4 Ways to Help Yourself Heal After the Death of a Parent

Feeling grief, anger, and guilt is normal

When I was a child, I could not fathom the death of my parents. It isn’t something children think about. Because, to a child, parents are invincible and eternal.

When my dad died, it was sudden. There was no time to prepare. I’d talked to him a couple of hours before the call to let me know he’d died in an accident. So when the call came letting me know he had passed away, it was hard to comprehend. I remember thinking that it wasn’t possible. I thought, “I just talked to him. He can’t be dead.” I kept telling myself that someone made a mistake. Several years later, I received another call. This time to let me know my mother also died without warning. After hanging up I remember thinking, “I’m an orphan.”

Studies show that people who lose one or both parents are vulnerable to a variety of long term emotional problems. In children under 18 years old depression, anxiety, and substance abuse are common. I was over 18 when my parents died. I didn’t resort to drugs or suffer from anxiety after each of my parents passed away, but I felt deep depression for several months. At first, I couldn’t talk about them without becoming upset. Over time, the wound of their loss was less raw. I became comfortable talking to people about them and their deaths. No longer do I feel the scorching burn of loss. Now my memories are of the good things they brought to my life.

I’m sharing my story to help you if you are going through the death of a parent.

The 3 stages of loss after the death of a parent

Following the death of my parents, I went through 3 stages in dealing with their loss.

• Grief

I felt sadness so painful that it was crushing. It hurt so much that my chest ached until it seemed it would break. I felt an overwhelming loss. No words anyone said would console me.

There is no way around grief. It’s natural to feel sorrow after losing a parent. I remember my wife sitting with me, with her arm around me, not saying anything. Her silence spoke volumes to me that she cared enough to let me grieve.

If you’ve lost a parent, allow yourself to grieve. And if someone sits with you, accept their compassion.

• Anger

My father was drinking on the night he died. At the top of a flight of stairs, he stumbled and fell, striking his head. Once my grief eased, it gave me time to think about what happened to him. When I learned he’d been drinking that night, I felt upset with him. Even though I was an adult, I depended upon him for advice and guidance. Did he trip and fall, or did he have too much to drink and fell? I didn’t have an answer. The doctors couldn’t tell me what caused his fall.

It's natural to feel anger after losing a parent. In The Five Stages Of Grief, Dr. Christina Gregory writes about how anger is “a necessary stage of grief”. And it is part of healing.

• Guilt

Where I felt anger at my dad, I felt guilty about my mother dying. She’d moved to a town a hundred miles away. I couldn’t see her often, so we’d grown distant. We talked two or three times a year on the phone, and we got together for Thanksgiving and Christmas. But after she died, I wished I’d spent more time calling her.

Looking back, I used guilt as a self-punishment. The problem with guilty feelings is they don’t help. Guilt made me question my relationship with my parents. My self-talk was punishing. “Why didn’t I call more often?” “Why didn’t I say, ‘I love you’, every time we met or parted?” “It was my fault we argued.” “I was a bad child.”

Guilt was harder to deal with than anger. It was talking to siblings and my wife that helped me realize feeling guilt wasn’t a solution; it was a problem.

Here are three things that helped me:

1. Talking to family openly about feeling guilty
2. Changing my self-talk from negative emotions to positive truths
3. Reading about how guilt damages a life

Steps to self-healing from the loss of a parent

The emotions of grief, anger, guilt, are normal. Losing a parent who nurtured you from birth to adulthood is traumatic.

Here are 4 things to help you deal with the loss of a parent.

Bring the family together

No one deals with the death of a parent or spouse the same. Some people will be quiet, others will cry. And some will be angry. Part of healing is allowing each person to express themselves in their own way.

If your last parent has died, you and your siblings will have to work together to settle the estate. It’s an emotional and stressful time, and disagreements will happen. You may disagree about something as simple as flower arrangements or music. To make things easier, someone needs to be in charge. I was the oldest, so I felt it was my job to encourage everyone to work together.

Recreate your memories and share them with friends and family

Get together with family and friends. Go through photographs, watch home movies, and talk about the parent you’ve lost. It’s ok to cry, but it’s also alright to laugh. This is the time for you and everyone else to realize the parent gave a lot to everyone’s life. That will never change. And even though he or she is no longer with you, your memories live on.

Embrace your spirituality and make a spiritual reset

I have a strong faith in God. It helped me to stop blaming myself, my dad’s drinking, or my mother’s heart condition for their deaths, and accept that there are things beyond my control. The death of a family member is a good time to reevaluate your spiritual life. If you’ve grown away from your faith, talk to a minister. Or find someone who you feel comfortable talking to about your beliefs. It’s comforting to believe that, even though a parent has ceased to live with us, they still exist and have moved to a better place.

Accept your emotional limits and allow yourself to grieve

Feeling overwhelmed is normal. Crying is a good emotional release. Holding a sibling is comforting. Every person expresses their grief in different ways, but accepting your emotions as part of healing will help you get through the pain.

Final thoughts

The death of a parent is inevitable, and it is final. But it is also the beginning of a process for you. You’ll feel grief, anger, and guilt as you work through your loss. Accept them. They’re normal feelings.

To heal, you’ll want to get together with your family. My siblings and I don’t live near each other. But we renewed our relationships because of my parents’ death. It brought us closer together. Being with family, you’ll share memories, and you’ll reflect on your physical and spiritual life. And you’ll shed a few tears together.

When parents die, they give us one last lesson. They teach us that, even though it’s painful to lose a parent, we will survive.

And we will be stronger, better people because of them.