The last parent and death

I accepted my dad’s death really well. I was prepared for it and, to be fair, we had thirty four years to get used to the idea. This might have made it harder because they cured his first death (a heart attack at 40), several others that followed and that could have made it hard to accept that all death couldn’t be cured. However, this wasn’t a problem for me. I was able to say goodbye and grieve normally, go straight back to work and get on with my life with hardly a tear shed. Then, one day, I had left some music at home and decided to pop and get it during a break from teaching. I got in the car and a man was reading from his memoires on radio 4. He was talking about his elderly mother and said something like, “It shouldn’t have been a surprise because as soon as one parent dies you are unconsciously waiting for the next to go.” It floored me. I sat in the car sobbing so hard I had to pull over and ran out of time to get my music.

This fear of losing your second parent seems to be instinctive. People I have spoken to, sheepishly confess to having felt like that. The man in the memoire confessed to feeling some relief when his mother finally died because he could let go of that worry. It’s not something we really like to talk about. It feels too much like wishing death upon your parent. I know lots of people whose mother ended up with dementia following their father’s death and the guilt they feel is enormous. On the day of the evening my dad died I was at a friend’s funeral. (I know; it’s been a shit couple of years). Someone I hadn’t seen for a while, who knew my parents, asked me how they were and I had to tell her that Dad was dying. “Oh,” she said, “Keep an eye on your mum, won’t you? I’ve just had to put mine in a home,” and then she mouthed the word “dementia” at me. I stubbornly refused to accept that my mum wasn’t a candidate for a long and happy widowhood. She had plans, was going to travel, really get going with her art. 

The other day, novelist Marianne Keyes posted on Twitter about this subject. Her dad died recently and she wrote: 

The replies that followed were lovely. People said how normal this was and how thirteen years later  they still do this.

I wanted to give comfort but couldn’t. Sometimes the second parent does die soon after the first. Maybe if I had been more open to the idea it wouldn’t have been quite so difficult.