"Orphan"

I don't think of myself (or my siblings) as orphans, but I suppose it's technically accurate. Just over a year ago in April, my mother died. Less than five months later my father passed away. They had both declined rapidly near the end, but Dad's terminal diagnosis came at about the time of Mom's passing and he remained relatively stable through the summer - which thus became a time of sober, sorrowful reflection, but also mutually conscious, affectionate parting. It was with special interest and sympathy, then, that I read the NY Times Magazine cover story yesterday:

Chris Buckley: My mother and father died within 11 months of each other in 2007 and 2008. I do realize that “orphan” sounds like an overdramatic term for becoming parentless at age 55, but I was struck by the number of times the word occurred in the 800 or more condolence letters I received after my father died. I hadn’t, until about the seventh or eighth reference, thought of myself as an “orphan.” Now you’re an orphan. . . . I know the pain myself of being an orphan. . . . You must feel so lonely, being an orphan. . . . When I became an orphan it felt like the earth dropping out from under me. . . . A certain chill began to encroach, until I was jolted out of my thousand-yard stare by an e-mail message from my old pal Leon Wieseltier, to whom I’d written that I was headed off to Arizona for some R and R: “May your orphanhood be tanned.”

One realization does dawn upon the death of the second parent, namely that you’ve now moved into the green room to the River Styx. You’re next. Another thing about parental mortality: No matter how much you’ve prepared for the moment, when it comes, it comes at you hot, hard and unrehearsed.

He's right. It's a different universe, the parentless one. I'm not sure I can yet say all that it means to me, to have lost both parents last year. But I think I'm ready to begin trying. Stay tuned.