Alone in the world at 23—that’s how I felt when my mother died. She was my anchor, my confidence. Living without her was a terrifying prospect. I was the youngest of six, and I moved back in with my dad after her death. He had been devoted to her. When she died, he was 68 and healthy, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t last too long without her. Three years later, he was gone too. Lung cancer got him, from a life of cigarette and factory smoke. But I just figured he missed my mom too much.

I wrote a post about this a few years ago. “Facing Death” looked at how my dad and one of my brothers faced their impending deaths.

This post is about the difficulties of dealing with the death of your parents and what’s left after they’re gone. Those two events were the greatest adversity of my life, and I was totally unprepared. I had taken my parents for granted and assumed they would  always be there to guide me. I learned that when your parents die, it doesn’t matter how old you are. That may seem odd, but from my perspective, it just seemed significant. My oldest brother was in his forties when our parents died; he’s twenty years my elder. I thought it wouldn’t be as hard on him. I was wrong. It was just as hard on him as it was the rest of us.

I’ve taken to saying, “It doesn’t matter how old you are or how old they are. Your parents are your parents. Their deaths still sting.”

In the wake of their deaths, I learned not to make major decisions for at least a year. There were some dumb decisions that I made during the twelve months following each parent’s death. Fortunately though, I didn’t make any major decisions because my mind was in a fog from grief. I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I wasn’t really aware of that until I had some distance from each death. Through prayerful reflection, I could see the results of my grief. But while I was grieving, I couldn’t see the dumb things that I was choosing.

Eventually, grief gets replaced by daily living and life goes on. Here it is thirty years after my dad died, and I can still feel him with me, my mom too. Sometimes through interactions with my wife or children, I may do something that reminds me of my parents. Immediately I think, “This is exactly how my dad would react.” Or, “This is what my mom would’ve said.”

This type of anecdotal evidence is a sure sign that the spirit of my parents lives within me. The spirit of their parents lives within me too. These unseen influences are the spiritual heritage we inherit. How we live out those influences forms our character. We can choose to embrace the influences that helped shape us. We can also reject them. Or we can modify them. 

The great tragedy is to ignore them.

Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Does that mean the philosophical questioning of society, or does it apply equally to the mind and its offspring, personal character?  An unexamined life that does not recognize the influences, both past and present, which shape its actions is an unfulfilled life.  If we deny the spirits that shape our lives, how can we connect with the Spirit that shapes all of life?

This is an entry for this month's What I Learned From... groupwrite project hosted by Robert Hruzek.

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