Existing literature on grief has frequently underplayed the psychological impact the loss of an older parent can have on the adult child. In this chapter we will turn our attention to the experience of loss which arises from witnessing the cognitive and physical decline of a parent’s health, evoking fears for the parent’s future and existential anxiety for the adult child. It will be argued that bereaved adult children experience a significant increase in psychological distress, a greater awareness of personal mortality, increased existential sensitivity, a reprioritisation of life goals, and a recalibration of relationships in the external world in the intra-psychic space. Furthermore, there is a significant experience of loss and a process of grieving which occurs before the physical death, and this is an experience which is commonly disenfranchised.

Timeliness and the disenfranchised death

Following the death of an older person, the bereaved are often ‘comforted’ with idioms or platitudes such as ‘they had a good innings’ or ‘it was for the best’, suggestive of a hierarchy of grief related to the ‘timeliness’ of the death. The death of an older parent is considered ‘timely’, and wider societal attitudes towards this type of loss are often disenfranchised (Marshall and Rosenthal, 1982; Osterweis et al, 1984; Moss and Moss, 1989; Scharlach and Fuller-Thomson, 1994; Taylor and Norris, 1995; Umberson, 1995; Smith, 1999). Timeliness refers to a death happening in the expected part of the life course, and the meaning and the consequences of the loss may differ by the timing of the death (Arbuckle and de Vries, 1995). For instance, the tragic death of a child may be considered to induce a greater sense of loss and distress compared to a natural death in the final stages of the life course (Calhoun et al, 2010). In comparison, the death of an older parent is frequently treated as a ‘normative life event’ (Scharlach and Fuller-Thomson, 1994) because the generational order dictates that the oldest generations die first. Taylor and Norris (1995, p 30) write that the ‘death of a parent when you are middle-aged and your parent is elderly seems more part of the natural timing of events’. Consequently, the death of an older parent can be minimised or underplayed, making it difficult for the depth of grief to be fully acknowledged and worked through.