Losing Your Parents, Finding You Self is a very different kind of book that explores what happens to us as children when one or both of our parents die.
Most of us have multiple emotions when a parent dies and these emotions can be time bound or effectively change us forever. As Victoria Secunda shares we still feel semi-orphaned when the first parent dies and orphaned when the second parent dies and it doesn’t matter how old we are when these events happen.
Jane Bryan Quinn who reviewed the book writes “This book is not about grief. It’s about the astounding and unexpected changes that occur in people when parents die”. Reading this book will create an opening to think, reflect and ponder the journey of a parent-adult child relationship.
Losing Your Parents, FInding You Self was inspired by the author’s own experience with parental death. It contains data from the 94 surveys that were completed by individuals through the United States as well as the information collected during the interviews with 65 of the respondents. The stories collected are interwoven throughout the book which is divided up into three parts, each having subsequent chapters with each part being divided into multiple sub-sections with heading such as The Last Emotional Word, Flying Without a Net and When Less is More.
An added bonus is the ability to read the book out of order or in sections which feel like the most meaningful at the time.
“Far from being an insignificant event, parental death is the milestone–provides the indelible line of demarcation–that enables adult offspring to begin to determine whether or not they are, or still must learn how to be, truly grown up.
