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17 minute read
How to cope with the death of a parent can be one of the most difficult things that we can ever face. Our parents have likely done everything for us, and losing one of them can feel like one of the great pillars of our own life has been demolished from beneath us.
We wanted to put together an article talking about this particular kind of grief, recommending ways that you can deal with it, and helping you to see that you are not alone. We also just wanted to say that, if you yourself have recently lost a parent and are unsure of where to turn, we’re truly sorry for your loss. You’ve come to the right place; we’re a highly rated and trusted provider of direct cremation funerals, and our dedicated team of Aura Angels is there for you, if you need them.
The grief that comes with losing a parent is extremely complicated. You may feel overwhelmed, as it will seem as if your entire life has changed forever. You’ll go through various stages of grief, and at times you might find yourself confused or worried by your own emotional response.
How we feel about the loss of a parent will largely depend on the relationship we had with them in life. A whole range of different emotions are possible, all the way from apathy to desperation.
The potency of grief’s emotional impact when we’ve lost a parent can be such that it feels as if all of our different emotions are clamouring together at the same time. This can make us feel as if the pain we’re experiencing is almost physical in nature; it may even stop us from eating, sleeping and thinking clearly.
Aside from all the immediate emotions we may feel like numbness, sadness, anger, and regret that are very common when we’ve been bereaved, we may also find ourselves dwelling on big questions: How will anything be the same again? Will our family function the way it did when they were alive?
These questions can swirl around in our minds whilst it feels as if our body is pouring out all of its sorrow inside. Please be reassured that a reaction like this is completely normal, and that it will begin to get easier as time goes on.
Whilst grief is experienced differently by each individual, it tends to have some commonly recognised checkpoints:
It’s important to remember that each person will mourn the loss of a parent differently; you may not stop at every point along the way; you may encounter two different phases simultaneously; you may even move back and forth between them. Don’t be hard on yourself as you navigate this process, as it looks different for everyone.
Some of the emotions we feel when we’ve lost a parent can seem strange at first, and sometimes can make us feel guilty. If we feel numb and just continue on as normal, such as we might if we’re in the initial stages of grief, this in itself can make us wonder why we don’t ‘care’ more, and leave us feeling guilty. Likewise if we are feeling relieved by the loss of a parent, such as we can if they had been battling a long, painful illness, or had been slowly becoming unrecognisable through an age-related cognitive condition like dementia.
It’s important not to judge yourself for the way you feel. Try to simply notice what is happening emotionally within yourself, and to let the emotions unfold naturally. If you can accept some emotional vulnerability too, it will be a big help in the long-term for experiencing a healthy grieving process.
There are a variety of different avenues for bereavement support and grieving processes that you can try when wondering how to cope with the death of a parent.
Coping with the loss of a parent will require a patchwork of different types of strategies and support. If at all possible, try to surround yourself with loved ones and friends. Whilst it may be good to be alone in grief sometimes, as it can really help you to accept it for what it is, it can also end up making you become lost and isolated if you spend too much time in solitude. Other people can help you to make sense of your emotions, if you feel you’re struggling to understand them yourself. Reminiscing together with others who are mourning the loss of the same person can be a meaningful and restorative experience too.
You might also consider joining a local grief cafe, or using online resources. They can put you in touch with others who are grieving someone else, which can be a very uplifting experience, as well as with those who’ve been trained to lead conversations about grief and to help you work things out. Cruse bereavement support is the UK’s leading bereavement charity, with a helpline that you can call to speak to someone who’ll listen to you. Mind is another one offering a similar service.
If you’re religious, remember that you can rely on the infrastructure of your faith; attending congregations and speaking with local religious figures can help to provide a religious perspective on your grief.
Reflecting on happy memories of the parent you’ve lost can bring comfort and aid the grieving process. You may want to found a ritual around some of those memories which allow you to remember your parents and celebrate them habitually. For instance, if your parent was a big football fan, you could attend a match at their club’s stadium in the week of their death as a way of honouring their memory. Building some structure into the habit of taking solace in your happy memories can make them even more meaningful whilst at the same time adding some guardrails which prevent you from living entirely in the past.
You can also make use of professional counselling and therapy services, if you feel you are struggling to keep your head above water. You may feel that you want to open up to someone about the way you’re feeling, but that you’re not comfortable doing so with family or friends, or with strangers at a grief cafe. And that’s totally okay.
In that case, you might find the idea of a more formal conversation with a mental-health professional comforting. There are various different options available, both on the NHS, which offers mental-health services, and with private therapy networks. Counselling can not only relieve you of the immediate burden of being emotionally overwhelmed, but it can also put in place the long-term mental architecture you need in order to know how to care for yourself.
When losing a parent, the trauma of our grief can be so powerful that it feels as if our whole life has been derailed, and that we can’t get it back on track ourselves.
It’s important to remember that our physical and mental health are inextricably linked together. When our diets, our physical fitness and our sleep quality begin to deteriorate, it’s only a matter of time before our mental health also begins to slide. Therefore, grief can feel like a bit of a vicious circle, impeding our desire to move, eat, and live, which in turn makes it harder for us to wrestle with the mental burden.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s really important that you try to keep one eye on your physical health; it will help to keep you strong and healthy, and ready for the challenge of experiencing your grief. If you feel intimidated, don’t be hard on yourself; losing a parent is one of the toughest things that can happen to you: it’s common to feel incapacitated for a while.
Try to start slowly, maybe by getting up and changing out of your pyjamas into proper clothes. If you’re usually more active, but can’t face it now, try going for a short walk in the day-time instead. Feeling the sun’s rays on your skin and getting some fresh air into your lungs can be hugely beneficial for your physical and mental health. It’s also important to eat as healthily as possible, to keep your body healthy.
Try to give your mind an outlet too. Some people find it helpful to journal their way through their grief, by expressing how they’re feeling in writing. This can be especially helpful to those who don’t feel comfortable confiding in other people. Others like to listen to or to make music, if they’re so able, giving a wordless expression to their grief. Simple things like joining a local choir can help you to feel grounded, and to get out of your own headspace and familiar surroundings.
Little by little, you will rebuild your routine. Unfortunately, life doesn’t stop when we’ve lost someone, and the ever growing list of daily tasks can make us feel that we are losing control of everything. Writing down a to-do list and crossing items off one at a time can help us to feel like we are taking action, and make us feel a bit more together. Writing things down can also help us to avoid forgetting about them, which we’re more likely to do when we’re grieving.
Another thing that some people find useful is meditation. The practice has become very popular in the last few years through the growth of different app-based companies such as Headspace and Calm. These subscription services offer all kinds of targeted meditation on specific themes, such as dealing with grief. They also provide support for helping you to get to sleep, or get back to sleep if you’ve woken up.
It’s in the structure of a routine that we can begin to build ourselves up again, recharging our strength, helping us to contextualise the story of our grief within the wider framework of our lives. Good sleep, a bit of exercise and sunlight, and healthy eating give us a big head-start when dealing with the grieving process.
Actively creating the time and space to respect the memory of your parent can be very beneficial to the grieving process. It can help you to put some structure into the desire to look back on old memories, which at first when recently bereaved can feel overwhelming and impossible to control. There are a number of different ways that this can be done.
Depending on what kind of funeral was arranged for your mum or dad (i.e., whether a burial or cremation), there might be different options available. For instance, with a direct cremation (which takes care of the practical matters usually without any mourners present), there’s the opportunity to have a celebration of life among friends and family at a much later time, once the initial shock of the bereavement has passed. Today people are thinking of ever more creative cremation ashes ideas, using the cremated remains of their loved ones to remember them in more and more personal ways.
A memorial service or end-of-life celebration can be personalised around the life of the person who has died, allowing the family to build it around their most prized memories of their loved one, and around their life-story and passions or interests. With celebrations honouring those who’ve been cremated, they can also be an opportunity to distribute their ashes among different family members, or scattering them somewhere dear to them.
Similarly, starting a new family ritual around the interests of your parent can be a very emotionally meaningful gesture which can give consistent and lasting closure. Perhaps you and the rest of your family could meet on the anniversary of their death to go on their favourite walk together, or you could all meet to eat their favourite food in their favourite restaurant. It doesn’t have to be grand or serious, just something that helps you all to remember the one you’ve lost together on their terms.
Establishing family rituals like this, or taking the time to formally and personally mark the death of your mum or dad, can make your grief much easier to bear. It also has the positive side-effect of creating mental space for you to draw upon the memory of them and their positive impact on your life in times of need. Family rituals can help you to develop a positive relationship with your own feelings of grief, as well as giving you the mechanism to gain control over those feelings.
It’s never easy to tell how grief will impact individual family members. A death in the family, particularly of a parent, can create difficulty. It’s not every family that is at peace with itself and which enjoys harmonious relationships among its members. In fact, death can often exacerbate existing tensions.
Just as with talking about death and dying, or in breaking bad news with family members, losing a parent can provoke all kinds of different reactions among our siblings and wider family members. The important thing to remember is that everyone grieves differently, and so it’s important not to judge how another person handles the news.
Don’t worry or despair if your family enters a period of conflict after the death of a parent. When things are fraught and emotionally heightened, this can be a perfectly natural consequence. Patience and compassion are the two most effective approaches to this kind of situation; it’s especially important to keep lines of communication open with each other, and to be understanding.
Guilt is one of the most common emotional reactions to the death of a parent, and it can arise for many different reasons.
It’s important to remember that this is a natural reaction to the death of a parent, and that feeling guilty doesn’t make you a bad person or that you didn’t do right by them whilst they were alive. It might feel tempting to resist or ignore your feelings in response to the death of a parent, particularly if they make you feel uncomfortable in the way that guilt can. But it can be comforting to simply let it unfold and to notice how you feel inside.
Grieving is a lifelong process, and it’s certainly not an easy one. Acceptance of the situation for what it is is the start of the healing process.
Know that the intensity of your pain will lessen as time goes by. When you begin to acclimatise to the loss you’ve suffered, you’ll start to regain your routine. Your head will begin to clear of the churn of memories and unanswered questions. But, even the recognition that we’ve moved one from our initial phase of grief can prompt further feelings of guilt and a new wave of sadness.
When we accept the death of a parent, it doesn’t mean that we are letting them go, leaving them behind, or that we are getting to a place where we no longer care about losing them. That’s not the point of grieving. We’ll always retain those we’ve lost within our hearts, no matter how long it’s been since we first lost them. The grieving process is ultimately about integrating our grief into our wider lives, moving forward and finding peace in our memories.
Grief is something that can help us to grow as people. The experience of losing a parent could throw us in at the very deep end of emotional pain and distress. But little by little, we will right ourselves again, and begin to move forward once more. By creating space for ourselves to experience grief fully, rather than hiding from or denying it, we will embark upon a more healthy process.
In finding the balance between self-care and an individual focus on the one hand, and by discovering grief networks and leaning on friends and family on the other, we can create healthy conditions for real personal growth. Carving out time and space to actively remember the parents we’ve lost with a formal memorial or a regular commemorative ritual in their memory can help us to find meaning and solace in their loss. The initial grief of losing a parent, combined with the journey we go on to come to terms with it, becomes a part of our own story. In finding closure, we get the chance to move forward in life with the benefit of all of the lessons we’ve learned.
We hope that you’ve found this article useful and helpful. If any questions have arisen through anything we’ve written, whether about coping with grief generally, opening up conversations about death with your family, or how best to remember the ones you’ve lost, we are here to help you and answer them.
At Aura, we pride ourselves on the compassion, patience and kindness of the service we offer those in need of our funeral services. Our direct cremation services are available to both those who need to arrange something at short notice, as well as preparing for the future with a prepaid funeral plan. In both cases, it’s our wonderful, compassionate Aura Angel team who’ll be there to guide you or your family through the difficult experience of funeral arranging for a loved one. They’re not only experts in funeral arranging, but can lend you an ear if you need to talk about what you’re going through. We’re there for you on the phone, whenever you’re ready.
We’re a family-run company, founded by Paul Jameson in 2019 after he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. He wanted to set up a company that could help families in the UK to benefit from his own journey with end-of-life planning. He runs the company today alongside his son, David (our CEO), and a family friend called Ben (our COO). Our mission is to provide a service quality that never drops below what Paul would want for his own family. We’re also the UK’s top-rated provider of ‘cremation services’ on Trustpilot, with a score of 4.9/5 stars.
