I have a number of clients who are experiencing the aftermath of the death of a parent. For some the death is recent. For some, the death was many years ago, but their grief feels unprocessed, stuck somehow. There’s a wide range of what that looks like for each of them — for a couple of them it’s excruciatingly painful, there’s a sense of betrayal, an underlying anxiety about whether they can count on anything at all in their lives. For others, there’s actually a sense of release and relief. Those deaths were protracted, and for a couple of them, the relationships with the parent were complicated and painful. Death can bring out the worst of family dynamics.

The end of a day

Death is a potent time. Not that different from birth, it’s a major life transition that all humans will experience. A time when we become intimately aware that there is little that we can control about… really anything. Death can come very much at random. As I’ve written about before, my mother moved here in 2012, we thought for her last years. We had no way of knowing she only had 4 months to live.

When I zoom out a bit and remember that time, I can see that there was some divine timing and rightness of how that process went. I learned so much.
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