Death of parents
March 21st 2010 02:19
What happens when your parents die, and suddenly you're on your own?
There's a void, like losing a limb, missing a key piece.
But this void isn't simply practical, material.
Firstly, it's also the disappearance of authority. You have no one to look up to. These people were the source of your beliefs and values, they were there from before the beginning, and you're now abandoned without continuing guidance. There's no higher authority than yourself, and you can't shake the freedom and the burden to forge your own path.
It might even be that their death destabilizes their authority.
Perhaps their authority was based solely on their approval and disapproval and your concern for what they thought -- so with this gone, there are no bindings on you.
Or perhaps, subjectively, the enduring stability, the universality, of the values they taught you went hand-in-hand with, was somehow guaranteed by, their care for you and their physical presence: -- you felt that they would always be there.
The shock of their vanishing brings all certainty into question, and their principles in particular.
Secondly, this void is vulnerability, it's the disappearance of safety net. There's no one to catch you if you stumble or go wrong.
And there's nothing between you and death. If your parents can die, then so can you. Your security is punctured -- your belief in the rightness and order of the world, your assurance of your place in it, your confidence of your immortality.
Every soldier new to the battlefront feels that he's bullet-proof, invulnerable. But as his friends are cut down around him, he's finally brought to "see the elephant", and he realizes he's just a body and a number.
There's a void, like losing a limb, missing a key piece.
But this void isn't simply practical, material.
Firstly, it's also the disappearance of authority. You have no one to look up to. These people were the source of your beliefs and values, they were there from before the beginning, and you're now abandoned without continuing guidance. There's no higher authority than yourself, and you can't shake the freedom and the burden to forge your own path.
It might even be that their death destabilizes their authority.
Perhaps their authority was based solely on their approval and disapproval and your concern for what they thought -- so with this gone, there are no bindings on you.
Or perhaps, subjectively, the enduring stability, the universality, of the values they taught you went hand-in-hand with, was somehow guaranteed by, their care for you and their physical presence: -- you felt that they would always be there.
The shock of their vanishing brings all certainty into question, and their principles in particular.
Secondly, this void is vulnerability, it's the disappearance of safety net. There's no one to catch you if you stumble or go wrong.
And there's nothing between you and death. If your parents can die, then so can you. Your security is punctured -- your belief in the rightness and order of the world, your assurance of your place in it, your confidence of your immortality.
Every soldier new to the battlefront feels that he's bullet-proof, invulnerable. But as his friends are cut down around him, he's finally brought to "see the elephant", and he realizes he's just a body and a number.
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Comment by William Parkhurst
Really Long Link