The Last Goodbye

(2 of 3)
A

mid the sorrow, Lynch says, were unexpected gifts. "We had to make room for the rituals, ceremonies and liturgies that my parents were always responsible for." In the process, he saw his siblings in a fresh, more adult light, and he even rediscovered his parents. "When I look, for instance, at my sister," he says, "I see my mother's wisdom, sensibility, faith and her great tolerance for the imperfections in others."

Such losses often bring new opportunities for reassessing one's life. "Even in mid-life people still defer to their living parents," says the Bereavement Center's Duff. "There's freedom to explore without parental approval how one votes, careers, the expression of sexual preference, marriage, religion," adds Levy. There is also, for many of the grieving children, a heightened sense of mortality and of being fully--and solely--responsible for one's life.

Profound re-evaluations are not unusual, says Ken Doka, a professor of gerontology at the College of New Rochelle in New York and an ordained Lutheran minister. For adults, their older parents' deaths dovetail with a life stage in which the children are already noticing the physical signs of aging. Mid-life introspection, Doka says, "is like a Janus mask, with two faces looking opposite ways: 'I've lived this much, and now I have this much more to live.'"

The swirl of emotions that stem from losing both parents is typically negotiated through a tremendous channel of grief, which friends and family--even the adult orphans themselves--sometimes greet with limited tolerance. "This is a quick-fix society," says John DeBerry, bereavement coordinator for the Palliative Care and Home Hospice Program at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital. "Society says keep busy and you'll feel better."

When Anne Reid's mother died in August, her siblings joined her at the family apple farm in Virginia to help with the funeral arrangements. Afterward, everyone headed straight back to work. "My brother's a college professor, my sister's a schoolteacher, and I had to process the apples," says Reid, 62.

Ira Byock, a palliative-care physician in Missoula, Mont., and author of Dying Well: The Prospect for Growth at the End of Life, says intolerance is institutionalized. "What are most leave policies for loss of a parent?" he asks. "Three days? In the workplace, people expect you to grieve for a week and then get on with it." DeBerry says too many people think grief is something to move past. "Grieving comes and goes just like the waves in the ocean," he explains. "Do we ever get over missing someone we love? The goal is not to get over it or recover from it but to reconcile to it."

For the last 18 months of her life, Henry Roy's mother lived with Roy in Philadelphia. They were in and out of hospitals frequently, and he says he put his emotions on hold in order to care for her. When she died in February, he went on autopilot, arranging her funeral and cleaning out her St. Louis, Mo., apartment. "I still feel like I haven't addressed it," says Roy, 47, of her death. It took him six months to clear out the bedroom he'd made for her, and he has yet to go through the belongings that fill his third floor. "I keep saying that I will," he says, "but those are her things; I don't feel like I have the right." Toward the end, when his mother needed to gain weight but had little appetite, fast food was Roy's best chance at getting her to eat. Passing a Burger King now can reduce him to tears.

What would ameliorate grief, Byock suggests, is if, given the chance, we all faced impending deaths more directly. Byock has found that one stunningly simple conversation has helped people tremendously. "To complete relationships," he says, "people have to say these five things: 'Forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you. And goodbye.'"

Though much of loss is anchored in the past, some people who lose their parents lament a future they will never share. Stuart Chapin's father died when he was 25, his mother five years later. Chapin, now 40, considers what their relationship might have grown into had they lived until he'd passed his 20s, which were so consumed by a desire for independence. "I, like my parents, have sat up with a sick child. I, like my parents, have juggled mortgage payments. You receive when you are young. Now you are in a position to share the experience of being an adult, and there is no one to share it with."