Grieving a parent
When a mother or father dies you become nobody's child, whatever your age. What Scripture says to that loss, and what to do with the things you never said.
Your mother or father has died. It may have been last week, or it may have been years ago and something set it off again this morning, a song, their handwriting on an old envelope, a phone number you still have not deleted. Whatever your age, you have become nobody’s child. That is a real loss, and it is allowed to be big.
Here is the comfort, plainly. The Father who made you did not lose you when your parent died. Scripture says that even if a father and mother forsake us, the LORD will take us in, and He means it for the grown man in a suit at the cemetery as much as for a small child. You are still somebody’s. You are His. The grief is still yours to walk through, and He walks it with you.
You are nobody’s child now, at any age
People who have not lost a parent sometimes do not understand why a person in their fifties is undone by it. You may not fully understand it yourself. But something structural has gone. The one who remembered your first day of school. The one whose voice, even from another state, meant that somewhere on the earth you were still a child. Now there is no one above you. You are the oldest generation, or you are simply alone in a way you were not before.
Scripture does not treat this lightly. The psalmist, a grown king with an army, wrote from the place of being a child without parents.
Though my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will receive me.
Psalm 27:10
Notice that he does not say the loss is small. He says that on the far side of it there is Someone who receives him. The word means to gather in, the way you take in a child who has nowhere else to go. It is not sentiment. It is what the Father does.
When the relationship was hard
For some of you this is not a clean grief. Your parent was absent, or cruel, or drunk, or simply cold, and now they are gone and the conversation you were always going to have one day cannot happen. You may be grieving the parent you had and the parent you never had at the same time. You may feel relief and feel guilty about the relief. You may feel very little and worry that something is wrong with you.
None of that is wrong. Grief for a hard parent is often heavier, not lighter, because there is no tidy story to tell at the funeral. Give yourself permission to carry both things at once: they hurt me, and I have lost them.
The commandment to honor your father and mother still stands, and it can feel impossible here.
Honor your father and mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
Exodus 20:12
Honor, even now, does not mean pretending. It does not mean saying they were a good parent if they were not. It can mean telling the truth without contempt. It can mean thanking God for the life you were given through them, whatever they did with theirs. It can mean choosing not to let their failure have the last word over you. If forgiveness is the part that sticks, there is a longer article on forgiving your father, and it applies to mothers too.
The Father knows what you are made of
Whatever kind of parent you had, there is a compassion older than theirs. The psalm that speaks most tenderly of God as Father does so by pointing at what a good parent knows about a child: they are small, they are tired, they are made of dust.
As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him. For He knows our frame; He is mindful that we are dust.
Psalm 103:13–14
He knows what you are made of. He knows you did not sleep. He knows you snapped at your sister over the casseroles and the paperwork. He knows the sound you made in the car. He is not disappointed in your grief. He has compassion on it, the way the best father you can imagine would, and better.
Where your parent is, if they were His
If your mother or father trusted Christ, then on the night before He died Jesus spoke words that were meant for exactly this moment.
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe in Me as well. In My Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and welcome you into My presence, so that you also may be where I am.
John 14:1–3
Many rooms. A place prepared. A Son who comes back for His own. If your parent belonged to Him, they are with Him now, and the separation, though it is real and long, is not permanent. There is more on this in what the Bible says happens after death.
If you do not know where your parent stood, or you fear you do know, let this be honest too. You cannot settle their account, and it is not yours to settle. Leave them in the hands of the Judge of all the earth, who does right and who is far kinder than we are. Then turn back to what is yours: your own life, your own trust in Christ, the days you still have.
What to do with the unsaid things
Almost everyone who loses a parent is left holding sentences. Thank you. I am sorry. Why did you. I wish you had seen. They do not go away just because there is no one left to say them to.
Write the letter. Sit down this week with paper, not a screen, and write to your mother or father everything you did not say. Do not edit it. Do not make it fair. Say the thank you and the anger and the question. Then read it out loud, alone, and give it to God. He was there for every one of those moments and He can hold all of it.
Say it to Him directly. He is the Father who is still here. Try something like this:
Then find one older believer, someone who has buried a parent and kept trusting God, and ask if you can sit with them. Not for advice. Just to be near someone who has walked the road and is still standing. If you belong to a church, the pastor will know who that person is. If you do not, this is a good week to find a church where the Bible is opened and Jesus is called Lord, and to tell someone there what has happened. The first weeks after a death has more on the practical side of those days.
You are still somebody’s
Read Psalm 27 tonight, all of it, slowly. The one who wrote it knew what it was to look up and find the chair empty. He also knew what it was to be gathered in.
You have not stopped being a child. You have only found out whose.