When Someone You Know Loses a Parent

My closest friend — I will call him Rob, because that is his name — lost his father in February. Rob is 46. His father was 78. It was not unexpected, in the sense that his father had been ill for about eighteen months. It was, in every other sense, exactly as large as these things are.

We have been friends for twenty-two years. We met at work, when I was 22 and he was 24, and the friendship has survived the various reshapings that friendships in your twenties survive if they are going to survive at all: different cities, different circumstances, the periods of distance and the re-convergences. He was at my wedding. I was at his.

He called me the evening of the day his father died, and we talked for an hour. I want to write about that conversation and about the weeks that followed, because I think it contains something useful about what it means to be in your forties and losing people and being a parent at the same time.

The conversation

Rob is not a person who processes things verbally as a first instinct. Neither am I. We have been, for most of the twenty-two years, better at sitting in the same room than at saying things directly, and the friendship has worked on that basis.

The phone call was different. He talked for much of it. Not in a structured way — it moved around, from the hospital to his childhood to a specific memory about his father teaching him to drive to the logistics of the days ahead. I did not try to manage or redirect it. I mostly listened, and said the things that were true rather than the things that were designed to help: I'm so sorry. He sounds like he was a good man. I know.

This seems obvious and I want to say it anyway because I have, in the past, been worse at this — more inclined toward the constructive response, the looking-forward, the suggestions about what might help. None of those are wrong, exactly, but they are not what the first evening requires. The first evening requires someone to be on the other end of the phone without an agenda.

What being a parent added to it

I have been writing about my own parents ageing — my father's hip, my mother's articles — and about the particular position of the sandwich generation. Rob's father's death was the first death in my immediate circle since Ellie and Sam arrived, and something was different about it in a way I have been trying to understand.

I think what was different is the double mirror. I am Rob's peer, which means his father's death is a visible data point in my parents' future — the thing that will happen, that is already in the timeline somewhere, that I have been managing as an abstraction and that Rob's phone call made briefly concrete.

At the same time, I am a father. The image of Rob standing in his parents' house, packing things, deciding what to keep — I held that image against the image of Ellie and Sam, and the future version of themselves doing the same thing, and felt the full stack of it in a way I had not before.

This is not comfortable. I do not think it is supposed to be comfortable. I think it is simply what it feels like to be in your forties, with children, and to be watching the generation above you move through the thing that comes next.

What actually helped Rob

Not much that I did, specifically. I want to be honest about this because there is a version of the story in which the friend does something notably right and the piece resolves into guidance. That is not this story.

What I did: called when he called, texted on the weeks between without expectation of reply, went to the funeral, took him out for lunch in March when the initial intensity had subsided and the lonelier stretch was beginning. The lonelier stretch is real — the period after the flowers and the cards and the people, when the loss has not diminished but the visible support has. I tried to be present in that stretch in a modest and undramatic way.

He told me in April that the lunch in March had been important. I had not thought of it as particularly important at the time. I had just thought he seemed like he could use a lunch.

What I carried home

I called my parents that evening. Not because Rob's loss had made me panic or produced a crisis — it didn't, it produced something quieter than that. I called them because I wanted to hear their voices and because I was aware, concretely, that there are a finite number of evenings when that will be possible.

My mother told me about a television programme. My father asked about the children. We talked for about twenty minutes. Normal conversation. Exactly what it was supposed to be.

I have written about the things my father never said — the words that travelled slowly in his generation. What I know now, more clearly than I did before February, is that the conversation itself is the thing, regardless of what the words are. The availability of the conversation. The ordinary twenty minutes.

I will keep calling.