The Terror Of A Parent Dying

Content note: This piece contains reflections on death, dying, and bereavement. Please read only if you feel emotionally resourced to do so.

Following on from my last blog post, as I approach the seventh anniversary of my mum’s sudden death, I feel able - perhaps for the first time - to process more fully the terror of a parent dying. This has come from several relationships, including the one with Alexis*, no longer existing. With their ending, my mother is no longer still “alive” through them. I am now able to grieve her fully, as my mother - and all the projections and iterations of her - are all dead.

I have just come from therapy (yes, therapists also need their own therapists). I cried like I never have before, remembering the week leading up to Amma’s (mum in Tamil) passing. I feel drained and exhausted but also purged - as though a weight has lifted. It feels as if it was necessary to go through all the re-membering in order to become whole with what happened, so that it could finally take its place as part of the integrated whole of me: a therapist, a wife, and a woman whose mother died far ahead of her time.

For the past six years, whenever I spoke about her death - whether in therapy or when asked by others - it felt as though I was reporting on something that had happened to someone else, or to someone else’s mother. This, of course, is the trauma response of dissociation.
“A person who has suffered the loss of a beloved may be so overcome by intrusive, tormenting traumatic memories connected to the shocking process of their death that their grief is blocked and unable to be expressed,” writes Philippa Smethurst.

Now, seven years later, being able to be with the grief - the memories and the devastation -  feels freeing, as though something has shifted.

You may have your own story of bereavement. Mine, and my mum’s, was aggressive metastatic breast cancer. We were told only a week before she died that this was what she had been struggling with. There had been symptoms, but no clear signs, despite numerous tests. When she left this world after being ill for just four months, a part of me died too.

I used to think anniversaries would get easier with time. Instead, each one seemed to sharpen her absence. This isn’t surprising. 2019 was spent in shock, and trying to grieve through a pandemic distorted everything. Alongside this came irrational guilt, as life moved on around me in indescribably wonderful ways - ways I would never be able to share with my first love, the person who brought me into this world.

This year feels different. This anniversary feels less heavy. Through the work I am doing in therapy, and because I now have a safe and containing home environment, I feel able to sit with the horror of watching my mother die -  so quickly, yet so slowly - before my eyes.

The day she was readmitted to hospital for the last time, she looked like a small child, yet impossibly frail in a way I had never seen before. She wasn’t in pain at that point -  that came later, when the dying itself began. What I remember most is how disappointed she looked. How despairing. How bitter. As anyone dying before their time might be. All I wanted was to swap bodies with her, so she could have back the energy and vibrancy she once had.

A couple of days later, we were told that her breast cancer had returned (she had been in remission for six years), and that it was a matter of weeks or months. But her decline was rapid. It felt as though her mind remembered how horrendous chemotherapy the first time had been, and she was taking agency over when she would leave this life.

A week later, she did. It was 11:24pm on a Thursday in January. I had set up a cot next to her bed. Having experienced intense - and irrational - guilt about her spending the previous night in a coma alone, I was determined not to leave her overnight again.

For the two days she was in a coma, there was a constant sense of terror - the knowledge that this was the beginning of the end.

I didn’t have a say in how many nights I would get to sleep beside Amma. About an hour after the rest of my family left, her breathing became short and shallow. The nurse told me to call them, but they didn’t make it back in time. I like to think my mum only wanted me there.

“It’s just you and me, Amma,” I kept whispering as she faded away. A single tear rolled down her face as the gaps between her breaths grew longer and longer. I like to believe that tear meant she was seeing her parents and her brother, making their way to meet her.

When she took her final breath, there was a strange peace in the silence. The terror of what was imminent gave way to the reality of what had happened: my mother was dead. We would never again talk or cuddle. There was an honour and a quiet beauty in the intimacy of it being just the two of us at the end - as though she allowed only me to be there for her last breath, just as she had been there for my first.

And then the blocked grief began.

Something remained stuck in the terror of what had happened so suddenly. Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion wrote about what he called nameless dread - a terror so overwhelming it cannot yet be thought or spoken. Looking back, I recognise that this was what I experienced when she went into a coma, and in the years surrounding her death anniversary that followed. Not fear exactly, but something more primitive: the knowledge, held in the body, that something irreversible was happening -  and had happened.

Writing this now, I’m aware of how frightening it can be to stay with such memories, and why nameless dread can persist for so long. The terror of dying is not only about death itself, but about helplessness, loss of agency, and watching someone we love disappear before we are ready. Many people carry these images silently, unsure whether they are allowed - or how - to speak them aloud.

This is why watching someone die, particularly a parent, can evoke such profound terror. The dying body confronts us with dependency, helplessness, and the collapse of meaning. When the speed or shock of loss exceeds our capacity to think, the experience can remain unspoken, manifesting later as dissociation (as it did for me), panic attacks, or a pervasive sense of annihilation. Where do those unbearable feelings go when the person who held them for us in infancy is gone?

In my work as a psychotherapist, I often sit with people who believe they are “doing grief wrong” because it hasn’t softened with time. What I have learned - personally and professionally -  is that grief begins to move when safety arrives. Sometimes that safety comes years later, when the body finally believes it can survive the remembering, and when the negative projections of the person who has died are no longer present in one’s life.

This is where the consistency of my own therapy has been vital. My therapist helped me transform nameless dread into grief with language and meaning - allowing me to feel more integrated and whole with the experience.

Until you feel ready to face it, it is okay to sit with the uncertainty of whether the pain will lessen. In time, something will shift, if you are willing to process your trauma. Until then, it is possible to experience both joy and despair at once - both are transient. Be where you are. Be gentle with yourself.

This article reflects my professional perspective and is intended for reflection and education. It is not a substitute for therapy or personalised mental health support.