“If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue frame, place it face up on the floor  of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief.” – Victoria Chang, Obit

I was twelve years old when I encountered death for the first time. My maternal grandfather had passed away from a heart attack. I remember standing beside my mother and grandmother in a funeral home, a space where the worlds of the living and the dead collide. My mother greeted acquaintances and thanked them for their condolences for what seemed like an eternity. During my grandpa’s cremation, I was overwhelmed by an irrational fear that he could still feel pain. Meanwhile, my mom was occupied with documents to be signed and conversations to be had with staff. Occasionally, she checked on me and told me that I was being a strong girl. It wasn’t until decades later that I started wondering how that day, and the days that followed, had felt for her as a daughter.

It’s hard to process a parent’s death, and one this sudden—random, even, considering my grandpa was relatively healthy and had gone dancing just the night before—gave our family no time to prepare. I recall my mother’s reaction being one of utter disbelief rather than distress. As an only child, she was left to cope with the loss of her father alone. She had little time for discussions with relatives as she sorted out funeral arrangements. Besides, having candid familial conversations about feelings isn’t the norm in Chinese culture. For a long time, my mom kept her emotions around my grandpa’s passing bottled away.

My mother’s relationship with my grandpa was never smooth sailing. Growing up, she received little attention from him. She observed her parents’ tumultuous relationship, in which secrets and feelings would be brushed under the rug and left unacknowledged. Later, she watched her once demanding, disapproving father shower his granddaughter—me—with boundless affection. When he passed, my mom not only had to deal with grief, but was forced to reconcile the resentment, hurt and guilt that had battled inside her for decades. She says it would’ve been easier to process those childhood wounds if she’d had siblings who’d gone through similar experiences.

Lately, I’ve been contemplating and dreading how lonely the experience of grieving a parent can be for only children like my mom and I. My grandma is still with us, living in Beijing. At eighty-six years old, she’s healthy and shockingly tech-savvy; but her pill organizer has been getting fuller, and as her hearing deteriorates, headphones have become a necessity for her during our calls. She no longer wants to come stay with us in Canada, and my mom has been extending her annual visit to Beijing to several months. I’ve also been going back once a year, sometimes on unpaid leave in order to maximize the length of my stay. Though we never spell it out, my mom and I both know the reason for our more frequent visits—we never know when the last time we see my grandma will be.

The thought of losing my grandmother and, eventually, my mother, scares me to the core. My grandma raised me, taught me piano and shaped the woman I’ve grown to be. My free-spirited, artistic mother—the ultimate cool mom—remains my best friend. My ties to these two complex and incredible women have defined my senses of being and belonging. What would I do and who would I be without them? How will I cope without siblings to share the weight of that loss?

I may not be alone in this existential pondering. Only-child families are now the most common type of family with children in Canada, accounting for 45 percent of such households, according to the 2021 census. Canadians are having fewer children overall: Statistics Canada found that the national fertility rate dropped to a record low of 1.26 children born per woman in 2023, a decline that experts have attributed to factors that include people deferring or deciding not to have kids due to the high cost of living. As families shrink, more Canadians will experience a parent’s death without siblings. They will not have a sister whom they can lean on for support, or a brother with whom they can share the responsibility of giving their loved one the final send-off. For these only children, mourning a parent’s death can be a lonely and isolating experience. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can take a more compassionate and expansive approach to grief, centring relationships beyond kinship and validating the experiences of adults who have lost a parent as an only child.

What often follows the loss of a loved one is a series of logistics that are sometimes crudely referred to as the death checklist. From funeral arrangements to property transfers, completing this checklist can take a heavy toll on those who are mourning. Aside from tasks such as choosing a resting place, and sometimes things like headstones and urns, there may also be cultural traditions to carry out, such as arranging catering services for a large funeral reception or coordinating shiva, a week-long mourning process in Judaism observed by immediate family members. While siblings may share these duties and depend on each other, only children often face these obligations alone.

Frances Chiu, an academic, writer and educator based in Hartford County, Connecticut, lost her mother in 2014. Chiu is an only child, and while her father was still alive when her mother passed, they had a strained relationship. The handling of funeral affairs rested mostly on Chiu’s shoulders. “That burden kind of fell on me because my dad knows nothing about finance,” she says. But one of the things that hit her hardest was the isolation after her mom’s passing.

Chiu started a Substack newsletter in 2021 to document her reflections on the loss of her mother. In a post that year, Chiu recalls the loneliness of the period after the first Chinese New Year following her mom’s passing. She felt distant from those who had supported her and her father in the previous months. “No one called us to join their get-togethers,” she writes. “I felt genuinely sad for Dad because he loved to go out and eat more than anything else.” Chiu describes how her father lost longtime acquaintances just as she was becoming his primary caregiver, leaving her without help as she took on the responsibilities of cooking, cleaning and handling finances. 

While each person deals with loss in their own way, in many cultures and religions, collective rituals are an important part of the grieving process. Movies and TV shows depict the loss of a parent as an event that reunites their children. Siblings put their lives on pause and come together to reminisce over old photographs, share memories and wipe tears off each other’s cheeks. They are reassured by the fact that someone else was nurtured, loved and scolded in similar ways.

However, an only child may not have people who can relate to their experience of being parented by their loved one. They may become the sole person preserving these memories, or carrying their parent’s traits, like their mother’s eyes or their father’s taste in music. My mom says this lack of shared experience is the scariest part of grieving as an only child. “It’s as if no one else knows about [the death],” she says. “There’s no one to share the memories [with], and life is all about memories.” I was too young to be there for my mother when we lost my grandpa, but our conversations in recent years and her therapy sessions played a big role in helping her make peace with her relationship with her father. “Talking to you, another person close to him, helped me heal,” she says.

For Chiu, her newsletter was a space to reflect on the moments she shared with her mother.  In her posts, she reminisces about cherished childhood experiences and dives into family history. “It’s kind of a way of dealing with grief, remembering those good times,” she says. The newsletter helps her hold on to the memories and express some of her love and longing.

While siblings get to tackle the death checklist and make sense of memories of their parent together, only children may have to do so alone, or with loved ones who do not have the same childhood experiences. I anticipate having a family of my own, and a child who will form their own relationships with my mom and my grandma. I see myself sharing stories from my childhood with them, like my mom did with me on so many nights before bed. But despite my best efforts, my child will not know my mom and my grandma the way I do. And it would be naive, if not selfish, to rely entirely on my child while coping with the grief of parental loss. I’m terrified of the deep void I’ll be left with and the lack of support I might face when I lose the two people who have made me whole.

The loss of a parent can also lead to the loss of a part of a person’s identity. Carrie Traher teaches in King’s University College’s thanatology department, which studies death, grief and bereavement. She says we all have multiple identities that give us an idea of who we are, such as child, spouse and sibling, and that these identities give us different relational bonds. These bonds can inform our grief response; if people have other roles they can hold on to, it can help offset the loss. “Without these [other identities], it’s almost, for some people, a sense of ‘Okay, what am I anchored to now?’” says Traher. Only children can’t turn to the identities of sibling, aunt or uncle, and those who have few relational bonds may feel a lack of connectedness.

Being her mother’s daughter was a key part of Chiu’s identity. “It’s not like my relationship with my mom was perfect, but at the same time, she was really the most stable force in my life,” she says. Chiu’s mother grounded and guided Chiu from her childhood to her journey through academia. The only time Chiu questioned her decision not to get married was after her mother’s death. “If I had someone who loved me and everything, I probably would not feel as lonely,” she says.

Chiu is not alone in this sentiment. In a thread about experiencing parental loss as an only child on the grief support forum Grieving.com, one user writes, “I don’t think most people understand what it’s like to lose your only parent when you don’t have a significant other, a brother or sister, or any kids of your own ... My whole [life] it was just me and my mother. That was really it.” Other users describe how coping with loss as an only child hasn’t gotten any easier. 

For only children from immigrant families, the death of a parent may come with another layer of grief: that of losing an important tie to their culture. In her gut-wrenching memoir Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner, the only child of a white father and a Korean mother, reflects on how her mother’s death weakened her connection to part of her heritage. Growing up as the only Korean American girl at her school in Eugene, Oregon, Zauner had a complicated relationship with her Korean identity. While she felt embarrassed about her background before her racist peers, she also cherished the summers she’d spend in Seoul with her maternal family. Her mom’s cancer diagnosis led Zauner to embark on a journey of reckoning with and embracing her Koreanness through cooking, exploring family history and holding on to fragments of the language. After her mother and maternal aunt’s deaths, Zauner started searching for glimpses of her culture in the narrow aisles of the Korean grocery store chain H Mart, and on the bustling streets of Seoul. “I’m searching for memories,” she writes. “I’m collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn’t die when they did.”

Many children of immigrants access their culture through their parents. I spent my childhood in Beijing, and was raised with love and care in a family that taught me about Chinese culture. When my mother and I moved to Markham, Ontario right before I started eighth grade, I found it hard to relate to the Chinese kids who were born in Canada, who would bond over bubble tea and disdain toward their overbearing parents. My mom and my grandma became important links to my culture and the history and politics of my homeland. Now, whenever I return to Beijing, I still feel a sense of familiarity from knowing that I’m breathing the same air as my grandma. I wonder what I’ll make of that nostalgia when it’s no longer grounded in her presence, and if I’ll still feel like I belong. 

In the late 1990s, the term “adult orphan” entered the mainstream through books like American psychologist Alexander Levy’s The Orphaned Adult. These texts expanded our understanding of orphanhood and opened the conversation around the experience of losing a parent after childhood. The idea of the adult orphan continues to surface in online discussions, personal essays and think pieces. In a 2022 article for the Cut, columnist and then-forty-year-old only child Kathryn Jezer-Morton contemplates the legitimacy of the concept after the loss of her mother. “There really isn’t anything in life more precedented than parents dying, is there?” she asks. “The very idea of ‘adult orphanhood’ is stolen valor. Children are orphans. It feels like the maladaptive behavior of people who grew up in their parents’ shadow.” But the predictability of such loss doesn’t take away from the pain and devastation it causes many adults. “Sometimes it feels absurd for anyone to call themselves [an adult orphan],” muses Jezer-Morton. “Other times it feels like the central thing that I am.” 

Imperfect as it is, the term reveals our lack of awareness and understanding of the experience of adults who have lost their parents. When someone’s spouse passes away, they become a widow or a widower. But when an adult loses their parents, there’s no specific term to describe them aside from those like the saccharine “adult orphan.” It’s hard to make sense of something that we don’t have a name for, and rarely consider as a unique form of grief. 

This gap in grief literacy—knowledge around loss and how to navigate it—makes it difficult for adults dealing with a parent’s death to feel cared for. Chiu says she felt an acute lack of emotional and social support in the years following her mother’s death. “I [saw] other people get helped by their friends, neighbours,” she says. “I really wish I had that because I think I probably would not have felt that lonely.” She struggled to find resources tailored to adults who had lost a parent. During the toughest moments, she called suicide hotlines wanting to talk to someone. Speaking with her best friend and writing about her experiences helped her through those difficult times. 

Building a more compassionate, grief-literate society that better supports adults who have lost a parent might mean recognizing the importance of chosen family, a concept that renders biological ties irrelevant to cultivating unconditional love and care. These deep friendships and relationships can support only children through their grief and give them other social roles to shift to. Online communities, like those on Grieving.com or in the comments of Chiu’s Substack posts, where users discuss similar experiences, can also help people process loss. They provide the grieving with platforms to anonymously share their emotions without fear of judgment, while helping them realize that they are not alone in their suffering. The compassion and validation provided in these virtual gathering spaces can challenge the isolation that many adult orphans feel. Whether it’s through chosen family or online forums, cultivating community can be a way for grievers to process the emotions around losing a parent, especially when they don’t have the support of siblings.

My grandma was never one to take death too seriously. “When I die, just flush my ashes down the toilet,” she used to joke. “I don’t need random people coming to stare at my dead body.” Her lightness around the topic has faded in recent years, especially as she entered her eighties. In one of our recent video chat sessions, she talked about approaching ninety and how scary that sounded. My mom and I tried to shut those thoughts down by reminding her of her physical and mental agility: “Remember how the doctor’s jaw dropped to the floor when she found out how old you are?”

Comments like this seem to work pretty well in restoring some of my grandma’s confidence. But after my mom and I finish the call, a brief silence hangs in the air. What occupies my mind in such moments is anticipatory grief. The disturbing truth—that my grandma may soon no longer be with us—feels more real and uneasy when she acknowledges it herself. Now that I’m an adult, I know I’ll feel the loss of my grandma much more deeply than when my grandpa passed away in my childhood. My grandma’s death will also make my mom an adult orphan and me her only kin. “It will leave an empty hole. You can live with it, but you can never recover from it,” my mom says. “We try our best to cherish the time with her, so when we look back on the memories, there [can] be some lovingness amidst all that grief.” 

I try my best to do that, though it never seems like enough. I’ve started hugging my grandma when I see her, something that isn’t the norm in my family or in many Chinese families. I call her randomly outside of our scheduled calls, even just to hear her voice for a few minutes. My grandma, on the other hand, has started discarding many of the health rituals she’d strictly followed for decades, and embracing treats she’d always loved but had been advised against enjoying due to her various health problems—coffee, cheesecake and KFC fried chicken. “I might as well enjoy them while I can!” she’d say with a smirk. I make a mental note to take her to some dessert shops the next time I visit. I know she has a point. ⁂

Vicky Qiao is a journalist and storyteller based in Toronto. Originally from Beijing, she moved to Canada as a teenager with her mom. She has worked as a producer for CBC, TVO and Global News, and is currently an editor for Home Network. In her spare time, Vicky loves dancing, reading and trying out new restaurants.