After losing her mother to cancer, 27 year old Emily Kaiser struggled to find peace with her grief. In this moving piece that was published in Washingtonian Magazine, Ms. Kaiser shares her thoughts on the unique perspective of young adults facing the loss of a parent.
As a society, we know how to offer condolences to middle-aged friends who’ve lost an elderly parent. But there’s no script to pull out for a loss like mine. It’s not quite the juvenile-bereavement tragedy, but not quite the adult way-of-the-world one, either.
It seemed to me that people saw my mom’s death as borderline bearable, a setback. It was obviously wrong, because she was only 56—but it wasn’t totally tragic, either, because we did have 27 years together.
I was angry that no one seemed to know how to console me, and desperate to connect with someone who’d survived the same thing. But the more I looked, the less I found. I came across only one support group for people who’d lost a parent, and I resisted it at first—I couldn’t be expected to feel sorry for a bunch of 50-year-olds.
Read the full story: How Millennials Mourn
