Reflections on Disenfranchised Grief

Since my father died, I've been processing a grief that is recognised and supported by society. It is a totally different experience to processing the disenfranchised grief of childlessness.

My father died three weeks ago. It has been emotional and fraught at times. There has been grief and sadness, stress and anxiety, as well as some relief that his health struggles have come to an end. In the time since he died, nobody has said any of these things to me:

"Well, you could always volunteer in an old people's home"

"At least you have your uncle though."

"You can borrow my dad, ha ha."

"Well, maybe you should have changed his drugs and he might still be alive."

“You have to just be grateful for what you do have."

"It's probably just your hormones. Are you perimenopausal?"

"Sounds like a midlife crisis. We all go through them."

And absolutely nobody has suggested that I shouldn’t give up hope, that he might come back to life.

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Over one hundred and fifty condolence cards have landed on my mother's doorstep in the past three weeks along with at least twenty bunches of flowers (and counting). Family and friends have rallied around to cook, clean and shop for her, or put the recycling out. Her house is rarely empty because there are always people popping in, with a cake, with a hug, or with an offer to help with funeral arrangements. 

She keeps all the condolence cards in a pile on the kitchen dresser. The sight of them  makes me feel glad that she is so well supported. It also brings up a sad kind of fury in me, because these messages of love and support are not there for the people who lose the children they never got to bring into this world and lose the life they imagined and the person they dreamed of becoming had they become a parent. It is a sad fury that comes from knowing that if those condolences were there for us too, if just a small handful of people checked in on us in those early days as we grappled with our new reality, then the grief of childlessness would be more bearable and acceptance of a future without children would be easier to find.

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My journey through childless grief felt like staggering along a rocky path to the top of a mountain, blindfolded, carrying the weight of an enormous backpack that rubbed awkwardly on my shoulders. It was as if I had blisters on my heels, my clothes were wet through and there was sleet pelting in my face driven by a harsh wind. The journey was a painful one, an uncomfortable one, and worse, it was lonely. 

With my father dying, it feels more as if someone has given me a daypack to carry. It feels relatively light on my shoulders. I am fit and the path is largely flat. It is overcast but warm and dry. I find I don’t need a lot of help on this journey, and yet people choose to walk by my side, to ask how I’m holding up and to encourage me along the way. I pour my energy into resisting the urge to shout at them, even though every ounce of my body wants to ask them why they are here for me now when they abandoned me at the time I needed them most.

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With the funeral looming, my siblings and I have taken time off work. It is easy for all of us to do that. Two of us are self-employed and we simply told our clients that our father had died. Before we said anything more, our clients told us that we must take all the time we need to deal with our grief and to help with the funeral arrangements. They said that they would manage without us. My other two siblings have been given compassionate leave by their respective employers, no questions asked. Their children are taking time off during the school term for the funeral. 

In the deepest parts of my childless grief, I worked on, because how can you possibly explain to a client that you cannot work because you ran out of time to have children? My grief was visceral then. It was a full-bodied affair that brought me to my knees day after day, year after year, but I was lucky, I told myself, that I could work on my own terms and take breaks to cry on the kitchen floor and return to my laptop to answer emails or join a video call without anyone even noticing that I’d been away from my desk. 

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Ten days after Dad died, my neighbour walked past my kitchen window and peered in. I was crying, but I waved her in. She had locked herself out, she explained. She needed her spare key which I look after.

She saw my red eyes and gave me a hug, “Oh, it’s so hard to lose a parent,” she said.

How could I tell her that I wasn’t crying for my dad? How could I begin to explain that I felt at peace with his death ten days later, but that I still grieved childlessness four years on? How could I tell her that I had received a photo of my dad holding his newborn grandchild in his arms, on the family WhatsApp chat, and that my tears were because the baby was not my child? How could I tell her that in the days since my father died I had cried as much for my childlessness as I had for him? Perhaps more.

I stayed quiet and simply let her hug me.

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I am not fundamentally changed by my father’s death. 

My sense of identity is not undergoing a radical transformation because he is not in the world.

My group of friends is not shifting dramatically because he is not in the world.

My psyche is not trying to find meaning, purpose or fulfilment in a new place because he is not in the world.

At the peak of an emotional wave, when I am hit by the knowledge that I will never see my father again and that he is not in this world, the raw grief feels similar to the grief I feel for my children, but the loss itself is easier to integrate.

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My siblings have all mentioned that in the weeks since our father’s health started rapidly deteriorating, it has been a struggle for them to work. They struggle to put their concentration into their jobs. Work feels pointless and their mind is elsewhere.

This has often been true for me during long drawn-out waves of childless grief, but I could not express that pointlessness without being told I was “probably peri-menopausal” or that I should “get on anti-depressants.” Several people suggested I was “just lonely” because I worked from home. I wasn’t peri-menopausal and I wasn’t lonely working from home. I was grieving.

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Since Dad died, my mother, my siblings and I have spent a lot of time trawling through old family albums. We share memories of him and swap anecdotes, casually throwing his name around the kitchen in a way that makes him seem present even though he is absent.

One of my siblings mentioned that they were worried they would forget him, forget all those memories. It is a common concern with death, that we might forget. Memories are important to us and we don’t want to lose them. We don’t want to wind up with no memories. With children that never were, there are no memories to lose. In effect, the memories are already lost and for many of us, that is an agonising truth.

Having all those family photos and memories feels comforting, and it keeps him real. In a way, it gives me permission to mourn, to know with absolute certainty that he was here. It comes easily to me to keep my relationship with my dad alive beyond his death. I instinctively look upwards to speak to him about the things that would have made him laugh and the things he would have appreciated, like seeing a kingfisher flit across the water or opening a bottle of milk and spooning out the cream from the top. I love conjuring up the way I felt when I spent time with him, and I love that I am able to do that. It all comes easily because I know him.

I know what my father’s eyes look like.

I know what it feels like to be his daughter.

I know what makes him laugh and how his eyebrows twitch in amusement.

I know the tone of his voice.

I know his presence in a room.

I know him and I feel like I know where he is. In his early thirties, my father had a near death experience. He spoke of seeing a light, a feeling of his soul leaving his body and the presence of an all-loving force that ‘felt good.’ Now that he has died, I feel like I know where Dad has gone, and I trust that one day I will go there too. That makes sense to me. 

Things that we can make sense of are more easily digestible. Not having children didn’t make sense. It spun me into a wild panic, the kind you would imagine feeling if someone close to you went missing. It left me flailing in despair. I didn’t know where my children were and the not knowing was the worst feeling in the world. I write that last sentence and I know that, actually, there was one feeling that was even worse - that feeling that the people around me didn’t understand my anguish and chose to behave as if nothing had happened, as if no-one was lost.

Dad’s death is tangible. I saw him in his bed. I watched him deteriorate over several days. I remember the exact moment that his chest stopped moving. I remember walking upstairs several hours later and leaning against his bedroom door, looking at his now empty bed and listening to Claire de Lune playing on Classic FM while candles flickered on a side table. He was there, and then he was gone. What a privilege it is for me to have that logical step-by-step gradation, to have been present for it. How it helps me anchor my grief.

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My experiences of unwanted childlessness and of my father dying are my own. You may recognise some parts of my experience, others may seem alien to you. I certainly do not speak for all childless people or all people who have lost their father. We’re all different, we all have different stories and experiences.

Some of my childless friends do not feel the grief I feel for the children they never had. At least one of my siblings feels a deeper kind of grief for my dad than I do. Twenty years ago, when my grandmother died, I didn’t even notice, but when a friend’s grandmother died a few weeks later, she was utterly crushed. We do not know how grief will hit us. It isn’t something we can really anticipate. We can be totally floored by one loss and shrug off another. We might watch a friend collapse in a heap about something that we would barely notice. It is not for any of us to judge, but simply to acknowledge and witness what we see in each other. 

We need to say, ‘I’m so sorry that you didn’t get to bring your children into the world. I’m thinking of you,’ just as freely as we say, ‘I’m so sorry that your father died. I’m thinking of you.’ 

We need to be prepared as well, for other people not to feel the level of grief that we expect of them in their loss. When someone says, “It hurts this much,” we need to believe them and respond to what they are telling us.

“How actually are you?” my friend asked a few days after my father had died, rather than assuming that I was devastated. It meant that she could meet me where I was with it, she could respond to my sense of peace and acceptance of his death rather than mindlessly engulfing me in a hug and treating me as a broken victim. We need to do that for each other, to approach these big life events with curiosity so that we can meet each other in the right place and offer the level of support that is needed. Being offered more support than that can feel claustrophobic, patronising and, frankly, annoying. Being offered too little can feel alienating and hurtful. 

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I miss my father, but I ache for my children. Oh, to have been able to hold them just once, to have known the smell of their hair or the colour of their eyes. What it would have been, to have had just a few memories of those precious people, to be able to retrieve at any given moment the way I felt when I spent time with them, when I mothered them, when I did nothing more than love them. What a blessing that would have been. 

What a blessing it would have been, too, if someone had sent a card to say they were sorry I never got to hold my children.