Why Life Feels Different After a Parent Has Died

When a parent dies, it can lead to a feeling of being untethered

When we’re young, parents are more than important people in our lives. They are often our nervous system’s first reference point for safety - the place our body learns what protection feels like.

To a child’s brain, a parent is less “a person” and more part of the structure of the world itself. A bit like gravity. You don’t anticipate gravity disappearing. It is simply assumed - an organising force around which life quietly arranges itself.

When a parent dies, that structure shifts.

Something that once felt immovable is no longer there and the body notices.

Our brains are predictive by design. They are constantly scanning, updating, and adjusting to help us anticipate what is safe and what is not. When a foundational assumption is broken, the system adapts. This isn’t weakness or pathology. It’s the nervous system responding to new information.

For many people, the death of a parent is the moment the body learns - not abstractly, but viscerally - that the unthinkable is possible.

After this kind of loss, I often hear:

“I’m anxious all the time.”

“I’m waiting for the next bad thing to happen.”

“I keep thinking I should have prevented it.”

These responses aren’t irrational. They reflect a system that has moved into prevention mode - trying to ensure that something so devastating never happens again.

What can remain is a heightened awareness of fragility. A reduced ability to lean on the comfort of “it probably won’t happen.” A sharper sense of how little control we truly have. Without space to process this, life can begin to feel organised around vigilance rather than presence.

The added layer of losing a parent in your twenties or thirties

The death of a parent is profound at any age. But in early adulthood, it can feel particularly disorienting.

The twenties and thirties are typically organised around expansion - building careers, forming long-term relationships, imagining futures. There is often an unspoken expectation that the people who anchored our early world will remain somewhere in the background as this expansion unfolds.

When that assumption is broken earlier than expected, many people describe feeling untethered.

If the relationship was close, the loss can leave a gap where reassurance, guidance or a sense of being “held in mind” once lived.

If the relationship was complicated, the loss can close the door on the possibility that something might one day have been different. The imagined future - where repair, clarity or softening could have happened - disappears too.

It can also create a subtle sense of being out of step with peers. You may be navigating milestones - promotions, partnerships, parenthood - while carrying an awareness of life’s fragility that others haven’t yet had to integrate.

That mismatch can be quietly lonely.

Learning to live with what you now know

Grief doesn’t ask us to return to who we were before. The nervous system cannot simply forget what it has learned.

The task is not to undo this knowledge, but to integrate it - to recognise that while devastating loss is possible, it is not constantly imminent.

Over time, many people find that the same experience that exposed life’s fragility can also deepen presence and clarity about what matters. Not because the loss was “worth it”, but because living with impermanence can sharpen attention to what is here now.

If the death of a parent has altered how safe the world feels, that makes sense. Your system adapted to something enormous.

With the right support, it is possible to understand those adaptations and gradually build a life that is shaped by more than vigilance or fear.

About Laurie

Laurie Hole is a qualified counsellor and psychotherapist specialising in grief, loss, and change. With an MA in Counselling & Psychotherapy and certification as a bereavement counsellor, Laurie provides compassionate support to adults across the UK through online sessions. You can learn more about Laurie here.