Dead Parents Club
E and I got back from our vacation last Wednesday; it was a great trip and I'll probably write about it at some point this week or next. I also plan to circle back to my Completely Comprehensive and Totally Unbiased Intro to Romance series. For today though, I just want to share a few disparate thoughts on the dead parents club, which have been rattling around in my head.
In case I've never talked to you about the dead parents club before, I generally use it to refer to people (like myself) who lost one (or more) parents in their teens or early twenties (or even younger than that). The dead parents club isn't just about having dead parents, it's about having experienced that loss earlier than many of your peers and earlier than our society expects parental loss. I'm sure the death of a parent hurts at every age, but it's a different kind of hurt depending on when it happens. Dead parents club is about the shared experience of losing a parent 'too soon.'
My dad has been dead for almost 11 years now, so that hurt isn't raw the way it once was. As I mentioned in On / Off issue #63, I mostly think about and grieve my dad around big life events and anniversaries.
When my dad's death was more recent, media that included dead parents often really bothered me. Dead parents would pop up in things I was watching or reading and spoil the experience for me. Sometimes the death of a parent is a well-written and meaningful part of the story, but so often it's a plot device. Need a tragic back story asap? Kill off a parent! This still bothers me when the writing feels lazy, but it doesn't ruin the media experience as often anymore.
I started watching season 2 of Bridgerton yesterday and the main characters both lost their dads when they were young and took on a lot of familial responsibility as a result. I don't find the show especially well-written, but instead of being annoyed when this plot point came up, I was like, "oh good, they're both in the club - they both get it."
The kinship I feel with other members of the dead parents club can be powerful, even now when losing my dad isn't something I need to talk about or process very often. When I was in the US last Fall, I saw my friend Megan, who I've known since I was 8 and whose dad died when we were in middle school. I was riding in the car with her and her partners, both of whom have also lost parents, and something about dead parents came up. We didn't have a big heart-to-heart about our grief or anything, but there was something strangely nice about sitting in a car of 30-somethings who all 'got it.' It was comforting to be able to make a comment about parental loss and then just sort of move on with the conversation; to trust that this was an okay topic to broach with these people and to not have to do a lot of explaining.
My own mom is a member of the dead parents club. She was 17 when her mother died, but that was so long ago, has been a part of her reality for so much of her life, that we don't talk about it much. When she brought it up on a video call over the weekend, it surprised me. We were talking about when she should come visit this summer and how long she should stay and she expressed worry about overstaying her welcome. "I didn't have a mom when I had my babies," she said. "I don't know what this is going to be like." That lack of a model for what this life transition looks like hadn't occurred to me. I have no idea if E and I will want space in the last couple of weeks before the baby arrives, or if we'll want space once the baby is here, or if we'll want all the help we can get, but I've kind of been assuming that last option. It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would be looking to her own life experience, coming up empty, and making a different assumption.
I don't have a neat conclusion to share, but thanks, as always, for reading my thoughts.