The death of a parent

What it's like to keep living without the people who brought you into the world — and how grief companionship can offer grounding.

I had the privilege of accompanying Nadja, who is grieving both of her parents — her mother passed away on October 9, 2010, and her father on February 1, 2024.

In this very personal and honest interview, she talks about why she chose to work with me, what our work together gave her, and how she experienced that journey.

I feel deeply honored to have been with her during this intense time — and I'm grateful that she's sharing her thoughts with us, to make visible what grief companionship can mean. Maybe you'll find yourself in her words too.

Why did you seek support?

About six months after my father's death, I sought support because I often felt internally paralyzed. I was going to work and trying to take care of my family, but several times a week, for hours at a time, I was completely immobilized — lying lethargically on the couch, tears coming again and again, unable to do anything. My husband listened and supported me as best he could, and my friends made time for me whenever they could, with enormous understanding and open ears. But in daily life I was still being overwhelmed by my feelings. A friend then suggested I look into grief companionship.

I also felt that I wasn't able to give my older son, who was 9 at the time, the support and stability in his grief over his grandparents that I wanted to. That was another important reason for me to seek guidance.

How did the grief companionship help you?

ust taking the step of finding a grief companion brought relief. I think it had to do with the sense of self-empowerment that came with it: I felt less at the mercy of my feelings and more like I had a promising path ahead of me for getting a handle on them.

Our meetings set a great deal in motion inside me. After the first one, I felt as if everything in me that had been stuck, everything that had settled and hardened like sediment building up over time, began to flow and move again. I had that feeling after every conversation with you. Especially after the first meeting I had this image in my mind (I think I wrote to you about it at the time): I arrived at the grief companionship carrying a backpack that felt very heavy to me. And there I could set the backpack down, sort through its contents a little with your help, so that afterward I could walk a little further with more strength, and the heavy load didn't feel quite as uncomfortable anymore — even though it was of course still there.

In the companionship I could talk about things that were weighing on me, and I was given concrete strategies for how to deal with them. I could also work out with you what I could do in daily life to stop feeling so at the mercy of everything.

I also really appreciated that you took my specific situation fully into account: as a mother of two relatively young children, I'm quite busy in daily life. Certain things are just not realistic to implement given limited time. You always showed me possibilities that were actually achievable, so I could genuinely use those impulses.

For my son, you had concrete suggestions for how we could navigate his grief together. Those suggestions helped enormously — they brought him relief, and that brought me relief too.

What was your situation when you found your way to me? What challenges were you facing, and what was weighing on you most?

As I said, about six months after my father's death I decided to look for a grief companion. At that point I was 45, married, with sons aged 9 and 6. I had a 35-hour-a-week job and was heavily involved in everyday life with work and family.

My husband and my friends were there for me and had open ears — but one difficulty was that I didn't even really know what to tell them. There was just this enormous grief, this dark cloud that had slowed me down and pressed me under. My father had pancreatic cancer, and the diagnosis came very suddenly — his condition deteriorated incredibly fast after it. My brother and I were primarily taking care of him. The whole thing was enormously challenging, both emotionally and logistically, and it felt like a terrifying freefall. Three months after the diagnosis, my father died. After his death I kept coming back to that final time — it went around and around in my head. Added to that was the longing for my father, and still for my mother too. We were very close, and the fact that these dear people are no longer here is and was terrible for me.

Since my father-in-law also died in spring 2024, the theme of impermanence played a big internal role for me, and the realization that life is incredibly precious was thrust in my face. How do you live a meaningful life? How do you live in a way that you can let go with peace at the end? That question stays with me powerfully. Of course it had always been there, but the deaths of my parents brought it to the foreground — made it more urgent, created more pressure.

I can enumerate those individual themes now, but before the grief companionship I couldn't have differentiated them this way. It was all just one single tangled mass in me, swelling and growing heavier, and I couldn't unravel it alone.

I also wanted to support my children, and I felt I wasn't able to do that enough. I kept arriving at the point where I felt helpless and didn't know how to go on.

All of that together pressed me down and left me feeling effectively unable to act. I was often angry too, and found myself too impatient with my children or my husband — because I wasn't at peace with myself and was trying to push the grief down.

What made you decide to reach out? Was there a particular moment or feeling that moved you?

I'd thought about finding a grief companion or a grief group several times before. But I held back, because what had happened to me was just the natural order of things. For me personally it was terrible and sad, but objectively speaking it was completely ordinary. There are so many tragic stories — compared to them, what happened to me wasn't "bad enough," I thought.

Then at a meeting with a friend, she asked me again whether I might want to look into grief companionship. In her life too, several close and beloved people had died, and she believes that every grieving person deserves grief companionship, because death is so existential and shattering for those who are left behind that you should have a professional by your side.

That conversation ultimately led me to start looking. It wasn't easy to find someone. It has so much to do with trust. Since I was listening to a lot of grief-related podcasts at the time, I came across an interview with you in one of them. I immediately felt a connection — your way of being, the things you said, they touched me deeply. I looked up where you offer companionship and was delighted to find that you live in Berlin. I took a breath and wrote to you right away.

It also meant something to me that you had a formative experience with grief as a child. That was important to me in relation to my own child. It told me that you can truly feel and understand how a child experiences something like this. And I had a very strong sense that you don't judge — that you hold space for any form of grief, so that my story, even though it "only" follows the natural order of things, is still something you can hold.

How were the first sessions? What did you learn about yourself or your grief? Were there specific approaches that helped you integrate your grief?

Before the first meeting I was quite nervous — and at the same time I had no doubt that I was in the right place with you. The nervousness came (and still comes, to some extent, before our conversations) because working with grief is uncomfortable. You step outside your comfort zone. Letting feelings arise, crying, facing the grief — I don't always find that easy. So there was a little nervousness about going into the deep end.

The feeling of trust that I already had before our first conversation grew very quickly in the session itself. Through your words, you gave me a wonderful confirmation that I was safe with you and that we would be talking as true equals. I immediately felt enormously at ease. You gave me the sense that we were now going to tackle this painful thing — the grief — together. It felt like you were taking my hand and walking me through it. That was enormously relieving and took so much pressure off.

I found it incredibly helpful that you gave me concrete methods — the EFT tapping technique, writing — that I could use both when grief came over me suddenly and as a daily practice to integrate my different feelings. Through this I learned and deeply internalized that I am capable of action and not at the mercy of everything.

And a conversation in which we uncovered a key moment from my childhood was also very, very illuminating. It set a lot in motion in me and ultimately strengthened me.

How has your relationship with grief developed? What helped you find new perspectives or experience it differently?

Through our conversations I became more aware again that the positive and the difficult almost always coexist. I was able to shift my focus back toward the positive aspects, toward gratitude, and I no longer felt so dominated by the negative. My spirituality has also deepened and strengthened me, because it helps me feel more connected to my parents.

My grief has become somehow more familiar to me. Since the start of the companionship it hasn't completely stopped me in my tracks anymore. The "unraveling" helped me enormously to stop feeling helpless and at the mercy of it all.

Writing has become an absolute gift for me. I notice how good it does me and how much more I want to explore there.

The time ahead could be difficult — the anniversary of my father's diagnosis and that terrible period of illness is approaching, along with his birthday and the holidays. The light, the air, the November atmosphere — everything triggers me somehow and often makes me melancholy. But I know I can reach out to you at any time and make an appointment, and that gives me a strong inner grounding.

What has also deepened is the urgent feeling of wanting to live my life meaningfully and not waste it — so that at the end I have no regrets. Right now I'm experiencing that pressure as almost too strong. But then again, only that pressure actually leads you to face things and truly take action.

How has the grief companionship affected your family?

For us as a family it was very good that I did the grief companionship. I've been more balanced since, more in my center. We talk a lot about my parents. We remember together. The evening ritual I began with my son through the companionship — he writes a short letter to grandma and grandpa every evening, telling them about his day — my younger son now wants to do too. He draws a picture every evening. My husband and I talk more openly. I tell him about my thoughts and what's on my mind.

The family atmosphere overall is more settled. We're all still sad at times, but we try to channel the grief through rituals and activities: visiting the cemetery together, painting stones for the grave, finding beautiful pinecones or shells for it.

I hope my children are taking in and internalizing that in a crisis you don't have to feel like a leaf in the wind — that you can try to actively steer through it, and that you can ask for help. Letting feelings be there is hopefully something that feels natural to them.

My work environment has also benefited from the grief companionship. Since I started, I'm noticeably steadier. Stressful situations don't throw me off as quickly. I'm more stable overall.

What has grief companionship brought you — even beyond the most intense phase of grief?

The positive experience of self-empowerment I gained through the grief companionship will certainly help me generally in life. But I'm perhaps still too close to it to answer this question well right now.

Writing has become a resource, as I mentioned.

The companionship helped me hold the ambivalence of life. I had wonderful parents — I'm reminded of that again and again in conversations with friends. For a while I thought that was just how it is. I didn't know anything different. Over time I realized that many people don't have a good relationship with their parents. I'm incredibly grateful to have had the parents I had (and in some sense still have), and I notice the deep sense of trust and strength they gave me. At the same time I miss them endlessly and it hurts so much not to have them here, on this side, with me anymore. Life has given me so much — and the goodbye hurts all the more for it, and the silence and the gap it leaves is all the larger. Holding that is hard, and the grief companionship helped me with that.

What would you say to people who have experienced a significant loss and are considering grief companionship?

I can only encourage it.

After my mother's death, my father — who was completely devastated — eventually, after much persuasion, found a psychologist to support him. Those meetings gave him grounding and supported him in a way that my brother, I, or his friends simply couldn't.

I think the ideal in a situation of grief is to have multiple sources of support: family where you feel held, friends who try to catch you, a solid measure of self-care — and ideally someone who brings professional expertise and can offer a kind of support that family and friends simply can't.

I should have started grief companionship much earlier, after my mother's death. I believe it would have helped through so many painful moments and phases.

Were there moments or aspects of our work together that were especially valuable or unique?

This absolute trust that was there for me immediately, your enormous warmth, your incredibly loving way of being with people — I find that indescribable. You don't find that often in people. It creates a tremendous sense of wellbeing. Especially in a grief situation, where you're very vulnerable and exposing your innermost self, those qualities help you open up and show yourself.

You always let me know that I could reach out to you, that I could write to you, that I could tell you when something heavy was on my heart. That helped me enormously too, because it took away my worry about being a burden.

The atmosphere in our conversations was simply wonderful. I experienced the sessions as very intense, I received many impulses that kept me thinking long after we spoke. I was definitely able to accept my grief, to work with it, to unravel it. The atmosphere and the space couldn't have been better.

Do you recognize any of these feelings? Who are you grieving for? Have you had experience with grief companionship — and what helped you? If not: what is still holding you back from taking that space for yourself?

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