What Losing a Parent Feels Like

A crash course on dying and death

My dad was 68 when he died last month of colon cancer. There are no words for what it’s like. But here are a few metaphors that get closer.

Losing a parent is like being on a moving walkway at the airport. In front of you, your dad reaches the end. Then he steps off and vanishes. You’re still on the walkway, getting pulled along toward that same vanishing point.

It’s like being in a room with a one way mirror. You look at the pane and see only your own reflection. Your dad has left the room, and you imagine him somewhere on the outside, looking in at you while you search for signs that he’s okay.

It’s like being a sapling, growing up under the shade and support of a big older tree. One day, that tree is gone, and you wither a little bit under the sun’s glare. Your roots were intertwined, and that older tree gave you its nutrients. Now you have to spread your roots deeper, your branches higher, grow your bark thicker to weather the storms. You have to become that older tree.

Losing a parent is like having heard music all your life. Then the music stops. The silence feels empty, suffocating, endless. But you strain your ear. You keep listening. You realize the music is still there. It’s coming from within, not just outside you. It’s been that way all along.

Reading on Death and Dying

Nothing can adequately prepare you for a loved one’s death. Or your own. But here are some books I have read through the years, including a couple I re-read after my dad’s passing, that have helped.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande - on the failure of modern medicine to help us achieve what really matters at the end of life—meaning, agency, and dignity.

Confessions of a Funeral Director: How Death Saved My Life by Caleb Wilde - how death can be beautiful, and how being close to it can help us live wiser.

Eternal Life by Dara Horn - a novel about a woman who cannot die. On how finitude is part of what makes life worth living.

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit - another novel, this time for children, playing with what immortality would really mean in this world.

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry - I reread this novel every few years, one of the few books in my life that I pick up again. One passage has been a lifeline for me recently: “I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I was sure that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.”

No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) by Kate Bowler - I appreciated Bowler’s first book, Everything Happens For a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved). Sometimes it helps to hear stories from people who have been through the wringer and are still living to tell about it.

Dancing at the Pity Party: A Dead Mom Graphic Memoir by Tyler Feder - This book is so honest. I felt so seen. Having a parent die earlier than you expected is hard in so many ways. Some days I want a T-shirt like the author depicts that says “Dead Dad” to make the invisible grief visible.

When It Rains…

Life is brutal. On top of my dad dying, we just found out a couple weeks ago that my mom has stomach cancer. WTF?!!!

So far, based on scans and bloodwork, the cancer is still early stage, meaning it hasn’t spread to lymph nodes or other organs. I’ve become an unwilling student to all kinds of medical and cancer-related vocabulary, like neoplasm and adenopathy. I’m praying that my mom can find a good surgeon and get surgery scheduled fast. Please pray with me.

I’m doing okay. I’m taking lots of deep, intentional breaths where all I think about is breathing and not about the past or the future (at least I try). I’m gardening. I’m hugging and kissing my babies as much as I can. I’m calling my mom multiple times a day to check in and ask if she’s eaten. I’m making morbid jokes—what else can you do but laugh hysterically sometimes? I’m playing Wordle and Connections and the New York Times Mini Crossword every night with my husband. We somehow got started on a 1,000-piece Baby Yoda puzzle and couldn’t stop working on it until we were finished.

When life falls apart, start a 1,000 piece puzzle. Even here, an obstinate missing piece reminds me that control is an illusion.

Now, more than ever, every day feels like a walk along the cliff’s edge, the rope tethering me to solid ground somehow frayed to a single flimsy thread. I suppose that’s actually the case for each of us, every moment of every day. Sooner or later, we will all walk through that void that is Death. What I’m clinging to for dear life is this: even if the thread snaps, even if I fall, headlong, into the abyss, wherever I end up, Love will still be there.

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