ABSTRACT
How do children experience the death of a parent, especially in adolescence when they begin developing their gendered identity? Grief is a pervasive feeling that, contrary to popular belief, can accompany us for life. When grief is traumatic though through sudden loss that cannot be put into words or processed, there is the risk of internalising it as a sense of one’s own ‘badness’ through having been implicated or even having ‘caused’ a parent’s death. As in the previous story, here the beginning of adolescence is marked by trauma, this time through tragic loss. Perhaps, one is also left with the question of how human beings can cope with loss, when it feels both unbearable and unrecoverable.
