Grieving a Parent You Had a Complicated Relationship With
The phone call comes and for a moment you don't know what you feel.
You knew this day would come eventually. You'd spent years preparing yourself for the possibility, especially if you'd been distant.
People tell you they're sorry, they ask how you're doing, and you don't quite know how to answer.
Because you are sad.
But you're also angry.
Or relieved.
Or guilty that you feel relieved.
You miss them, but you don't necessarily miss the relationship you had with them. And underneath the grief is something harder to explain: the knowledge that whatever happened between you is now finished.
There will be no better conversation.
No apology you've been waiting for.
No chance to finally explain yourself.
No possibility that someday, perhaps, they would become the parent you had always hoped they might be.
Sometimes what you're grieving is not only the person who died.
You're grieving the relationship you never got to have.
Grief can be complicated when love was complicated
When a parent dies, there can be an expectation that grief should bring clarity.
Instead, it can bring everything back.
The things you loved about them. The things that hurt you.
The moments when they showed up for you. The moments when they didn't.
The ways you understood them differently as you got older. The things you still wish they had understood about you.
You may find yourself remembering something tender one minute and something painful the next.
You may feel guilty for being angry at someone who has died.
You may wonder whether you're allowed to grieve deeply when you spent years creating distance.
Or you may be surprised by how devastated you are by the loss of someone you had already learned to live without.
There is no contradiction that needs to be resolved.
A person can have mattered enormously to you and also have hurt you.
You can love someone and have needed distance from them.
You can understand why they were the way they were and still wish they had treated you differently.
Death does not make those things simpler. Sometimes it makes them impossible to avoid.
Sometimes the hardest loss is the possibility of change
Part of what makes the death of a complicated parent so painful is that something has ended beyond the relationship itself.
The possibility remains closed.
Maybe you had imagined that one day things would be different.
That you would finally have the conversation, that they would see you differently, that you would understand each other.
That becoming older, becoming a parent yourself, or simply having more distance might eventually make something possible between you.
Even if that possibility had become increasingly unlikely, it was still a possibility.
Now it isn't. And maybe you din’t even realize you were holding that hope.
That can create a particular kind of grief.
You aren't only looking backward at what happened, you're grieving the future you had quietly continued to imagine.
After a complicated loss, the past can feel unsettled
You may find yourself thinking about things you haven't thought about in years.
A conversation in the kitchen.
Something they said when you were twelve.
The time they showed up for you when you didn't expect them to.
The time they didn't.
You may remember your childhood differently than you did before. You may find yourself wondering whether you were too angry, too distant, too unforgiving. Or you may feel angry all over again at things you thought you'd already made peace with.
Sometimes other people make this harder.
They tell stories about your parent that don't match your experience. They remember the funny, generous version of them. They tell you how much your parent loved you.
And you know that was true.
You also know there were things they didn't understand about you, things they couldn't give you, things that hurt.
You don't have to choose which version is the real one.
A complicated relationship can hold tenderness and disappointment, loyalty and resentment, closeness and distance. Losing the person doesn't erase any of those experiences.
You don't have to make peace with everything
There can be a lot of pressure after a death to forgive, let go, or find closure.
Sometimes people aren't looking for any of those things.
They are trying to understand why this loss has affected them the way it has.
Why they are grieving someone they spent years trying to get away from.
Why they feel guilty for being relieved.
Why they keep wishing they could make one more phone call.
Why they are still waiting for an apology that can no longer come.
Therapy gives you somewhere to stay with those questions.
You can talk about the parent you loved, the parent you resented, the parent you needed, and the parent they were actually able to be.
You can grieve what was there.
And you can grieve what wasn't.
What therapy can help you make sense of
The work isn't about arriving at a single conclusion about your parent.
It's about understanding what this relationship has meant in your life and what its ending has brought up for you now.
That might mean making sense of old patterns, revisiting memories you haven't known what to do with, or finally giving yourself permission to acknowledge parts of the relationship you've spent years minimizing.
It may also mean discovering that you don't need to keep carrying certain expectations.
The relationship is over.
Your relationship to what happened doesn't have to remain exactly the same.
What brings people to therapy after losing a parent?
People reach out because they:
Feel grief that is more complicated than they expected
Are mourning a parent they loved while carrying hurt, anger, or resentment toward them
Feel guilty about how they feel—or about how the relationship ended
Are struggling with the realization that certain conversations will never happen
Keep thinking about the parent they wished they could have had
Find themselves revisiting childhood memories or questioning their understanding of the past
Feel conflicted when other family members remember the parent very differently
Are surprised by how deeply the loss is affecting them, even after years of distance
Feel relief alongside their grief and don't know what to make of it
Are struggling to understand how the relationship continues to affect them now
Sometimes the hardest part is simply having nowhere to put all of it.
You can miss someone and still be angry with them. You can love them and wish they had been different. You can grieve the relationship you had while also grieving the one you never got to have.
Therapy for Complicated Parental Loss in Seattle and Throughout Washington
Seattle Counseling Center offers therapy for adults navigating the loss of a parent and the complicated feelings that can accompany it in our Queen Anne office and online throughout Washington State.
Therapy can provide a place to make sense of the relationship you had, grieve what was lost, and begin to understand what this relationship continues to mean to you now. You don't have to arrive knowing whether you're grieving, angry, relieved, or all of the above.
If you're struggling with a loss that feels difficult to explain to the people around you, we invite you to schedule a free consultation.