The Grief of Losing a Parent

Losing a parent—whether sudden or expected, loving or complicated—fractures something deep inside us. Even when the relationship held pain or distance, their absence stirs the psyche in ways that are hard to name. Grief doesn’t always announce itself with sobs or ceremony. Sometimes it arrives quietly, like a shift in the atmosphere. And sometimes it takes us apart.

As a depth psychotherapist, I view the loss of a parent not only as a personal tragedy, but as a profound psychological and spiritual passage. This kind of grief touches our identity, our history, and our inner world in ways that echo long after the funeral has passed.

When the Ground Beneath Us Shifts

Parents are more than people in our lives—they are archetypal figures. Our earliest mirrors. The ones whose presence (or absence) shaped our nervous systems and taught us, in ways often unspoken, who we believed we had to be.

When a parent dies, something foundational within us changes. Even if you’re an adult with children of your own, even if the relationship was strained or unfinished, there is a strange disorientation: Who am I now, without them here?

Grief stirs the unconscious. It brings forgotten memories to the surface, awakens childhood longings, and sometimes connects us to intergenerational grief we didn’t know we were carrying. The death of a parent can feel like crossing a threshold—where time bends and the soul is invited to reconfigure itself.

Unfinished Conversations and the Ache of What Wasn’t

Rarely is grief tidy. More often, it’s tangled up in things left unsaid, unanswered questions, or love that never had the safety to be fully expressed. A parent dies, and with them go pieces of our story—secrets, truths, perspectives we’ll never get to hear.

This kind of grief can show up in dreams, in sudden emotional floods, or in the quiet moments when you realize there’s no one left to call who remembers your childhood the way they did. Depth psychotherapy honors this grief. It offers space to sit with the hauntings—not to resolve them, but to integrate them into the ongoing unfolding of your story.

Grief as a Descent and a Becoming

Depth psychology understands grief as an initiation. In myth, descents into the underworld are necessary for transformation. Like Persephone or Orpheus, we emerge from grief altered—stripped of what once protected us, and more intimately acquainted with what it means to be human.

The grief of losing a parent often brings us face-to-face with our own mortality. It stirs existential questions:

• What parts of me were shaped by this person?

• What was mine, and what was inherited?

• Who am I now, untethered from this relationship?

This is not a linear process. Grief cycles. It pulls us under and then lets us go, only to return again in different form. There is no timeline. No “getting over.” Only a slow, sacred becoming.

Becoming the Elder

At some point, the loss of a parent shifts us into a new position in the family lineage. We become the next in line. Sometimes it feels too soon, or undeserved. Sometimes it feels lonely.

This shift can awaken new questions:

• What legacy am I carrying?

• What do I want to pass on—and what do I need to lay down?

• What part of their story lives in me, and how do I honor or transform it?

In therapy, we hold these questions with care. We listen for what still needs to be grieved, and what may be ready to evolve. Grief can awaken the elder in us—not in age, but in wisdom, in groundedness, in the ability to hold complexity without needing to resolve it too quickly.

Making Soul Out of Loss

The death of a parent is more than an event—it’s a reckoning. A reshaping. A call into deeper presence with your own life. And when held with tenderness, it can become part of your becoming—not something to overcome, but something to grow with.

In grief therapy rooted in depth psychotherapy, we explore these layers together. We don’t rush the process. We honor the mystery. We allow grief to move through the body and psyche at its own pace—trusting that something true is forming in the dark.

The loss of a parent changes us. But if we allow it, it can also deepen us.