When a parent dies: what is left unfinished

Three months after the funeral, she still had her father’s number in her phone. Not because she wanted to ring it. Because deleting it would mean that the conversation they had never had was finally off the table. “I’ve sorted everything,” she told me. “The funeral, the paperwork, the flat. The only thing I haven’t sorted is what I wanted to tell him. And now I never will.”

A parent’s death rarely comes at a moment when everything has been said. Even when we expect it — after a long illness, after months of caring — something is left open. Thanks that were never spoken, or anger that was never spoken. A question you never got an answer to. Siblings who, without their parents, suddenly don’t know how to talk to each other. A role nobody needs any more. In this piece I won’t write about grief in general, but about what is left unfinished — and what can be done with it when the other person is no longer there to talk to.

What “unfinished” means

Psychotherapy has a term that Gestalt therapy brought into use in the 1950s: unfinished business. It describes feelings and needs from important relationships that never found room — and so remain active within us. They don’t disappear with time; they speak up at unexpected moments: at a smell, a song, a sentence your child says that is exactly what your father would have said.

In the 1990s Leslie Greenberg and Sandra Paivio studied what happens when people address such unfinished business with an important person — often a parent — directly in therapy, using the empty-chair technique. In their 1995 study, people who did this work felt less burdened by that relationship after therapy than those who received psychoeducation only. What matters here is that the other person was not in the room. The finishing didn’t happen with them, but within the person themselves.

This may be the most important message of this piece: even when your parent is gone, your relationship with them isn’t over. Only the place where it happens changes.

How often grief gets stuck

Most people grieve a parent’s death in a way that is painful but softens with time. For some, though, grief gets stuck. A 2017 meta-analysis by Marie Lundorff and colleagues, which pooled studies of adults bereaved by a natural death, found that roughly one in ten develops prolonged, complicated grief — a state in which the pain doesn’t ease after many months and makes everyday life impossible. I wrote about how to recognise it in When grief doesn’t pass: what prolonged grief disorder is.

Among the factors that increase the risk, researchers often mention the quality of the relationship with the person who died — very close dependence, or a very complicated, ambiguous relationship. A sociological study by Debra Umberson and Meichu Chen back in 1994 showed that how adult children react to a parent’s death depends strongly on what the relationship was like. In other words, we don’t grieve only for the person, but also for what did and didn’t happen between us.

Those around us often underrate the death of a parent in adulthood — “well, he was old”, “she had a good life” — which I wrote about in The death of a parent in adulthood: the loss everyone underrates. I would only add this: when something unfinished is left behind, that underrating is even lonelier. It is hard to explain why your eighty-year-old father’s death hurts so much when the reason isn’t the loss itself, but the conversation that will never happen.

The first layer: the unsaid

The most common unfinished business isn’t a great drama. It is a sentence you never said. In many Slovenian families feelings weren’t talked about — love was shown through work, a cooked lunch, a father who started the car on winter mornings so it would be warm when you left for school. Lovely, but wordless. When a parent dies, you’re left feeling that you never told them what they meant to you. Or that they never told you they were proud of you.

The unsaid isn’t always tender. Sometimes it’s anger you held back for years because “you don’t say that to your parents”, or because they were already ill. That anger doesn’t disappear after death. It often turns inwards and becomes guilt — how can you be angry with someone who has died? People are often more ashamed of anger at a dead parent than of any other feeling. But anger and love can both be true at once. We call this ambivalence, and it is part of almost every important relationship.

The second layer: the unresolved

The second layer goes deeper. It is no longer about one sentence, but about a relationship that never reached where it should have. Perhaps you waited your whole life for your mother to acknowledge how hard her drinking was for you. Perhaps you hoped your father would one day say: “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.” While they were alive, that hope existed, even if you knew it was small. With their death, it closed.

For many people this is the hardest part of grieving: they grieve not only for their parent, but for the parent they never had — and for the chance that they might still have had them. I wrote about how painful it is to see your parents as they really were in Seeing your parents as they really are: the loss of idealisation.

When the relationship was very difficult, grief can be surprisingly confusing. Some people feel relief and are ashamed of it. Others feel nothing and wonder what is wrong with them. Others again are surprised by the force of their pain for someone who hurt them so much. All of this makes sense. Death doesn’t erase what happened — but nor does it erase the fact that this was your parent.

The third layer: the undivided

The third layer is the one we see most clearly in family therapy. When a parent dies, the family reorganises itself as a system. Someone was the centre — the person everyone gathered around at holidays, who knew who had fallen out with whom, who rang all the children in turn. When they’re gone, that role stands empty. Someone will take it on, often without anyone agreeing to it. Or nobody will, and the siblings will slowly drift apart. You can read more about how roles are distributed in the knowledge base under roles in the family.

If one of the children cared for the parent in recent years, then with the parent’s death, the role that filled most of their time ends too. What remains is tiredness, emptiness and sometimes resentment towards those who didn’t help — that is the subject of Life after caring for a parent: the emptiness that takes you by surprise. Practical matters often pile on top: the house, the belongings, the inheritance. When siblings argue about who gets the flat, they are rarely arguing only about the flat. They are arguing about who was loved more, who gave more, who was overlooked. That is the subject of Siblings and inheritance: when you argue over a watch but it’s about something else.

Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, one of the founders of family therapy, described how an invisible ledger of debts and merits runs between generations in a family. When a parent dies, the ledger doesn’t close. The accounts are simply passed on — to the siblings, to the surviving parent, sometimes to the next generation.

When “I could have” keeps coming back

A particular kind of unfinished business relates to the last weeks and days. “I could have taken him to the doctor sooner.” “I shouldn’t have gone home that night.” “The last time we spoke, I was impatient.” These thoughts return with a persistence that wears you out.

Guilt after a death is often an attempt to regain some control: if you could have changed something, then the death wasn’t entirely beyond your power. Such guilt is understandable, but rarely fair. I wrote about it in more detail in Guilt after a loss: “I could have done more”. Here just one question I like to ask at such moments: what did you know at the time? Not what you know today, given what happened afterwards. What you knew back then, when you were deciding.

Bonds that continue

For a long time psychology held that the aim of grieving was to “let go” of the person who died — to sever the bond and invest your feelings elsewhere. In 1996 Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman showed in their book Continuing Bonds that most bereaved people don’t sever the bond, but reshape it. They talk to the person, ask them for advice, wear their watch, cook from their recipes. This isn’t a sign that grieving has failed. It is one of the ways the relationship lives on.

This matters for unfinished business. If the bond continues, you can still finish something within it. A conversation that didn’t happen in person can happen differently. This is how part of one such conversation in therapy sounded (composite, not a real person):

“I don’t even know what I’d say to him. He can’t hear me.”
“He can’t hear you. But you can hear yourself. What would you say to him if you knew he was listening now?”
A long silence. “That I was angry because he never came to a single one of my performances. And that I still looked towards the door every time.”
“What happens when you say that out loud?”
“It’s easier. And sadder. But a different kind of sad.”

“A different kind of sad” is often exactly what happens when unfinished business starts to be finished. The pain doesn’t vanish, but it changes from stuck to flowing.

Exercise: the letter you don’t send

One of the simplest routes into what is unfinished is a letter you don’t send. I describe it in more detail in the knowledge base under the letter you don’t send. For a parent who has died, you can do it like this:

1. Choose a quiet time and get some paper. Writing by hand is often more direct than typing for this exercise. Give yourself at least half an hour and make sure nobody will disturb you.
2. Begin with the form of address you used in life. “Mum”, “Dad”, a name. The greeting alone often opens up something you didn’t expect.
3. Write what you never said. Thanks, anger, a question, sadness. Don’t correct or censor — the letter isn’t meant for anyone else.
4. Write what you wanted to hear from them. Not what they would probably have said, but what you would have needed. This step is often the hardest and the most important.
5. Decide what you will do with the letter. You can keep it, read it at the grave, burn it or bring it to a session with a therapist. What matters is that the decision is yours.

If the exercise overwhelms you, stop. You don’t have to finish it in one evening. Sometimes it takes weeks for the letter to write itself out.

When nothing needs to be finished

I also want to set a limit on my own argument, because the idea of “finishing” can turn into yet another task you can’t manage.

Not everything is meant to be resolved. Some questions will stay unanswered, and that isn’t your failure. As I wrote above: grief doesn’t end when everything is clear, but when you can live with what isn’t. The pressure to “process” everything can do as much harm as silence.

Forgiveness isn’t an obligation. If your parent was violent or abusive, you don’t have to forgive them in order to move on. Forgiveness can be part of the path, but it isn’t a condition of it. With such stories, finishing often means finally naming what happened and putting it where it belongs — with them, not with you. This is work best done alongside someone, not alone.

You don’t have to hurry. The first year after a death is often about getting through the dates, sorting out practical matters and getting used to the absence. Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut described how the bereaved constantly oscillate between two tasks: turning towards the loss and turning towards the life that carries on. Both are necessary, and the oscillation itself isn’t a sign you’re doing something wrong. So there is sometimes room for unfinished business only later. Some people return to it years afterwards — at the birth of a child, during their own illness, or when they reach the age their parent was when they died.

When the answer lies with a doctor. If months after the death you can’t sleep, aren’t eating, can’t manage work, or thoughts appear that it would be better if you weren’t here, see your GP. In Slovenia you can also call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day), and in an emergency 112. Grief isn’t an illness, but it can turn into a condition that needs treatment.

How therapy can help

In therapy with people whose parent has died, we rarely work only with sadness. We often look at what the death is shifting in the whole family: who is now closest to whom, who has taken on which role, which patterns from earlier generations are repeating. In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we believe that what we couldn’t resolve with the people who shaped us is passed on — into our partnerships, our parenting, our relationships with siblings.

One way of looking at this is the genogram, a family tree that shows not only who was whose relative, but also relationships, losses and repetitions. In the longer session A Look into the Past we draw it together. When you see on paper that your father also lost his father too young, and never spoke of it, the unfinished business between you can appear in a different light. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

What to remember

• A parent’s death almost always leaves something unfinished — unsaid between you, unresolved in the relationship or undivided in the family.
• Roughly one in ten bereaved adults develops complicated grief; the risk is higher when the relationship was very close or very complicated.
• The bond with the person who died continues — which is why you can still finish something within it, even though they are no longer part of the conversation.
• The letter you don’t send, a conversation with your siblings and therapy are paths that help; forgiveness isn’t an obligation.
• Grief doesn’t end when everything is resolved, but when you can live with the unanswered.