In a recent Guardian opinion piece, Lucinda Holdforth described her experience of caring for her late mother, and her complicated feelings after she died.
It is a common human theme that good parents can never really rest for worrying about their children. But it seems to me that a reciprocal burden exists for good children. We are never entirely free from the psychic weight of our parents’ needs, love and ambitions for us in our youth, and increasingly we now find ourselves taking on guardian-style responsibilities for them during their prolonged old age.
I finally understood the accumulated heaviness of the burden I had carried about a year after my mother died. At 59, I was at last an orphan, which meant I could turn off my phone each night. I woke up one day with the most complete feeling of creative liberty and personhood I’d ever experienced. That feeling has not left me since.
