Grief After Losing a Parent

It’s a Tuesday, three months on, and something good happens at work. Small news, the kind you’d normally ring home about. Your thumb is already on your mum’s name before your brain catches up. You sit there holding the phone while the office carries on around you.

Here’s the turn. That reach for the phone isn’t you failing to accept anything. It’s decades of habit doing what habits do, and it shows how much of your life was quietly built around this person.

What It Actually Looks Like

Losing a parent as an adult often looks less like a film and more like paperwork. There’s a funeral to organise while you’re barely sleeping. Then the bank, the super fund, the phone contract, the car, and a house that has to be cleared one drawer at a time. A lot of early grief is admin, and plenty of people are surprised by how numb they feel while doing it.

Then there’s a quieter shift. If both parents have now died, or the one who held the family together has, you may suddenly be the oldest generation. Nobody stands between you and the edge anymore. People describe it as an exposed feeling, as if the roof has come off the house.

Grief also doesn’t always arrive on schedule. Some people hold it together through the funeral and the first few months, then come apart half a year later over a song in the supermarket or their dad’s handwriting on an old birthday card. That delayed wave is common. It often turns up once the busyness stops and the people around you have quietly gone back to their lives.

Why It Can Hit Harder Than You Expected

There’s a story many of us carry that losing a parent is the natural order of things, so it should be manageable. Parents are meant to die before their children. Knowing that doesn’t make it hurt less. A parent is often the last person who knew you from the very beginning, and when they go, a chunk of your own history can go with them.

It can be harder again when the relationship was complicated. If your parent was distant, critical, unwell, drinking, or hurtful, you might expect to feel relief and then find yourself flattened instead. Or you feel both at once, which is confusing and can come with a fair bit of shame. You’re allowed to grieve a parent you were also angry with.

Some of that grief is for the parent you didn’t get. The apology that won’t come now. The conversation where they finally understood you. While they were alive, part of you could still hope. Death closes that door, and grieving the hope is a real loss, even when nobody around you can see it. The Myth of Closure goes further into why these things rarely tie off neatly.

You Don’t Have to Let Go

For a long time the standard advice was that healthy grief meant detaching from the person who died: work through it, let go, move on. In 1996 three bereavement researchers, Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman, published a book that pushed back on this. They gathered research showing that many grieving people, including children who’d lost a parent, keep an ongoing connection with the person who died, and that this can be a healthy part of grief. They called it continuing bonds.

In plain terms, the relationship changes shape instead of ending. You might talk to your mum in the car. Cook your dad’s curry on his birthday. Ask yourself what they’d say about a decision and realise you already know. Wear the watch. None of this means you’re stuck. The connection becomes something you carry with you.

With a painful relationship, the bond you keep might be quieter and more honest than the one you had, or it might mean finally saying what you never got to say. That’s part of what the empty chair is for in counselling: a structured way to speak to someone who can’t answer, and to finish some unfinished business.

When Siblings Grieve Differently

You’d think grieving the same person would bring siblings closer, and sometimes it does. Often, though, it shows how differently you each knew them. One of you was the carer for the last two years. One lived interstate. One wants the house cleared in a weekend and another can’t bear to move a cushion.

People grieve in different styles. Some talk and cry. Others go quiet and get busy, fixing gutters and handling the estate. Both are normal, though each can look cold or over the top from the other side. Old family roles tend to come back hard too: the responsible one, the baby, the one who never gets told anything.

If you can, name the difference out loud instead of reading it as a verdict on who loved Mum or Dad more. Something like “I cope by sorting things, you cope by talking” can save a lot of tension, especially around Christmas and other hard dates.

What Tends to Help

• Give the admin a container. Pick one or two set times a week for estate tasks so they don’t leak into every evening.
• Tell people what you need. Most friends want to help and have no idea how. “Can you come with me to clear the garage on Saturday?” is easier to say yes to than “let me know if you need anything.”
• Keep something of theirs in use. A mug, a jumper, a pot plant. Using it can feel better than packing it away.
• Expect the dates. Birthdays, Mother’s or Father’s Day, the anniversary. Plan something small, even just a walk and the coffee they would have ordered.
• Look after the basics. Grief is physically exhausting. Sleep, food and a bit of movement won’t fix it, and running on empty makes everything heavier.

When to Get Some Support

There’s no correct amount of time to feel this way, and how long grief lasts varies a lot from person to person. For most people the sharpest pain softens over time, even though the missing doesn’t fully go away. It may be worth talking to someone if:

Grief counselling gives you somewhere to say the hard things, including the ones you can’t say to your siblings. I work in person in Carlton and online, using approaches like ACT and gentle, nervous-system-based work, which helps when grief sits in your body as much as your head. It won’t make the loss smaller, and it can make it easier to carry.

If you’re in crisis or not safe right now, call Lifeline on 13 11 14, any time, or 000 in an emergency.

You don’t have to sort all of this out on your own. None of this is a diagnosis, and it’s not a substitute for individual assessment. If you’d like to talk it through, the first 15-minute call is free. Stabilise is available in Carlton, Melbourne and online.