This Mother's Day, remember adult orphans.

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[via The Peculiar Grief of the Adult Orphan]

“Parents are like repositories of memory. They’re the only ones who hold certain memories of you as a child. It’s like a mirror — we define ourselves in terms of our relationships so our parents’ deaths challenge us to define who we are.”

-- Chris Hall

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[via Adult Orphans: SPEAKING OF " NORMAL"]

Yes, it is a natural part of life for parents to die, but that time of living between their death and our own has some interesting and unique characteristics. Perhaps it has more meaning to those of us who are childless, since our sense of continuity of the generations is different. Do we feel more of a need to honour our parents - both for the miseries and for the joys in our legacy from them. We are their legacy, what do we leave when there are no children?

...Have you ever noticed that we comfort ourselves in obituaries by talking about being reconnected with the lost loved one in the future. It is not the sense of the past that we mourn, it is the loss of the shared future that we mourn. People don't really get stuck in the past, they get stuck in an empty future. They are not in the past when they don't change the table setting, they are trying to change the present and the future.{emphasis mine}

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From Library Journal's review:

As the baby-boom generation moves into middle age, their own aging parents are dying in record numbers. What does it mean to become an "adult orphan"? Strangely, this momentous event in adulthood has been given scant attention in the popular psychological literature except in terms of bereavement. Yet, argues author Secunda (When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends), coping with parental death is not a question of grief but of identity: "In one respect, adult children who outlive their parents are all the same: they relinquish the single role they have played longer than any other--that of being a son or daughter to a living mother or father." Drawing on her survey of 94 people, Secunda explores how adult orphans gradually give up their old childish identity and discover their true adult selves in terms of their relationships with siblings, children, and friends. Although a bit repetitious--Alexander Levy's The Orphaned Adult (LJ 9/15/99) covered the same territory more concisely and more elegantly--Secunda's book will be in demand.

-Wilda Williams