After your parent dies, you have an opportunity to think about your parent and yourself in a different light and resolve your relationship with them—an opportunity to come into your own, to grow into full adulthood and take responsibility for your own character and mature choices.

You are nobody’s child…and your parent can no longer share in your future joys.

Give yourself permission to change, to grow, to thrive, and to reconsider your parent and perhaps know them better through death—to accept their limitations (and yours).

Ask yourself:

“How did I feel about my mother/father?”

“How did they feel about me?”

“What did I learn from my mother/father?”

“Did I really know my mother/father?”

Consider how your mother/father was in the different roles s/he played: as a wife/husband, as a daughter/son, as a friend, and as a woman/man.

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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