Real Life
Lorna Harris explains the pain of losing both parents in just six months
The loneliness of being a mid-life orphan
Acouple of months after my mother died in 2018, I posted a picture on Twitter of a gloriously homemade-looking sandwich cake with cream filling bursting from its middle. ‘My mum always made me a birthday cake,’ I wrote. ‘Every year for 44 years. Two months since she died and my old dad tried his hardest and my heart melted.’
I never imagined it would chime with quite as many people as it did. But perhaps that’s because, until I lost both my parents in just six months, it had never occurred to me how many others were quietly carrying their own private burden of grief. Sometimes, it’s the seemingly small details that really hit a nerve when you’re grieving, and that was certainly the case with my simple cake post, which was viewed 70,000 times, and I received more than 1,000 messages from others sharing their experiences of loss. Inadvertently, I had started a conversation about grief that clearly needed to be held.
‘THE END CAME SO QUICKLY’
Unimaginable grief
Mum ate well, she was active and sociable. Occasionally she had complained that her stomach was growing fatter, but it was easy to blame this on the fact that, since retiring, she had moved less and eaten more. She was also tired, but that was hardly surprising, given that my father had pulmonary fibrosis and heart failure and required a lot of looking after.
Even her doctor wasn’t concerned. But about nine days before she died, she started to feel breathless. After a blood test, she was told a kidney infection was suspected and ordered to A&E.
I had a bad feeling at this point, and yet she was sent home and cancer wasn’t mentioned. The next day, however, the breathlessness worsened, her legs swelled up and her stomach was enormous. We took her back to the hospital and they said they would scan her ovaries.
‘But I haven’t got any,’ she said. ‘I had a hysterectomy about
30 years ago.’ In fact, it transpired that slivers of her ovaries had been left, to regulate hormone levels. Doctors then found tumours in my mum’s lungs (the cancer had spread from her ovaries, they later realised) and asked her if she’d ever smoked. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘But I have used a lot of hairspray in my time, so could that be the reason?’ That was my mum, always trying to lighten a mood and make people smile.
She knew she was too sick by this point for chemotherapy and, smiling through her fear, she declined it. Utterly helpless, all I could do was sit by her and stroke her hair as I watched the horror unfold, desperately researching her prognosis. The end came so quickly, it felt like being in a car crash. She died five days later, on a warm July day, surrounded by my two brothers and me, and her much-loved daughters-in-law. We then had to go home and tell our ill father his beloved wife of more than 50
years had gone. It was unimaginably awful. I am single and childless, and Mum was the world to me, and my best friend. It was her I would call after work every day; the one I would turn to whenever I needed somebody. She remains the funniest person I have ever known.
But my father’s condition meant that I couldn’t grieve properly at first. I work in PR as a freelancer, but stopped to look after my dad at his home in East London. My days became filled with sorting tablets, taking him to appointments and staying by his side, as he didn’t like to be alone. I did what any daughter would have done, and we had some good times with my family in the last six months of his life. He acquired a new zest for living. He’d been scared of dying before Mum, but that fear disappeared. He knew he would be back with her again. The following January, he contracted pneumonia. He survived for eight more weeks and I visited him every day in hospital. I was there when he suffered the heart failure that killed him.
And then, just like that, I was an orphan. Even in midlife, losing your parents does feel like being orphaned, and it was the loneliest time of my life. After Dad died, I returned to my empty flat and thought, ‘I don’t know how to do
this.’ I expected I’d fall into a deep depression, but something my wise old mum used to say stuck with me: ‘In every bad situation, look for the little glimmers of hope.’
I’d always dreamt of moving to the coast, and although my bereavement counsellor warned me that making any major life decisions in the year after a loss was like making a decision while drunk, I did it anyway. I left London for Whitstable and joined a soul choir, which has been my path back to normality.
Life carries on
Grief can be a very lonely place. I felt depressed, stricken and sad, and it’s easy to turn to things like alcohol or food to ‘solve’ this. But I try my best to turn to the things that help me live.
Grief really does change your address book and you soon realise who your true friends are. Some are so scared of saying the wrong thing they say nothing at all. I don’t blame them: until you lose parents yourself, it’s hard to understand the enormity of such a bereavement.
At times, I can no longer remember life before losing my parents. It’s so pitifully quiet without them. But life carries on; it has to, and my parents would have hated it not to. I’ll miss them forever, but I like to think I won’t always remain adrift, and I can already see the world lighting up again.
Another of my mum’s sayings was: ‘Don’t worry about it until it happens, and if it happens, you can always find a way.’ Well, Mum, I’m finding a way. And I hope that I’m making you proud.