ADULT ORPHANS

It has been six months since my father passed away. My mother died almost twenty-eight years ago. There is a strange phenomenon that comes about when your second parent is gone - you become an adult orphan.  In my case a 68 year old orphan.

It almost seems silly at first thought to call yourself an orphan when you are in your fifties or sixties or even seventies. When I first thought of this concept, I did an online search for "adult orphans". Low & behold, there is a ton of stuff written about experiencing life as an orphaned senior. I learned that I was far from alone in feeling like a grown up, or even elderly, orphan.

Like me, many people have had the responsibility of caring for our aging parent. I spent over thirteen years as a caregiver for my dad. I talked to him daily, drove him to medical appointments, ran his household, managed his finances, coordinated caregivers & spent countless hours doing numerous chores or making decisions for him. I learned far more about wound care, physical therapy & other necessary medical procedures than I ever dreamed possible.

Fortunately, at the end my father didn't suffer. We had visited him that morning & he was his normal self. That afternoon he apparently had a massive heart attack. Paramedics got his heart beating & inserted a breathing tube allowing us to make it to the hospital. Paperwork was in order & his wishes were honored. He never regained consciousness & when the breathing tube was removed, he passed quickly with me holding his hand in the ER just a couple months before his 90th birthday.

An article I discovered online summed up some of my feelings pretty well: "Some of us expect to feel relieved when we no longer have these responsibilities & are blindsided by the depth of the empty hole left by the passing of our final parent. For others, the shock comes from feeling like an orphan. Realizing that the last person who loved you from the day you were born is gone, & with it, the generational layer between you & your own death can be overwhelming." I won't say I was blindsided or overwhelmed but I definitely had similar thoughts.

Another website compared losing the role of caretaker to that of an empty nester when your children left home. Suddenly, you were no longer responsible & involved in the day-to-day lives of someone extremely close to you. It can be quite unnerving to realize that as an adult orphan not only have you lost your role as someone's child, but you are now next in line to leave this earth.

As life would have it, one of my best friends who is three years older than me, lost her mother at age 99 just a few months after I lost my dad. She is my friend of 45 plus years who moved to Australia over 20 years ago. We have spent many hours on the phone discussing this crazy concept of being 68 & 71 year old orphans. But both of us have felt disjointed many times since losing our second parent. At times we were caught by surprise by these feelings.

When I mentioned these thoughts to another friend (also in her early 70s) who lost her second parent many years ago, she commented that due to Alzheimer's, she had become an adult orphan long before her mother passed away. If any of you have similar adult orphan thoughts or feelings, I'd love to hear them.

I'm still kind of at loose ends & wondering what life after prolonged caregiving will be like. Of course, my son & granddaughter take center stage in my life but my major daily responsibility is gone. I don't take my cell phone upstairs every night anymore. I'm not awakened at 7 AM by a phone call from a caregiver. I can go on vacation without worrying about my father. An 800 number call doesn't scare me (it may have been Life Alert calling that my father fell, again).

For now I'm enjoying doing not much of anything. Watching "Ellen" or "Rachel Ray" is my guilty pleasure in the afternoon. Going to lunch with friends is just a fun afternoon rather than a respite from caregiving. Sure, I miss my dad. I still think, I have to tell Dad something I see or recall. I wish he was here to watch sports with like we always did. And, he was my best wine drinking companion a couple afternoons a week. I'll always miss that. Such is the life of an adult orphan.