Unspoken agony of being a midlife orphan
And why, after losing both her parents, author CASS GREEN found herself bitterly resenting friends
ORPHAN is such a sad little word. It conjures up images of Victorian children with melancholy eyes, or Oliver Twist with his empty gruel bowl asking: ‘Please sir, can I have some more?’
Certainly, it feels like a strange description for a middle-aged mother of two. But when I lost my parents I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that was now effectively what I was — an orphan.
My mum died following a sudden stroke in 1989, when she was 63 and I was only 23, and my dad in 2014 when I was 49. My mum’s death was very sudden and a great shock. Owing to its speed, and some very badly-timed train problems, I never got to the hospital in time to say goodbye.
When we lost my dad, by contrast, my sister and I were by his bedside for a week, holding his hand and talking to him as he made his final journey from the world. But even with this ‘proper’ goodbye, I was surprised by just how hard the grief hit me and how it continued to reverberate for such a long time. The devastating blow of my mother’s death naturally provoked feelings of disbelief.
By contrast, I imagined my father’s passing would be easier, if not easy, he was an elderly man, after all, and that I’d be able to just . . . get on with it.
Isn’t this kind of loss what they call ‘the natural order of things’?
The reality, though, was much different and far harder. And much of my reaction, I see now, was bound up with the grief I felt at becoming an orphan. I felt an intense sadness for my own nowdefunct role as a daughter.
Oddly in denial perhaps, given his age, I’d barely given a thought in advance to the fact that one day my dad would no longer be here.
For most of his life, he was so hale and hearty, it seemed inconceivable. I still vividly remember the time my family was felled by a particularly nasty stomach bug — all of us, that is, except for him, who had guts of steel and throughout my childhood was always healthy and strong, no matter what.
WHeN he went into hospital for the first time in his late 70s, the nurses actually laughed in incredulity at how thin his medical notes were.
Nine years after this first bout of ill health, his death from kidney failure was both terrible and vaguely astonishing, precisely because he was my ‘healthy’ dad. It felt as though I was reeling. Was this really it now? I didn’t have a mum or a dad?
Maybe we need a better term to help us frame this parentless state, whatever age it affects us. Psychotherapist Marc Hekster, who is a specialist in grief, says: ‘People often associate the word orphan with children and one rarely hears the term used to describe an adult.
‘But the feelings of orphanhood aren’t age-specific. It’s about feeling lost in the world, without an anchor or a direction.’
That sums up exactly how I felt for more than a year, two, really. Career coach Suzy Greaves lost both her parents before she was 20, and now believes parental death forces you to rethink your role in the world.
‘You suddenly have to start defining who you are,’ she says. ‘In my family, I had been the baby, the one that was a little bit hopeless and flaky. Suddenly, I had to look after myself. No one was coming to rescue me.’ In time, though, this became liberating for her.
‘I found it terrifying at first, but it did force me to learn how to be resilient and capable at a very young age,’ she says.
Orphanhood affects you in the most profound, existential ways. One of the things I found most painful was the sudden altering of my identity.
I am lucky enough to be a mother, a wife and a sister, but I am no longer anyone’s daughter. My father’s death took away that role and left nothing in its place.
‘That’s such a significant issue,’ says Marc Hekster. ‘An adult orphan is no longer a daughter or a son. That relationship is gone for ever and so the feelings it evokes are gone, too.’
Novelist Keris Stainton, who had lost both her parents by the age of 39, has a different take on this, perhaps as a kind of coping mechanism.
She still feels like a ‘daughter’, she says, but one whose parents ‘are just not around any more’. That’s the bit I find hardest to deal with. I’m afraid a tiny part of me will always think this is a temporary state of affairs.’
I understand this sentiment. The permanence of any loved one’s death is hard to process and can be very destabilising. They really do leave a void. For Keris, this feeling was physical when her mum died. ‘I was literally unsteady on my feet,’ she says. ‘I kept bumping into things and falling over. I couldn’t trust myself to walk on my own.’
As a writer, it’s probably not surprising that the theme of losing one’s parents made its way into my work. My new thriller, In A Cottage In A Wood, has as its central character a young woman called Neve who is grieving the recent death of her father.
The cliché goes that you don’t really become an adult until you lose both your parents, and
when neve is given a cottage by a stranger, she thinks it will help her to become a ‘grown-up’ at last.
Of course, that’s not necessarily the case. I’m ashamed to admit, I didn’t think of myself as particularly ‘grown-up’ when my dad died, and that his death didn’t provoke in me a sudden new sense of maturity. This is despite being a middle-aged, professional, married, homeowning mum. I mean, how much more grown-up can you get?
And yet perhaps 49 is not so old to become an orphan. not these days. With our ageing population, and parents quite likely to live into their 90s, the state of orphanhood is bound to come later than it once did.
I remember being on holiday last year with friends my age, and, as we sat drinking wine by the pool one evening, the topic turned to family. I found myself marvelling that each of the other three middle-aged adults had two parents each, albeit in varying states of health. Overall, most of my friends do have at least one living parent, and surprisingly often they have two.
My own feelings of unpreparedness demonstrate how differently we think about middle age compared with those generations before us.
At 50, we’re not old in the way our grandparents were, and our willingness to accept the stages we reach in life has changed, too. I’m too young to have lost both my parents, we rage — look how young and active I still am! Which brings me to another new feeling I’ve encountered since my dad’s death. Resentment.
how unfair it is that others my own age still have both parents, and how cross they make me when they complain about having to look after them.
I know I’m a hypocrite about this, since I did my own fair share of whingeing when my dad was still alive, and yet it seems my feelings aren’t uncommon.
‘I approach it with a bit of black humour,’ says Keris. ‘Often when I see people moan about their parents on social media, I’m tempted to reply, simply: “Mine are dead.”
‘The thought of doing it always makes me laugh and stops me feeling quite so resentful. I’m definitely envious of friends who still have their parents, but more than that, I just feel like it’s utterly unfair.
‘I have a friend the same age who still has her grandparents, which I find almost enraging. It’s ridiculous, I know.’
Suzy adds: ‘I used to get envious, and angry and lonely. I missed my mum and dad.
‘I wanted to talk something through, get some advice or just have a cuddle but suddenly, they were gone — and it made me so sad. But I also hated playing the victim. And I didn’t want my friends to feel they couldn’t talk to me about it. I was so scared of getting stuck in that mire of grief and negativity.’
For my part, I thought I’d processed the grief of losing my mum over the years, even though I still missed her keenly sometimes. But losing my dad seemed to inflame all those feelings that were lying dormant inside me.
Like the world’s worst two-forthe-price-of-one offer, I was grieving for my mum all over again, 25 years after she died.
One of my friends, also an orphan, likens this to when her brother was once badly stung by bees. After this, a single bee sting would bring a ghost pain in all the other places that once hurt. She thinks she only really understood and processed the grief of losing both of her parents many years later when she went through a divorce.
‘Grief is a strange animal,’ she says. ‘And it can flare up at the strangest times.’
One positive consequence of all this is that it makes us appreciate and value our remaining family relationships.
I feel even more strongly about maintaining the ties to my two siblings.
My huSBAnd, who was very close to my dad, is now more mindful of his relationship with his own parents, both of whom are alive and in their 80s. he appreciates what he has more than ever.
There is, of course, no good time to become parentless. The very fact that you love someone means their absence will always be tough.
Psychologist Martin Weaver quotes Terry Pratchett’s fictional character death, from the discworld series: ‘There is no justice, there is only me.’
And yet grieving can bring solace, too. ‘Remembering someone who’s gone is the surest way of knowing who we are, where we came from and where we wish to go,’ says Martin.
he’s right. My mum never got to meet my husband or my two boys, but my dad was a big presence in their lives.
not a day goes by without a joke or a comment that relates to his memory. Remembering my parents in any way I can will help me process their loss and keep them alive in my heart.
So, for those of you lucky enough to have both a mum and a dad, I say this: Cherish them while you can. you might not appreciate now those endless conversations about roadworks on the A303 or hoary old stories you’ve already heard a million times before. But it’s only when their tellers have gone for good that you realise how precious they really were.
In A Cottage In A Wood by Cass Green is published by HarperCollins.