To anyone who hasn’t lost their parents, here’s some news – you never get over it'

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/10/parents-death-bereavement-eleni-kyriacou

This is an excert from an artical  written forthe Guardian.com  Entitled They're my parents. I miss them by: Eleni Kyriacou:Friday 9 December 2011 19.05 EST

On a bitterly cold April morning in 1998, my father died of a heart attack. The shock of his death was like a punch to the stomach. It was the first bereavement I'd experienced up close. For weeks, a cloak of confusion, rage and disbelief descended. By contrast, my mother's death, five years later, held no shock. It arrived clearly signposted, with a predictability that was agonising: diagnosis, scan, operation, false hope, radiotherapy, hospice, morphine, death.

At 39 I'd become an adult orphan, a member of the club that nobody wants to join but most will. One parent dying was devastating; but when my mother died it changed me for ever. I felt anchorless, as if I was no longer anyone's child. I may have looked the same but something inside me shifted.

A friend likens being an adult orphan to being the only tree left standing in a forest. I know what she means. For me it's as if my roots have been hacked away: my parents are the reason I'm here, what held me up. They had been the one stable point during my whole life, the constant. Yes, I'm an adult and can stand alone. But there are times I still need my mother and father, times I feel very alone.

Join Uptown and Zaiyah as they discuss this and other important topics on this weeks edition of Zaiyah's House.