Navigating a Parent’s Approaching Death After a Difficult Relationship
There is a particular kind of grief that rarely makes it onto greeting cards or into the soft-focus tributes we see shared on social media. It is the grief of the adult child who receives the phone call — the one that tells them their parent is dying — and feels something far more complicated than simple sorrow. It might be dread. Relief. Guilt about the relief. Anger. Numbness. Or a desperate, aching sadness not for the parent who is dying, but for the parent they never had.
If you are navigating this experience right now, you are not alone. And more importantly, you are not broken.
Two Losses, Not One
When a parent with whom you have had a deeply painful, traumatic, or harmful relationship approaches death, you are not facing a single loss. You are facing two, simultaneously.
The first is the impending physical death of your parent — a real loss that carries weight, regardless of the quality of the relationship. The second, and often more overwhelming, is the permanent foreclosure of possibility. There will be no apology. No recognition of the harm caused. No chance for the relationship to become what it should have been. As one grief counsellor put it, the death of an estranged or difficult parent takes away “the last room left for repairing the relationship.” That door, which may have stood ajar — even just a crack — now closes forever.
Research confirms that this dual loss is genuinely distinct from ordinary grief. People who have had abusive or neglectful parents often describe having “no emotional road map” for dealing with this kind of death. Society gives us scripts for mourning a beloved parent; it gives us almost nothing for mourning one whose memory is steeped in pain.
The Weight of Ambivalence
Psychologists use the term ambivalence to describe the state of holding conflicting emotions toward the same person or situation simultaneously — and nowhere is ambivalence more acute than in relationships marked by harm and love, obligation and resentment, longing and self-protection.
You may find yourself feeling genuinely sad that this person is dying while also feeling relieved. You may feel the pull to be present at their bedside while also knowing, from hard-won experience, that being in their proximity is not safe for you. You may feel the familiar hope — perhaps for the first time in years — that something meaningful might yet be said, even as the wiser part of you knows that hope has burned you before.
This ambivalence is not weakness. It is not confusion. It is the natural, healthy response of a person who has been hurt by someone they were biologically and culturally programmed to love. Grief researchers describe anticipatory grief in complex family situations as “a highly stressful and ambivalent experience,” one in which the family member must somehow remain functional and available while simultaneously processing an enormous well of complicated feeling.
When Your Values Pull You Forward
One of the most common things heard in therapy from adults in this situation is a version of this: “I know what they did. But I still feel like I have to do the right thing.”
This is not naivety or denial. For many people, the drive to act in accordance with their values — to show up, to do what feels morally decent — is one of the deepest and most reliable compasses they have. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), personal values are understood as the foundational framework of a meaningful life: the qualities that guide our behaviour even when the situation is painful, uncertain, or unresolved. Acting in line with your values, even in the hardest circumstances, is one of the most psychologically protective things a person can do.
But here is the complexity: the value of “doing the right thing” does not come with a pre-written instruction manual for situations like this one. For some, it looks like being physically present. For others, it looks like making a single phone call, sending a letter, or arranging for logistical support from a distance without direct emotional exposure. For others still, it means honouring the years of work they have done to protect their mental health and wellbeing — and recognising that stepping back is also an act of integrity.
You are not obligated to re-enter a dynamic that has damaged you, simply because the dynamic is now approaching its end.
The Fear of Getting Tangled Up Again
This fear is extraordinarily common and entirely legitimate. Many adult children who have worked hard to establish distance — emotionally, geographically, or both — find themselves terrified that proximity to a dying parent will collapse years of recovery. And sometimes, that fear is well-founded.
Research into the experiences of adult children who provide care to a parent who harmed them in childhood has found that caregiving in this context can lead to re-traumatisation — a resurgence of old psychological wounds, a regression into relational patterns that took years to dismantle, and a significant risk of depression. For some, providing end-of-life care to parents who maltreated them leads to psychological harm rather than resolution.
For others — and this is important to hold alongside the above — the experience can facilitate a kind of healing. Some individuals describe finding a sense of agency, closure, or even unexpected compassion in being present at a parent’s end of life. Research suggests that for a subset of adult survivors, participating in end-of-life care “facilitated the mobilisation of relational agency and identity validation.” Whether this applies to you is something only you can assess — ideally with support.
The critical variable is agency. Whether you choose to be involved or not, whether you choose to attend the funeral or not, whether you choose to make contact or not — what matters most is that the choice belongs to you, made consciously and in accordance with your own values, not driven by guilt, obligation, family pressure, or the fear of judgment from others.
Disenfranchised Grief: When the World Doesn’t Understand
One of the most isolating aspects of this experience is that the grief you carry may not be recognised or validated by the people around you. This is known as disenfranchised grief — grief that exists but is not socially acknowledged.
When a parent was loving and present, people know how to offer comfort. When the relationship was painful, the responses from others can be bewildering: “But they were still your parent.” “At least you have closure now.” “You weren’t close anyway, so this can’t be that hard.”
These responses, however well-intentioned, can compound the pain. They suggest you need to justify your grief, or worse, that you don’t deserve to have it. The truth is that grief does not require a loving relationship as its prerequisite. You may be grieving the parent you deserved and never had. You may be grieving the version of the future where things were finally resolved. You may be grieving a wound that can now never heal in the way you had allowed yourself to hope.
All of this grief is real. All of it is valid. None of it requires an explanation to anyone.
Setting Boundaries Without Losing Yourself
If you decide to engage — even partially — with this process, boundary-setting becomes essential. Engagement does not mean unlimited access. It does not mean absorbing emotional abuse from a parent who remains unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the impact of their behaviour. It does not mean performing emotional closeness you do not feel.
A few anchors that may help:
- Define your “why” before you act. Clarify which of your values you are honouring with each decision. Are you attending because you need to for your own sense of integrity? Are you staying away because your mental health genuinely requires it? Getting honest about the “why” removes the grip of guilt and replaces it with conscious intention.
- Decide in advance what contact you are and are not willing to have. This might mean a brief visit with a support person present, communicating through a third party, or simply being kept informed without being physically present. You do not have to be either fully in or fully out.
- Have a plan for your own emotional care. Who will you debrief with afterwards? What will you do to resource yourself before and after any contact? How will you notice if you are beginning to regress into old patterns — and what will you do?
- Protect your recovery. If you have done the hard work of healing from a traumatic upbringing, that work deserves protection. Your wellbeing is not a secondary consideration.
Grief Does Not Require a Love Story
One of the most liberating realisations for adult children in this situation is that grief does not demand a loving relationship to exist. You may grieve a parent you also feared. You may grieve the loss of someone who hurt you, and that grief may be as deep and disorienting as any you have ever felt.
You are not obligated to perform forgiveness. You are not obligated to manufacture feelings you don’t have. At the same time, if you do feel something unexpected — compassion, softness, a flicker of connection — you are not betraying yourself by acknowledging it.
Self-compassion — in Kristin Neff’s formulation, the trifecta of mindfulness, self-kindness, and common humanity — is perhaps the most powerful tool available to you right now. It means meeting your own pain with the same gentleness you would offer a trusted friend who came to you in this same distress. It means allowing that what you are going through is genuinely hard, and that struggling does not mean you are doing it wrong.
You Are Allowed to Grieve on Your Own Terms
There is no correct way to grieve this kind of loss. There is no timeline. There is no emotional response you are required to have or to show. You may feel waves of unexpected sorrow followed by stretches of numbness. You may find yourself angry long after the funeral. You may feel a complicated sense of relief and then feel guilt about the relief.
All of it is part of the same tangled process of reckoning with one of the most complex relationships a human being can carry: the relationship between a child and the parent who failed them.
What you are navigating right now is not a failure of love. It is the evidence of how hard you have tried — and how much, despite everything, it mattered.
If you are finding this experience difficult to process alone, speaking with a psychologist who specialises in trauma and grief can provide the scaffolding to move through it without losing yourself. You deserve support that sees the full complexity of your experience — not just the loss, but everything that came before it.
Feel Good Psychology & Counselling supports adults navigating complex trauma, grief, and family dynamics. If this article resonates with your experience, we invite you to reach out to our practice to find out how we can support you.
Article is written with the assistance of Perplexity AI.