The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently published a book, Notes on Grief, a personal meditation on the loss of her father, who died in 2020. Just before the book was published, her mother died too.
Adichie’s book struck a chord because it is about the loss of a parent in adulthood. This is something I experienced when my mother died last year after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, which meant we lost her long before she actually died.
It’s not supposed to hurt so much, losing a parent as an adult. We’re expected to be able to accept the natural order of things. And indeed, we can only consider ourselves lucky if life follows that natural order, lucky that we had them for as long as we did, longer than a lot of people ever have their parents.
But somehow it doesn’t help at the time. Adichie writes of her father, “Yes, he was 88, but a cataclysmic hole now suddenly gapes open in your life, a part of you snatched away forever.”
By the time we are adults we are supposed to have outgrown the childish requirements we once had of our parents, but our emotional need for them doesn’t diminish as we age.
There are times in our lives, of course, when we think we don’t need our parents at all. The callous years in our 20s, when we are tasting life for the first time, establishing ourselves and our careers. We assert our supreme individuality by snipping the ties that bind, dropping our parents off the edge of our lives like sandbags from a hot air balloon before the dawning realisation we might actually need a bit of ballast, something to keep us grounded.
Somebody’s child
There’s a reason why the “child’s pose”, along with the bit lying under the blanket at the end (I’m sure there’s a yoga word for it), are my favourite parts of a yoga class; they remind me of those safe, comforting days of childhood, where you could fall asleep anywhere, and wake up to find everything completely as it was. If we are lucky enough to have had caring parents, be they biological, parent figures, adopted parents or other, we will always be somebody’s child. And I think we keep that first foundation layer of our identity forever.
I am lucky to still have my dad, but as I moved through some of the big rites of passage in my life, I longed for my mother’s advice and felt that maternal loss acutely. And it’s not just the big moments either. Even in the smallest, most pedestrian moments I am aware of her absence.
Most recently, on the date of my Covid vaccination, I was stuck for a babysitter, so brought my children along but ended up having to reschedule because it was against the rules. If my mother was here, I thought, irrationally, this would not have happened. She could have helped.
When all else fails, our parents are the ones who can always help. And isn’t that one of the reasons why we feel so bereft when we lose them? As well as mourning the person we loved, when we lose a mother or father we also lose that conceptual ideal of a parent.
I found people of my mother's generation openly caring to people of my age if they find us struggling on life's monkey bars
One of the surprising and uplifting things I have found since my mother has died, however, is that the world is full of proxy parents. Just as people in playgrounds will watch out for other people’s children – stepping in to comfort a crying toddler who has fallen off a swing, liberating a stranded child from a climbing frame – so too have I found people of my mother’s generation openly caring to people of my age if they find us struggling on life’s monkey bars.
As I was leaving the vaccination centre that day, a woman in her 60s, probably the same age as my mother would be now, had overheard my conversation with the steward and offered to mind my children while I got my vaccination. The generosity and humanity of the offer brought tears to my eyes. It felt like something my mother would have done. On another occasion, my GP, also a woman in her 60s, became parental in tone, as she doled out sensible advice on my personal life and general wellbeing in a way that a mother might do.
I felt cared for and supported in both of these situations, and often that’s all you need to feel less alone in the world – the idea that somebody cares, somebody feels your small pain, even if they don’t have a solution.
I think I thought a mother’s love died with a mother. But now I see that it continues in other ways. My mother was very close to her sisters and I feel her love through them now, particularly on special occasions, but perhaps even more so on the days where they text for no reason at all, as my mother might have done. But I also feel that love through my mother-in-law, through parents of friends, older colleagues, and even the small, anonymous gestures of strangers.
They all offer comforting facets of that maternal love that I thought would die with my mother, but I am grateful to find have not.