I am so sorry. Losing a parent fractures so much: the family you knew, the holidays you thought would go on for years, the feeling that you always have someone to call.
Grief is a demanding — and unwelcome — companion. It strikes at the big, predictable moments like a birthday and just as often at the smallest ones: a song, clothes still hanging in a closet as if waiting for someone to come home. I hope you know that time does heal. Grief crashes into us like a wave, but it also rolls back and gives us room to breathe.
I say all of this as someone who has not walked in your shoes. I don’t know what it is to lose a parent. But I do know what it is to lose a spouse. My husband Dave died when he was forty-seven and I was forty-five. We had two children, seven and ten years old. In seconds I lost the man I loved, my best friend, my co-parent. Each night at dinner his chair sat there with an emptiness that overwhelmed the present and cast a long shadow over the future, reminding me that I would grow old alone.
I am lucky to have extraordinary family and friends. Every night for months, my mother or sister or a friend would come over once my children were asleep, lie down in my bed with me, and hold me while I cried. But even this truly remarkable generosity could only carry me so far. Because at the end of the evening, they would go home — to their husbands. And I would lie there, in a bed built for two that now held only one.
In the eleven years since, I’ve talked to hundreds of people who’ve lost a spouse. I tell them what I’ve come to believe with my whole heart: that they will be okay. Grief doesn’t foreclose joy but can, in time, deepen it. As much as I would never wish the devastation of loss on anyone, many who experience it go on to lives of greater meaning. I used to complain about growing old. Now I experience each birthday and many ordinary Tuesdays with gratitude I learned the hard way. I know that each day is precious.
Near the end of almost every one of these conversations, I say the same thing: if you want to, you can find love again. To a person, they gasp — a small, involuntary sound of relief, as if they’ve been quietly hoping that someone would say those words out loud. Then they reply, “Thank you for saying that — no one else has.” And then almost as often they add, “But I don’t want to upset my children.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last few weeks because of a string of conversations that I can’t shake. I spoke to a man in his sixties who nursed his wife through cancer with a devotion I can barely describe. He told me that he was deeply lonely, but he couldn’t even entertain the idea of loving again because he didn’t want to alienate his grown children. I spoke to another man who ended a relationship with a woman he loved because of his daughter’s reaction. I asked how old his daughter is (thirty-seven) and when his wife passed away (four years ago). I spoke to a devoted mother whose boyfriend moved in. Now her son refuses to set foot in her apartment, saying, “I don’t want to see Dad replaced!”
To all the adult children who have lost a parent: I hope one day smiles replace tears and you carry your parent’s memory forward with love, not just longing. But I also hope that alongside your grief you can hold the idea that your surviving parent deserves a chance at happiness. That doesn’t mean finding a new partner is the answer for every widow or widower. But for some of us, it is one of the most hopeful paths forward. Because if you believed you would grow old with someone you love, the emptiness of that chair next to you can be not just hollow but terrifying.
The relationship between a parent and a child is by its nature lopsided, and rightly so. From the moment a child is born, almost everything flows in one direction. We feed you, hold you, drop you off at preschool and cry in the parking lot. We walk beside you through every stage of your life, sometimes imperfectly, but with everything we have.
But there comes a point when it falls to children to look back the other way. The loss of a parent is one of the hardest things a person will ever carry. So is the loss of a spouse. The question for families living inside both of those truths is, “How do we take care of one another?”
Just as your parent should do all he or she can to help you recover, you have a real opportunity — and dare I say obligation — to do the same for your widowed mother or father. Even though it might be almost achingly difficult, let your mother or father know that you support them if they want to look for love again.
On our honeymoon twenty-two years ago, Dave and I traveled to the tip of South Africa and took a photo in front of a sign: “Cape of Good Hope.” The words seemed to hold the promise of our future together. After I lost Dave, I looked at this photo more than any other. Sometimes it made me smile, and sometimes it broke my heart all over again.
Last month, I went back. Same rocks, same waves, but with my now husband Tom and my son. I sat there at first on my own and I talked out loud to Dave the way I still do sometimes. Then Tom and my son sat down next to me, one on each side. They put their arms around me and wiped my tears — and I let both things be true at once: grief for the love I lost, and gratitude for the love I have found. Then my son did the most caring thing he could have done. He took my hand, helped me up, and said, “Mom, let’s retake that picture. Take one with me and take one with Tom. Dad would be happy you found him.”
One of the truest things I’ve learned is that you can still deeply love someone who is gone. And at the same time, you can make room for someone new, especially if that person, like Tom, understands you can love them and still miss the person you lost. Grief and love aren’t opposites competing for space. They can sit on the same rocks, looking at the same waves, at the same time.
On those rocks, my son gave me the most generous gift a child can give a grieving parent: permission. Not to forget or replace, but to add. This is what I am asking of you — not to let go of the parent you lost, but to help the parent you still have. Help your mom take a new picture. Help your dad believe that if he wants to fill it, the chair beside him doesn’t have to stay empty.
New love doesn’t erase the old. It just proves that there’s more room in our hearts than we know.