogsite, The Bear Hug Waltz,  http://bearhugwaltz.blogspot.com  I will not be posting to that site anymore, as the waltz has ended.   

This Monday will be two weeks since mom passed.  Some days have dragged by unmercifully, while others zipping by.  It seems like a long time ago, yet just yesterday, or maybe the day before, I was sitting here typing and I started to get up to go check on mom.   I slowly sat back down.  No, I don’t have to do that anymore.

I want to include in this blog a post I wrote called the Long Goodbye.  Quite a few people have written posts or articles titled the same.  This one is my version.

The Long Goodbye

goodbye to sewing

goodbye to tole painting

goodbye to quilting

goodbye to doing laundry

goodbye to driving

goodbye to managing money

goodbye to taking trips

goodbye to shopping

goodbye to baking

goodbye to cleaning house

goodbye to doing dishes

goodbye to sending cards

goodbye to talking on the phone

goodbye to cooking

goodbye to reading and word search puzzles

goodbye to walking alone

goodbye to getting in the tub

goodbye to making it to the bathroom during the night

goodbye to telling time

goodbye to cooking

goodbye to going out

goodbye to remembering some times and places

goodbye to remembering some family and friends

goodbye to bathing

goodbye to using the bathroom, only the potty

goodbye to knowing morning from night

goodbye to eating solids

goodbye to drinking liquids

goodbye to feeding herself

goodbye to using a straw

goodbye to dentures

goodbye to blowing her nose

goodbye to sitting in a chair or on the couch

goodbye to using the potty

goodbye to controlled body eliminations

goodbye to talking

goodbye to my name

goodbye to standing

goodbye to sitting unassisted

goodbye to being up in wheelchair for more then once a day

goodbye to always sleeping at night

goodbye to eating what I determine to be enough for her

goodbye to skin staying strong and intact.

hello mom with the twinkle in your blue eyes......

But now the twinkle is gone, at least the earthly twinkle, now a sparkle exists that I can’t wait to see!