Verke Editorial

Losing a parent as an adult: the first year, the second year, and the parent who was hard to love

Verke Editorial · October 27, 2026

Your mother died in the spring. You took the week off, you did the funeral well, you were back at your desk before the flowers had gone brown, and somewhere around month three the people who had been careful with you stopped being careful. You were, after all, an adult with a job and a family of your own, and she was old, and it was expected. You said you were fine, and for stretches of a day you were.

Then it is the following autumn and you are standing in your own kitchen holding a jar of her jam you have not been able to open, and you realise that the first year was a kind of trick. There was so much to do that the feeling never got its turn. Now the house is sold, your brother is not speaking to you over a chest of drawers, your daughter has asked whether you are going to die too, and the one person you would have called about all of it is gone. You are forty-six and you feel, absurdly, orphaned.

This article is about that particular loss: a parent dying when you are grown. It is about why it is heavier than its reputation, why the second year so often hurts more than the first, what happens when the parent you lost was one you had a hard time loving, what the death does to a set of siblings and to your own children, and three things to do with all of it. Our broader article on Grief that doesn't fade: losing a parent as an adult, and grieving someone who is still alive explains how grief moves and the practices that give it somewhere to go. This one stays with the one loss, and goes deeper.

Losing a parent is the most ordinary bereavement there is, and that is precisely why it gets so little room. Everyone's parents die. You are not a child; you have, most likely, children. The world treats it as a sad chapter in a long book, and you treat it that way too, until it turns out to be something else.

What it turns out to be is the end of a position. For your whole life, however old you got, there was someone for whom you were still the child. Someone who remembered you small, who held the archive of your first word and your worst year and the thing you did at nine that nobody else knows about. When a parent dies, that archive closes. People are often surprised to find that they are grieving their own childhood almost as much as the person, and cannot work out why until someone says it: the last witness has gone.

When it is the second parent, something else happens that has a name people are shy of using. You become the oldest generation. There is nobody above you now, nobody whose job it is to worry about you, nobody standing between you and the end of the line. Adults in their forties and fifties say the word orphan to themselves and feel ridiculous, and the feeling is not ridiculous at all. It is exposure. The draft from a door you did not know was open.

And there is a quieter third thing. A parent is the person you were still, at some level, trying to show something to: the promotion, the house, the children turning out well. With them gone, that audience is gone, and some people describe a strange flatness in their ambitions in the year after. It is the letter still being written to someone who is no longer there to read it.

Nobody tells you this, so here it is plainly. The first year after a parent dies is, for most adults, mostly tasks. The funeral. The death certificate, in triplicate, to every company that ever sent them a bill. The house, with its forty years of objects each asking a question. The siblings and the lawyer. The first Christmas, which you manage by making it busy. It is relentless, and it is a very good hiding place, because it looks exactly like coping and nobody can argue with a to-do list.

The second year has none of that. The house is sold. The forms are done. The people who used to ask have stopped, not out of unkindness but because a year is the length of time the world allots. What is left is an ordinary life with a permanent absence in it, and no scaffolding to hold the absence at a distance. This is when the jam jar gets you. It is when many people say they actually grieved, and then feel they cannot say so, because to everyone around them it looks like going backwards.

It is not backwards. It is the loss being felt without the anaesthetic. If you are in your second year and it is worse than your first, nothing has gone wrong with you. The feeling waited, politely, until you had time for it. The Grief that doesn't fade: losing a parent as an adult, and grieving someone who is still alive article explains why grief moves in a swing between missing and rebuilding rather than up a staircase, and why a whole year spent on the rebuilding side does not shrink the missing. It only postpones it.

One practical consequence: not everything has to be cleared in the first few months. A surprising amount can wait, and the parts that can wait are often the parts you will want to have done slowly, when you were able to feel what you were doing.

Not everyone grieves a parent they loved simply. Some grieve a parent who was cold, or absent, or drunk, or frightening, or simply and consistently disappointed in them. And many of those people are startled to find that their grief is heavier than their friends' grief for kind parents, and that they have nobody they can tell this to without it sounding like a complaint about the dead.

The reason is that you are grieving two people. One is the parent you had. The other is the parent you needed, and the second grief is often the larger, because the death ends it. While they were alive there was, however faintly, a chance: the apology, the softening, the day they would finally see you. The death takes that hope even if you stopped admitting it years ago, and what you feel is the loss of something you never got. That is a real grief. It is not self-pity, and it does not require anyone to be the villain.

Anger belongs in this grief too, and it confuses people most, because the person it is addressed to can no longer receive it, so it goes sideways: at a sibling, a partner, the care home, yourself. If you find a hard, unexplained anger under the sadness, our article Anger: what it's actually trying to tell you is about reading it rather than policing it.

One more thing about the difficult parent, and it is the one psychodynamic work exists for. The relationship did not end with the death. The way you braced before their calls, the verdict you still hear when you fail at something, the role you took on at eight to manage them: all of it is still running, like a fan after the switch is off, and people often notice it most sharply once the person who kept it in place is gone. Our article How childhood patterns show up in adult relationships describes how that works, and why a death is so often the moment it becomes visible.

A parent is, among other things, the person who held the family's roles in place. While they were alive you could run your own household and still, in their kitchen, be the responsible one, the baby, the one who left, the one who stayed and did the caring. When they die, those roles do not dissolve. They come loose, and then they come back harder, because nobody is holding them any more and everyone is frightened.

This is why the estate becomes the battlefield. The chest of drawers is not the chest of drawers. It is who was loved more. The sibling who did the caring for four years and the sibling who flew in for the funeral are not really arguing about the fair split; they are arguing about four years that one of them lived and the other did not, and about whether the parent noticed. Money and objects are easier to fight about than that, so that is where the fight goes.

It helps to know, going in, that the people who grieve the same parent grieve different parents. Your brother lost the father who taught him to fish. You lost the one who missed your graduation. Both of you are right, and most sibling ruptures after a death come from one person trying to argue the other out of their version.

If you were the one who did the caring, there is a grief here that is easy to miss: the caring was exhausting and it was also, for years, your relationship with them, and now both have stopped at once. Our article Caring for an aging parent: caregiver burnout, guilt, and how to keep going is written for the years before; much of what it says about guilt still applies after.

One of the strangest things about losing a parent as a parent is that you do it in front of your own children. They ask whether Grandma hurt, whether you are going to die, why you were crying in the car. And you, who have just lost the person who used to answer the unanswerable for you, have to answer it for them.

Children do better with plain words than with soft ones. "Grandma died. Her body stopped working because she was very old and very ill. I am sad, and sometimes I will cry, and that is all right. You can ask me anything." What they mostly need to know is that the sadness is not dangerous, that it is not their fault, and that you are still there. Letting them see you cry and then recover teaches them more about grief than any explanation. A seven-year-old asking at the funeral what is for lunch is not being callous. They are checking that the ordinary world still works.

A partner is a different matter, and the mistake people make is to expect them to know. They did not lose what you lost, and most partners default to fixing: the forms, the lawyer, the practical. What you need is more specific, and you will have to say it.

• "I need you to ask about her sometimes, by name, even months from now. When nobody says her name it is like she is being deleted."
• "When I go quiet in the evening it is not about you. You can sit with me. You do not have to say anything."
• "I need you to take the children for the afternoon of the anniversary. I do not want to perform being fine for them that day."

Asking for presence rather than solutions is the move that works, and it is the one people find hardest, because it means admitting that the person who used to provide it unasked is gone.

Grief for a parent is rarely a steady weight. It is an ambush. You are fine for eleven days and then a small, specific thing takes the floor out: their handwriting on a recipe card, the smell of their soap, a stranger with their walk, your thumb going to their name in your phone before the rest of you catches up. The trigger is nearly always small, which is what makes it humiliating. You held it together at the funeral and fell apart in the cereal aisle.

Two of these deserve a decision rather than a reaction. The first is the number. Do not delete it in a brave moment; the deleting is often harder than the keeping, and there is no prize for it. The second is the voicemail. If you have their voice saved, decide where it lives before you lose a phone, and decide when you will listen to it: on the anniversary, say, and not at midnight in a weak moment. A voice is the last thing to go and the first thing to be lost by accident, and both are worse than a decision.

Then there are the dates: their birthday, the anniversary, the week in the year when the light goes the way it went then. The body often begins counting before the mind admits it, so the days before a date are frequently worse than the date. Telling someone it is coming, and deciding in advance what you will do with it, takes some of the ambush out. If what you mostly feel in those weeks is not sadness but a kind of static where the feeling should be, our article Feel numb emotionally? What numbness is actually doing explains why numbness is so often grief that has been asked to wait too long.

The grief article describes three practices for any long grief: the letter to the person, the weekly check-in, and telling the story once all the way through. These three are for the parts of parent loss that those do not reach. Do one. Do it badly if necessary. None of them is a test.

Everything above is about grief that is long and particular, not grief that is wrong. But there is a shape that clinicians distinguish, and you should know it. If, a year or more on, you are still unable to function most days, the longing is constant rather than in waves, you cannot take in that it happened, and life feels meaningless, that pattern has a name, prolonged grief, and it responds to specific, structured therapy in a way that time often does not. That is a clinician's job, and Verke's coaches are built to say so rather than to keep you talking.

Watch, too, for the grief that stops being sad and starts being flat. A low that has lasted weeks, sits there most of the day, and has changed your sleep, your appetite and your enjoyment of things is a picture a doctor should hear about, whatever started it. Our article Sad for no reason: why you feel down when nothing is wrong, and what actually helps sets out the markers plainly, and they apply here with one difference: you know the reason. That does not make the markers less worth acting on.

And if the grief has brought thoughts of not wanting to be here, or of joining them, that is not a grief question any more and it does not wait for a better moment. The numbers at the bottom of this page are for tonight. You do not need to be sure it is serious enough.

The grief for a parent is rarely only about the death. It is about the whole relationship, which is why it reaches so far back and wakes things: the role you took at eight, the verdict you still hear, the relief you cannot say out loud. Psychodynamic work is the tradition built for that question, what this loss is reaching back to and what it would mean to let it change you. Our page on What psychodynamic therapy actually does (and why it's not what you think) explains the approach without the jargon.

Anna, Verke's psychodynamic coach, works that way: slowly, with no checklist, and with a memory. What you tell her about your father in October is still there in March when the anniversary comes. You can tell her about the relief without being judged for it, and she will ask what the grief is protecting rather than tell you it is time to move on. She works in text or by voice, at any hour, with no account needed to start. She is a coach, not a clinician, and when what you describe matches the picture above she will say so and point you to a person.