'You can’t push through grief': Coming to terms with the death of a parent

The death of a parent is one of the greatest sorrows an adult can face. The grieving process cannot be rushed — it has its own arc. In most cases, the support of close family members and friends is enough, but for some, professional help may be needed, writes Suzanne Harrington

Catherine Tierney: "We grow around our grief. We have to experience all the feelings. And sometimes the second year can be harder, because everyone assumes you’ll have moved on."

Death has two timings: Off time (when a child dies, or an adult dies young, resulting in traumatic bereavement), and on time, when a person dies at the end of their ‘natural’ lifespan (when granny dies in her 90s). We are expected to weather the latter more easily — after all, everyone dies eventually. They had a good innings. This is what we tell each other when an elderly parent dies.

So my ex-husband’s death in his 40s, by suicide, was a radically different experience from my father’s death in his 80s, from old age. The former created psychological shockwaves that required therapy; the latter simply made me sad every time I forgot he was dead and I went to phone him for a chat.

But I was also hugely relieved my dad had finally died — he’d been in physical pain for a long time. I was glad he was free of that. It was a ‘normal’ bereavement.

But what if the death of a parent leaves you devastated?

“The deeper the love, the deeper the loss,” says Catherine Tierney, psychotherapist and bereavement clinical manager at the Irish Hospice Foundation. 

“People mean well, but it’s not great when they minimise your loss.” For example, when they say things like, ‘Oh, I know how you feel, my mother died, too’.”

The societal expectation after the death of a parent is that we crack on, because when we are in middle age such deaths are often life’s next milestone; a predictable loss. 

Shouldn’t we be neatly cycling through the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – and coming out the other side within six to 12 months? Nope.

“There are no ‘stages’ of grief, as this implies linearity,” says Tierney, explaining how the 1969 research by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (which gave us the five stages of grief) was conducted with people who were dying of terminal illnesses, not those who had been bereaved. 

There’s a huge difference. Yet these five stages were so tidy and linear that people fell on them in relief, and they became part of the conversation around bereavement.

“Another misconception is that if you ignore grief and plough on, it will dissipate,” says Tierney. “It won’t. You have to integrate it. So the intensity will diminish, but you can be ambushed by it, swamped by it, even years later. 

"We grow around our grief. We have to experience all the feelings. And sometimes the second year can be harder, because everyone assumes you’ll have moved on.”

Let yourself mourn

You can’t push through grief. It has to pass through you: Physically, emotionally, psychologically, cognitively, the lot.

“Grief is exhausting,” says Tierney. “It can impact you cognitively, so that you struggle to focus or concentrate, as well as physically: You can have sleep issues, digestive issues, nausea, loss of appetite, physical aches, and tension in the body. And yet people rush back to work while feeling like this, which, in turn, can knock self-confidence. If you’re in a fog, it’s hard to perform at work. Treat yourself gently — no ‘shoulds’.”

There may be a shift in intensity six months after a person has been bereaved, but if, a year post-bereavement, the person is still struggling to function, a trip to the GP might be useful. “There’s a lot of support out there,” she says.

Also, having the same parents does not mean, for siblings, having the same grief. It all depends on your relationship with the parent. Your age may also significantly impact your grieving process. One study showed that younger adults (age 18 to 35) reported far more emotional distress at the loss of a parent than middle-aged adults (aged 50-65), which makes sense within the on-time/off-time parameters.

Another study looked at how the death of a mother was linked more strongly with emotional issues for both daughters and sons, with daughters more negatively affected.

However, this is emphatically not the case for everyone. Katriona O’Sullivan is a psychologist and author of Poor, and when her mother died O’Sullivan’s bereavement was far more complicated, as she describes in an RTÉ interview. Her mother had been a drug addict, which had a catastrophic impact on her ability to parent.

“Sometimes, the biggest loss in grief is the loss of our assumptive world; how we thought our life was going to be,” says clinical psychologist Dr Susan Delaney. “Death removes the hope that things could be different.”

Your difficult parent will never be the parent you wanted them to be, the parent that you deserved, and death has shut down any possibility of improvement or redemption. And yet the socially sanctioned emotions around bereavement remain limited: Sadness and loss are fine, anger or indifference not.

“We need to invite all the feelings to the table, no matter what they are,” says Delaney. “As well as sadness and depression, there can be other, less socially sanctioned feelings, like anger, guilt, remorse, bitterness, relief. All are valid, even if they make others uncomfortable.”

When grief is prolonged

Delaney, who studied complicated grief therapy with Professor Kathy Shear at Columbia University, has trained others in supporting bereaved people who have complex grief. “There are so many misperceptions around grief,” she says. “It’s not linear — it’s more like a figure of eight. And there’s no closure. Instead, we find a different way to relate to the person who has died.

“There is no correlation between the length of your grief and how much you loved the person. It doesn’t mean that the more you loved them, the worse your grief will be. It’s more to do with your own attachment.”

She explains how attachment figures — of whom we usually have about five: For example, parent, partner, child, close friend — have a regulatory function in our lives, which makes losing them such a difficult adaptation. This adaptation process is what grief is. “Grief doesn’t get smaller,” she says. “We get bigger.”

Sometimes, adapting to our loss can be complex and prolonged. She likens grief to a wound, and complicated grief to an infected wound.

“Around 10% of us may experience complex or prolonged grief,” she says. “Sometimes, we can get stuck. How can we make this manageable? We may have lost all sense of joy, all sense of a life beyond our grief. When this happens, it may take more than the everyday support of loved ones to unstick us.”

Therapeutic interventions can include, says Delaney, cognitive behavioural therapy, trauma work, and encouraging people to observe and witness their grief, to write down twice a day where their grief is on a one-to- 10 scale, similar to a hospital pain-management scale. That way, we can track our grief, see its patterns, and register glimmers of joy and hope, which we can build upon.

This is not seeking “to take grief away, but to make it manageable, while reclaiming other areas of the [bereaved] person’s life”.

For those going through ‘normal’ grief, as when a parent dies — which can still be devastating and shocking, even when it’s not at all surprising — Delaney reminds us that grief is something that involves everyone. We do not need to medicalise it, or outsource to grief counsellors (unless we are one of the 10% she identifies as needing intervention). Instead, we can be there for each other.

It was my late dad’s birthday the other day. On our family WhatsApp, we posted old photos of him with us, and wished him a happy birthday.

Most of my friends are of an age where they have also lost their fathers — there is an acceptance, and for many of us, an infinite fondness that has settled upon our new fatherless landscape.

For those who had less straightforward relationships with their late parents, we listen to them as they process things. We hear them, and support them over cups of tea, walks on the beach.

“Grief is everyone’s business,” says Delaney. 

“We all need support. Practical and emotional. We can ask ourselves, What’s our role as a friend? How can we help?”

Supporting an adult whose parent has died

Here are some simple things we can do, or not do, as suggested by the Irish Hospice Foundation:

DO

• Attend the funeral if you can — it shows support.
• Make contact in some way— face to face, via phone, or card.
• Keep it simple — if you are struggling with what to say, just say how sorry you are.
• Make allowances for the person, rather than expecting them to adhere to a grief timeframe.
• In the immediate aftermath of a bereavement, the person may be too busy dealing with practicalities to grieve properly — and so may experience grief later. Be there for them.

DON’T

• Assume you know how the person is feeling, just because you have also experienced the death of a parent.
• Assume that as time goes on, they will stop needing support
• Avoid people. Offering condolences will not upset them — they are already upset and need support.
• Say vague things, like, ‘If you need anything, let me know’. Offer specific practical help, like food delivery, dog walks, domestic back up.
• Say things like, ‘They had a good innings’ or encourage the bereaved person to ‘move on’ when they are still grieving.
  

The Irish Hospice Foundation offers resources and support, including a free helpline 1800 807077