I spent my 26th birthday on a rooftop in Brooklyn. It was a perfectly sticky summer night, and I was surrounded by friends, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my father, who had Lewy body dementia, was going to pass soon. I went home early and, less than a month later, I got the call that he was gone. At the time, I had only one close friend who had also lost a parent, and I leaned on her heavily. “When does it start to feel better?” I’d ask her. She talked me through it (but in short, it never really does), checked in with me on difficult holidays, like Father’s Day, and got me out of the house – even when I didn’t know what I needed was to socialise. I desperately wanted to grieve in community, but I’d stumble through the “family talk” on dates and struggle to explain the all-encompassing feeling to new friends. 

Multiple people in my friend group have now, unfortunately, joined the dead parents club. With each loss, I’ve tried to be a listening ear, like my friend was to me, and speak openly about my grief. I’ve also joined a grief support group on Facebook for people who lost a parent in their twenties, and have found it a surprising relief to read my thoughts typed out by the hands of strangers. While losing a loved one at any age is difficult, grief and trauma therapist Gina Moffa says there are unique challenges to losing a parent in early adulthood. “Losing a parent in your twenties can feel like having the rug pulled out from under you while you’re still learning how to stand on your own,” she says. “You’re grieving not just who they were, but who you were becoming with their support nearby.” 

Your twenties are a time when you are looking forward to major life milestones – including, but not limited to, landing your first job, getting fired, finding an apartment, moving countries, meeting a partner, going through a major breakup and having a child – and grief has a habit of finding its way into those moments, good and bad. “I’m very lucky that my dad was able to meet my children, but he’ll never walk me down the aisle, so I don’t even want to get married anymore,” says Hannah, a 29-year-old in Ohio who lost her dad at 27. Hannah adds that when her father died, she lost connection to one side of her family and heritage. “My father was my Black parent and my mother is white,” she says. “When my dad died, it felt like I also lost my racial identity.” 

Shivohn, a 32-year-old who lost their mum at 20, says losing a parent during college is disorientating. “Losing my mom, I felt like I had no purpose; I dropped out of college because it didn’t feel important anymore and didn’t understand how to survive as an adult, pay my bills or do my taxes,” they say. “I felt lost as a person, like I was never going to find my feet again, and found myself floating in nothing.” At the time, Shivohn was told by some of their peers that they had to “just get over it”. Instead, they find it helpful to be as “open and loud” about their grief as possible. Shivohn lost their father ten years later, at age 30. “When I talk to my friends about it, I say it’s like there’s this cavern that’s been worn into my chest,” they say. “Every year, the wind whistles through it different, but it just gets deeper.” 

There are many cultures where mourning is a communal process, filled with rituals and traditions, but Western capitalistic society is not one of those. “When you lose a parent in your twenties, it can feel like everyone else still has something you’ve just lost forever, and that can be really isolating,” says Moffa. While more young people may be openly discussing parent loss online, there is still an unspoken social pressure to grieve quickly, quietly and efficiently; to return to work after a week’s leave and gradually stop speaking about your deceased love one after the funeral. We’re taught to be there for people with flowers and baked casseroles immediately after the loss, but not how to share in the grief for the years to come. Grief itself, however, is a multidimensional experience, impacting our physiology, psychology, social life and even sense of self without a time limit. 

When losing a parent in your twenties, Moffa says it can pay to look beyond your immediate circle for support, including online support groups and in-person events, like The Dinner Party. “That might look like joining a grief group, finding a trauma-informed therapist or even letting older mentors or chosen family step into small supportive roles if they are present in your life,” Moffa says. To Gabby, a 31-year-old in New York who lost her mum five years ago, it looked like texting someone she’d never met before. “A friend of a friend, who had lost her brother a few years before, offered her number if I ever needed somebody to talk to who wasn’t a loved one,” she says. “I could call or text her at any time of the day, and that was one of the most important things that got me through.” Gabby now offers up her number whenever she hears of a loss outside of her close friend group. 

There’s also the dead parents club: the immediate connection you feel when you meet somebody who has lost a parent. “There’s this levity through joking, knowing we’re the only ones to joke about this, and it makes everyone else feel uncomfortable,” says Gabby. In your twenties, this is more of a rare occurrence – only around 11.5 per cent of 18 to 29-year-olds in the US have experienced the loss of a parent. “Losing a parent in your twenties is considered an ‘off-time event’, which are those that occur at a non-typical or unexpected time in a person’s life, disrupting the normal life course,” says Jill S Cohen, a grief counsellor in New York. “Young adults are a group with fewer people in it than other age groups of grievers, are therefore somewhat less studied, and it is a group that has not as often been paid attention to.” 

While everyone who lives long enough will eventually join the dead parents club at some point or another, I’ve often struggled to shake the feeling that I’ve joined “too soon”, as if I was somehow robbed of years that can never be promised. Speaking to friends about their very alive and healthy grandparents and parents can bring up an uncomfortable reality: I’m happy for them, but I wanted that chance, too. I’m sure people who lost parents in their childhood looked at me in the same way. Cohen says that jealousy during grief is not only common but rational. “It’s normal to think ‘why not me’ when you see friends with healthy grandparents or parents because it’s a reminder of what you don’t have,” she says. “Though it’s hard to accept the void, where there is grief, there was great love – and not everyone gets that in their lifetime.” 

I’ve spent years grappling with the loss of my father, wondering if it would have been more manageable if I had my life “in order” before he died. The vision is this: he’d pass not a moment before I found a partner, established a fool-proof support system and entirely established my career (as if any of those milestones are fixed and would have somehow made it all easier). The truth is a hard pill to swallow: no amount of time will ever feel like enough with someone you love. “There’s no good or better time to lose a parent, and age doesn’t guarantee more support,” says Cohen. “Most report that even if they are partnered, grief is a completely lonely experience.” It’s far less lonely, however, when you can find kinship with another member of the dead parents club in the comments of a TikTok video, vent to a Facebook group or speak to a kind stranger.