26/02/2026
Grief changes the shape of a relationship, and not in the way we expect. We tend to think that death fixes a person in place, that it closes the account. Yet the longer our parents are gone, the more they seem to shift. We revisit them. We revise them. And sometimes, to our surprise, we understand them more fully than we did when they were sitting across the table.
Part of that is simply time. When our parents are alive, we’re busy reacting to them. We’re irritated, grateful, defensive, impatient. We’re still trying to separate, or still trying to please. Even as adults, we can find ourselves sliding back into the old roles without noticing. It’s hard to see a whole person when you’re still arguing about who forgot to call, or who never quite said sorry. Death removes the immediate friction, and that absence can feel like clarity. But it isn’t purity. It’s distance.
May Sarton wrote those words in At Seventy, a journal published in 1984, when she was already an established poet and novelist. She’d spent years documenting her inner life in diaries that were praised for their candour and criticised for the same reason. Some readers found her self absorbed. Others found her brave. She lived much of her adult life in committed relationships with women at a time when that wasn’t widely accepted, and she wrote about loneliness, depression and ageing without smoothing the edges. So when she reflects on parents late in life, she’s not speaking from sentiment. She’s speaking as someone who has spent decades examining her own attachments.
What changes after our parents die isn’t just the level of noise. It’s that we’re no longer competing with them for space in the present. We’re no longer their child in a practical sense. And so we can begin to see their youth, their fears, their compromises. We might recognise, sometimes with a wince, that the trait we criticised in them has taken root in us. Or we notice how young they were when they made decisions we judged harshly. Ageing has a way of collapsing moral certainty.
But this later understanding isn’t always generous. Sometimes it sharpens blame. Without the possibility of conversation, grievances can harden. We replay what was said and what wasn’t, and because there’s no one left to contradict our version, we can grow more convinced of it. Memory isn’t neutral. It edits, rearranges, fills gaps. Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking about how grief involves constructing and reconstructing the dead, almost against our will. She shows how the mind searches for meaning, even invents it, to make the loss bearable. The same process can apply to parents. We’re not just remembering them. We’re building a workable figure out of fragments.
And that building often happens as we move through the stages they once occupied. When we reach the age they were at during our childhood, something shifts. We realise how little we know at forty, or fifty, or seventy. We see how precarious adulthood actually is. Simone de Beauvoir, in her writing on ageing, argued that society prefers not to look directly at old age because it exposes dependency and vulnerability. In a different way, looking back at our parents exposes that too. We see that they were improvising. They didn’t possess the authority we assumed. That recognition can soften us, but it can also unsettle our sense of security, because if they were uncertain, then so are we.
There’s also the uncomfortable fact that we often only grant our parents full humanity once they can no longer answer back. While they’re alive, it’s easier to keep them fixed in the roles that suit us. The strict father. The anxious mother. The distant one. The overbearing one. Those labels help us make sense of our own stories. After death, though, the story doesn’t need to be defended in the same way. We can afford to complicate it. And sometimes that feels like a betrayal of our earlier selves. If we soften our view of them, what happens to the grievances we built our identity around?
Sarton suggests that we’re never finished thinking about our parents, and that might be because they’re woven into the structure of our inner life. Their voices, their habits, their anxieties become part of our own mental furniture. Even if we reject them, we’re still in conversation with them. Death doesn’t silence that conversation. It internalises it. And so the work of knowing them becomes the work of knowing ourselves.
But this ongoing understanding isn’t tidy. It doesn’t lead to a final verdict where everything is forgiven or explained. It’s more like a long adjustment. As we age, as we love, as we fail in our own small ways, we find ourselves returning to them again. And the picture shifts, not because they’ve changed, but because we have.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
