Orphan
I came across a reel on Instagram the other day that caught my attention. A woman had started a secret account for her husband. He was grieving the loss of his parents, and she wanted to build a following by describing how wonderful he was, then present the account to him to show him he had support. I thought it was really weird. Not the grieving part, but the secrecy behind it all. I don’t think I would have appreciated the setup, but he didn’t seem to mind. In her posts, she kept talking about how unfair it was that he had lost both of his parents before he was forty. By the time she showed him the account, he had more than 10,000 followers.
Once I got past the deception, I felt empathy for him and thought to myself that it was indeed sad that he had lost his parents so young. Then I started doing my own math. (Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake.) I was only thirty when my dad died in 1999 and barely thirty-six when my mom died in 2004.
I got screwed.
This is the first time in twenty-two years that I’ve stopped to think about how losing them so young impacted me. I remember the sadness of being an orphan. The thought of adopting myself out even crossed my mind. But thinking about it now, all these years later, stopped me in my tracks. I was younger than my own kids are now! I wish I had given myself a little more grace back then. I was blessed to have an incredible support system around me that helped carry me through the sadness, but I still can’t help thinking about how much I missed out on.
I missed having parents to call when life got hard and when life got good. I missed their advice, their reassurance, and the comfort of knowing they were there. Maybe that is the part I never let myself grieve. I was so busy surviving the loss that I never stopped to acknowledge what it meant to keep living without them. Twenty-two years later, I finally see that younger version of myself more clearly, and my heart breaks for her. She deserved more grace than I gave her. So maybe it isn’t too late to give it to her now.
