There comes a point in adulthood when we begin to look at our parents differently. We might notice that they're moving a little more slowly, that they tire more easily, or that conversations increasingly include doctor's appointments, medication and health concerns. Sometimes the change is gradual. Sometimes it arrives suddenly, with a diagnosis or an unexpected hospital visit. And sometimes nothing has happened at all. Our parents are healthy, independent and enjoying their lives, yet we find ourselves thinking about their mortality in a way we never really have before.
Of course, we've always known that our parents won't live forever. But there's a difference between knowing something intellectually and beginning to feel the emotional weight of it. For much of our lives, our parents can represent a kind of permanence (they definitely have for me!). Even as adults, with families, careers and responsibilities of our own, there may be something deeply reassuring about knowing they're there.
Then, somewhere along the way, that sense of permanence begins to shift. We become more aware of their vulnerability, of time passing, and of the possibility of a future in which they are no longer part of our everyday lives. And sometimes, long before we've lost anyone, we find ourselves experiencing something that feels remarkably like grief.
Can we grieve someone who is still alive?
Psychologists have long recognised that grief doesn't always begin after a death. The term anticipatory grief, introduced into the literature by psychiatrist Erich Lindemann (1944), describes grief-related responses that can arise when we anticipate losing someone, particularly in the context of serious illness.
When a parent receives a significant diagnosis, we may begin mourning things that haven't happened. We might imagine future birthdays without them, wonder how family life will change or feel frightened by the possibility of losing the person we've always turned to for reassurance. These thoughts can arise even when the prognosis is uncertain, treatment is available and there is every reason to remain hopeful.
Anticipatory grief isn't simply sadness about a possible death. It can involve anxiety, helplessness, anger, guilt and an unsettling awareness that life may be changing in ways we cannot control. But not every experience of worrying about ageing parents is anticipatory grief in the clinical sense. When our parents are healthy, what we're experiencing may be better understood as an increasing awareness of mortality, anxiety about future loss or sadness about the passage of time. These feelings can overlap with grief without necessarily meaning that we're grieving a specific impending death.
The distinction matters, because growing older isn't an illness, and recognising our parents' mortality doesn't mean we've already begun losing them. Yet the emotional response can still be powerful. We may find ourselves feeling unexpectedly sad after an ordinary visit, worrying when a parent doesn't answer the telephone or becoming acutely aware of how quickly the years seem to be passing. Sometimes the sadness isn't attached to anything that has happened. It's attached to the knowledge that things cannot stay exactly as they are forever.
When the relationship begins to change
One of the more complicated aspects of watching our parents age is that our relationship with them can begin to change, sometimes almost without us noticing.
For much of childhood, parents are the people who look after us. They're the ones we call when something goes wrong, who know what to do, who provide reassurance or practical help. Even when our relationships are imperfect, the idea of our parents as the older generation can provide a familiar sense of order.
As they age, those roles may gradually shift. We might become the person reminding them about appointments, checking whether they're feeling well or helping them make decisions. We may find ourselves worrying about them in ways they once worried about us.
Researchers studying intergenerational relationships have described how ageing can bring changing patterns of support, dependence and responsibility between parents and adult children (Bengtson, 2001). These changes are not necessarily negative. They can bring greater closeness, mutual understanding and a different kind of intimacy. But they can also stir feelings that are difficult to explain. We may feel protective towards a parent who has always seemed strong. We may resent the growing responsibility and then feel guilty for resenting it. We may miss being looked after, even while recognising that we're perfectly capable of looking after ourselves.
Sometimes what we're grieving isn't the person themselves, but an earlier version of the relationship: the parent who seemed invincible, the family dynamic we knew, or the comforting assumption that somebody older and wiser would always be there. And those feelings can exist alongside enormous love and gratitude for the relationship we still have.
For women, the emotional experience of watching parents grow older can sometimes be complicated by another responsibility: becoming the person who quietly manages everyone else's worry. Research on family caregiving has consistently found that women, particularly daughters, are more likely to take on substantial caring responsibilities for ageing relatives (Pinquart & Sörensen, 2006). But the burden isn't always visible. It can involve remembering appointments, researching treatments, checking in regularly, keeping siblings informed and noticing changes in a parent's health or wellbeing, often alongside responsibilities to children, partners and work. For women in midlife, this can create a sense of being pulled between generations, sometimes described as the sandwich generation. And while practical responsibilities may be shared, the emotional work of anticipating problems, reassuring others and holding the family's anxiety together can be harder to recognise. The result is that there may be little space left for a woman's own fear or sadness. She can become so focused on making sure everybody else is coping that she barely notices how much she's carrying herself. This doesn't mean women necessarily grieve more deeply than men, or that all families divide responsibilities in the same way. But it does mean that, for some women, the experience of worrying about an ageing or unwell parent is accompanied by an additional, often unspoken, emotional load.
The difficulty of living with uncertainty
When a parent becomes ill, uncertainty can be one of the hardest things to manage. Waiting for results, trying to understand medical information or wondering what the coming months might bring can create a constant background of worry.
Psychological research has linked difficulty tolerating uncertainty with excessive worry, although this relationship is complex and doesn't mean that every response to uncertainty is unhealthy (Carleton, 2016). When something matters deeply to us and we have limited control over the outcome, our minds may repeatedly return to possible scenarios, almost as though thinking about them for long enough might help us prepare. We search for information, revisit conversations, imagine different outcomes and try to anticipate what we might need to do next. Some of that thinking is practical and necessary. But sometimes it becomes an exhausting attempt to find certainty where none is available.
There's also a particular kind of guilt that can accompany these thoughts. We might feel disloyal for imagining life without someone who is still here, or worry that we're somehow giving up hope by acknowledging the possibility of loss. But recognising that something frightening could happen is not the same as expecting it to happen. And feeling sadness about a possible future doesn't mean we've stopped appreciating the present.
For those whose parents are healthy, uncertainty can take a quieter form. We may suddenly become conscious that every visit is one of a finite number, even though we have no reason to believe that anything is about to change. An ordinary goodbye can feel unexpectedly significant.
The difficulty is that there is no amount of worrying that can make the people we love permanent. We can take sensible precautions, support their health and be present in their lives, but we cannot remove the uncertainty that comes with loving someone.
The pressure to make every moment count
When we become aware that time with our parents is limited, it's natural to want to make the most of it. We might feel an urgency to visit more often, have important conversations, take photographs or create memories. There can be something valuable in that awareness. It may encourage us to prioritise relationships that matter or say things we've been meaning to say.
But it can also create another source of pressure. We begin to feel that every visit should be meaningful, every conversation should matter and every opportunity to spend time together must be taken. If we live far away, have demanding jobs or are raising children ourselves, we may feel guilty about all the time we're not spending with them. And sometimes we can become so preoccupied with the thought of losing someone that it becomes difficult to enjoy the ordinary experience of having them here.
There is no perfect way to be an adult daughter or son. Not every family has a close relationship, and not every relationship with a parent is uncomplicated. Some people carry unresolved hurt, difficult histories or boundaries that remain important regardless of a parent's age or health.
Even in loving families, we cannot make every moment count in some extraordinary way. Much of family life is ordinary. We talk about the weather, discuss what we're having for dinner, disagree about small things and sometimes have very little to say. Perhaps we don't need to turn every moment into a memory. Sometimes the ordinary experience of being together is enough.
Learning to hold two truths at once
One of the challenges of loving ageing parents is learning to live with feelings that seem contradictory. We can be grateful that they're here and frightened of losing them. We can feel hopeful about a medical outcome while acknowledging that we're scared. We can enjoy a conversation with them and feel unexpectedly sad afterwards.
These emotions don't cancel one another out.
Research into bereavement has challenged the idea that grief follows a neat, predictable sequence. Stroebe and Schut's (1999) Dual Process Model describes how bereaved people may move between confronting a loss and engaging with the practical demands of everyday life. Although the model was developed to understand grief after bereavement, it offers a useful reminder that difficult emotions don't need to occupy us continuously to be real. We can worry about a parent in the morning, laugh with a friend at lunchtime and spend the evening thinking about something entirely unrelated. That doesn't mean we aren't taking the situation seriously, or that our love is somehow insufficient.
For some people, talking openly about their fears can help. For others, the most helpful thing may be allowing themselves to step away from those fears for a while. Sometimes it's enough to acknowledge the sadness without trying to solve it. And perhaps there is something important in recognising that we don't have to rehearse a future loss in order to prove how much somebody matters to us.
Loving them while they're still here
There is no way to make ourselves completely comfortable with the thought of losing our parents. Nor do we need to. The sadness we sometimes feel as they grow older is closely connected to the significance of the relationship. These are people who have occupied a place in our lives for decades, who may know versions of us that nobody else remembers, and whose presence has become woven into our understanding of family, history and belonging.
Of course the thought of losing them can feel overwhelming. But perhaps the task isn't to stop thinking about the future altogether, or to prepare ourselves so thoroughly that a loss will somehow hurt less. It's to recognise when our minds have travelled somewhere frightening and gently return, when we can, to the relationship that exists today.
A parent can be ageing and still have a full life ahead of them. A diagnosis can be serious without every outcome being known. A relationship can be changing without having lost its value. We don't have to deny the possibility of loss to appreciate what remains, and we don't have to spend our time anticipating grief in order to be prepared for it.
Perhaps one of the hardest parts of loving our parents as adults is learning to live with two truths at once: they are still here, and they won't always be. And somewhere between those two truths is the life we're sharing with them now.
References
Bengtson, V. L. (2001). Beyond the nuclear family: The increasing importance of multigenerational bonds. Journal of Marriage and Family, 63(1), 1–16.
Carleton, R. N. (2016). Into the unknown: A review and synthesis of contemporary models involving uncertainty. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 39, 30–43.
Lindemann, E. (1944). Symptomatology and management of acute grief. American Journal of Psychiatry, 101(2), 141–148.
Pinquart, M., & Sörensen, S. (2006). Gender differences in caregiver stressors, social resources, and health: An updated meta-analysis. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 61(1), P33–P45.
Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224.