Turning 36 isn’t much of a milestone for most, but for me it marks a decade since the year that will always divide my life into a “before” and “after”. I was 26 when my dad died of cancer. Three months later, my mum died of a brain aneurysm. Suddenly, I was an adult orphan, selling up the family home where I’d grown up, eradicating the safety net I’d known all my life.
What really amplified the enormity of this loss was being an only child. Of course, having siblings isn’t a guarantee that grief will be shared or lessened – there are numerous reasons why this may not be the case. But for me, even with brilliant friends and relatives, the lack of a direct line to those people – someone who knew them like I did – felt absolutely gutting. When my dad died, my mum and I would try to distract ourselves with TV, but inevitably end up just talking and crying and reminiscing – it helped. When I lost her, I also lost the ability to talk about either of them with that level of intimacy. It’s a grieving tool that’s so needed, but that no one else aside from the people you’ve shared a life with can provide.
A decade on, acknowledging that period of time still feels like trying to rationalise a fever dream. The short months following my dad’s death were more like how I imagined grief to feel – physically painful, full of barely contained emotions. However, after my mum’s death, it was very different. I went into overdrive, meticulously planning her funeral and sorting out their (stressful, debt-filled) affairs. I had folders and highlighters and colour-coded everything; I was trying desperately to keep myself together with a back-to-school stationery haul’s worth of Post-it notes and chaotic, broken energy. After a short while, something had to give. I slept and cried, tended to by a rotating circle of close friends. I can’t be fully sure whether that period lasted weeks or months.
One traumatic loss, you can, hopefully, process, but the cumulative effect of two felt like the walls of reality had crumbled. Without a sibling to compare myself to, I had no barometer to measure what I was really feeling. I couldn’t work out where, on the bleak spectrum of “coping”, I had landed.
In Griefcast presenter Cariad Lloyd’s book You Are Not Alone, she recalls going into a McDonald’s in the wake of her dad’s death and wanting to scream at the horrendous normality of it all. I remember sobbing in Sainsbury’s after looking at a packet of budget bacon and cheese grills that my mum would regularly buy, and thinking there was no one else left on earth that would remember the incredibly normal evenings we shared – and that was horribly, horribly unbearable.
There’s an acute sense of displacement that happens when you deal with this as an only child. On a practical level, there is physically no one else who can fill in the forms, take over the accounts, make the important funeral decisions and greet people at the wake. You have to, on some level, hold it together because there is no space for you to fall apart.
In One and Only, the author Lauren Sandler examines the dynamic of only children, and how much pressure it places on your other relationships: “Even if you have the greatest friends in the world, do you ask those things of them? There’s no one to share the obligation and the responsibility with, and there is so much obligation and responsibility that goes with losing parents and unravelling the lives that they’ve lived. It’s a scenario that asks your other relationships to provide more. When it’s your family, you talk to them about the rest of your family. But if you’re an only child, you still need to find a place for that.”
On top of this, you’re grieving not just the people but everything they represented. There’s a secondary level of grief for both the physical and conceptual loss of a home that, in its own way, is just as difficult to overcome.
For years after I moved all the family possessions up to London, I would schlep busted bits of furniture and boxes of things I would never use from rental flat to rental flat. I placed a frantic level of importance on every fork and towel that had come from home. If someone broke a saucer, it would feel like yet another fragment of what I had left slipping away.
Floyd Matthews of Affordable Therapy speaks of being “held in child energy” – the idea that, if your parental relationship is still one of dependency (be that for emotional security and love as much as finances or anything more practical), then the sudden loss is one that roots you there. The relationship is never able to mature; in some ways, you remain in that dynamic for ever. He states: “When you think about that loss, it’s through the lens of a child, and that’s where the struggle is. People can feel abandoned and then angry and then ashamed about their anger. There’s the duality of grieving for the people you’ve lost and then there’s thinking about your own life afterwards.”
I’m very lucky that a branch of my dad’s family took me under their wing. I spend Christmas with them and they’re as generous with opening up their homes as I could ever ask for, but it’s taken me a long time to truly accept that it’s impossible for that to ever be a replacement. My references are not their references; their dining table memories are not my memories. My visits have become a new normal that I genuinely love and enjoy, but it’s impossible not to look at their family and deeply, deeply miss my own.
A real issue with the grieving process is that, practically, it needs to have a best before date when, emotionally, it never can. A decade on, I can’t cancel a morning meeting because I had a really vivid dream that my parents were still here and when I woke up, they weren’t, even though stumbling through the next few hours can feel like wading through mud.
Matthews describes the act of returning to work, of trying to pick up your life, as implicitly also “feeling like the date when you should be over it, that you should have moved on by now”. But the process of acceptance for me, particularly with all the composite losses of an only child, has taken the best part of 10 years rather than 10 weeks of sick leave.
There’s a profound loneliness at the point when you realise there’s no possible way of filling in the gap, of just getting a new family to replace the old one. But I have been trying to adjust my thinking to appreciate what’s here instead of what’s not. In a recent, beautiful Instagram post on the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, his daughter and only child Frances Bean spoke of the strange gifts that losing those you love the most can give you. There is, she said, “deep wisdom [in] being on an expedited path to understanding how precious life is”.
There have been so many moments over the past decade where I’ve felt so alone, so furious at the universe for dealing me this hand and so exhausted at trying to push through and make the best of it. But there have also been so many instances of pure joy and love with the people around me, where I have felt so present and acutely aware that this is what life is about – savouring it and seeking it out whenever I can.
Maybe the key to acceptance is realising that you don’t want out of the situation you’ve found yourself in. When I was in the throes of grief, it didn’t feel possible there would be a full and happy way of living. And there are still so many times when I’m blindsided completely. But even on those occasions, I wouldn’t want to not feel those feelings. Sometimes the memories are too much, but sometimes they’re wonderful. In the absence of family members to walk with me down those lanes, I appreciate the songs and the foods and the places that do those jobs, reminding me of the things that, as an only child, nobody else could know.
If there’s one thing that you can do for sibling-less children in this position, it’s just to listen. Even when it’s sad, even when you don’t know what to say. I know that no one else will remember my parents like I do, but I still want to talk about them and keep them alive through my memories, even if they’re only mine. My dad was called Eric and my mum was called Sandra. He loved the Beatles and Stephen King, and she loved Sherlock and Mars bars. I miss them madly every day, but I wouldn’t ever want that to change.
