ABSTRACT
One of the most difficult aspects of learning to live with a parent's death is that the process often continues in painful stages for many years, some would even say for the rest of your life. Accepting just how long the legacy of loss continues to make itself felt is one of the hardest aspects of a bereavement. Long, long after the actual event of a parent's death, the ripples and reverberations are still affecting your life. Sometimes you can feel as if there is no escape from the past, it just keeps coming back to haunt you; sometimes it can return in ways that are hard to recognize and easy to ignore. Often it will seem ludicrous to connect the way you are feeling and behaving with your parent's death, but far below the surface of conscious thought the impact of such a loss will still be affecting your life. It will take a long time to learn to live with the death of a parent. Learning to recognize old grief when it appears in new guises can be an immense help.
