Nicole Kidman recently opened up about her journey grieving the death of her parents. Her comments about heartbreak and loss captures a particular grief experience that may sometimes get overlooked: losing a parent as an adult.
During an interview with GQ published Monday, the 57-year-old Oscar winner shared that some of her lived experiences as an adult, such as raising children and losing her parents, has made her feel more in touch with her emotions now more than ever.
“Mortality. Connection. Life coming and hitting you,” she said, citing reasons for why she’s been better about tapping into her emotions. “And loss of parents and raising children and marriage and all of the things that go into making you a fully sentient human. I’m in all of those places.”
“So life is, whew. It’s definitely a journey. And it hits you as you get older how— it’s a wake up at 3am crying and gasping kind of thing. If you’re in it and not numbing yourself to it,” she continued. “And I’m in it. Fully in it.”
Kidman has publicly opened up about grieving her mother and father before. Her mother, Janelle Ann Kidman, died in September, and her father, Dr. Antony Kidman, died in 2014.
The “Big Little Lies” star had arrived in Italy in September for the Venice Film Festival, but had to leave early — before she was awarded best actress for the film “Babygirl” — due to her mother’s sudden death, The Hollywood Reporter reported. She told the publication the following month that grieving her mother had been a “hard road,” and that she wished she was still there to celebrate her recent successes with her.
“I wish my mama was here,” she said at the time, adding, “Everything is great with work but I wish my mama was here.”
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Losing a parent at any age can be a traumatic, stressful and painful experience. And while parental death can significantly reshape a child’s life, losing a parent as an adult doesn’t necessarily make the grief process itself easier.
“You are always the child to your parent,” Debra Umberson, author of “Death of a Parent: Transition to a New Identity,” wrote in an American Psychological Association article published in October. “But also, for a lot of people, you become close friends, confidantes. They give you advice about your own children. They take care of you when you get sick. So there’s a lot to lose.”
A 2007 study published by the National Center of Biotechnology Information pointed out that there had previously been “surprisingly little research” on how parental loss affects adults psychologically and physically. But the study’s research found that the death of one parent, or both parents, had a number of negative mental and physical effects in adulthood — partly due to the “long-term linked lives across time” in relationships between parents and their adult children.
“If you are 60 years old and you’ve lost your parent, you’ve spent 60 years of your life with this person,” Umberson wrote in her article.
Adults often talk about the struggles of grieving their parents, and there are a lot of factors that make dealing with the loss of a parent in adulthood particularly difficult.
Some people who lose a parent before they become parents themselves — or had just begun their parenting journey — report feeling sadness that they won’t witness their loved one in a grandparent role. Others may be grieving after an estranged or a complicated relationship with their parent. Adults who became caregivers for their older parent may experience a wide range of emotions after their death.
Grief certainly isn’t a one-size-fit-all, and everyone’s grieving process doesn’t look the same.
Dr. M. Katherine Shear, director of the Center for Prolonged Grief at Columbia University in New York, previously told HuffPost that grief isn’t a “simple experience” and that people shouldn’t worry whether they’re “grieving in the right way or not.”
“The first thing is to be sure not to second-guess grief,” she said, adding that it’s also OK to put grief aside for periods of time.
“Try to commit to taking some time every day, even just five minutes … just some time every day to do something a little bit pleasant,” she said, later emphasizing that grief is an ongoing process.
“Death is permanent, and so grief is also permanent,” she said. “We don’t stop having some response to that loss — in other words, we still feel it.”
If you feel you need additional support in your grieving process, you may want to seek professional help. You can find information on grief therapists on therapy databases online.