Peaceable Man Files #63: My New Life as an Orphan

Random musings on my vagabond existence in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania and wherever else life takes me.

This morning I took my first walk around my mountain property as an orphan.

My 93-year-old mother passed away last Sunday. My father passed away in 2019 at the age of eighty-six. I am now officially parent-less in the world.

It was a beautiful spring morning, the sun shining, birds chirping, new growth sprouting everywhere, but I felt none of it. The outer world was alive again after the long, cold winter, but my inner world felt dead and colorless.

I walked a Technicolor world in black and white.

Losing my father six and a half years ago was brutal, but at least I still had my mother. Even over the past couple of years as she declined and couldn’t hold conversations any longer, I could sit with her, hold her hand, be with her, know that she was still there.

Now she is gone too. The two biggest trees in my landscape have been cut down.

How do people go on after losing both of their parents?

To be honest, I don’t know. It’s all new terrain for me, a terrain I don’t want to walk but that I must walk, because that’s all we can do—keep walking even when the way feels empty.

As I walk the path around the field with my dog Cassie, my mind is flooded by memories of my mother and father. Of good times and bad times, of joys and sorrows, all blended together in this concoction of life.

Everything that came before in my life had my parents in it. This property, too.

I bought the raw land twenty-five years ago with the plan to immediately build a cabin. My father always wanted a mountain house but couldn’t afford one. My hope, my dream, was that he and my mother could come up here while they were still healthy to enjoy it.

But then I got divorced and I had to put off building a cabin until I was able to recover financially. By the time I was able to finally build the house in 2019, my father was too frail to come up. I did manage to get my mother up here a couple of times, but that was it.

Those dreams are dead now, never to be fulfilled. I mourn, as well, the loss of dreams I had of my parents meeting my future grandchildren, of celebrating future birthdays and milestones, of being around if and when I ever publish these books I’m working on.

They’re all gone, never to be.

Cassie is unaffected by all my mournful ruminations. She is squarely in the present, searching for birds and rabbits.

“We see only the past,” teaches A Course in Miracles. That book, as well as my readings into eastern philosophies, were instrumental in teaching me about the power of the ego-mind to rob us of our peace by taking us the make-believe world of past, future, memories, attachments, strivings, grievances, and other such preoccupations that don’t exist except in the space of our head.

Here I am, all these years later, allowing myself to go into that netherworld.

But I have to be gentle on myself. I will come back to joy again, but for now, I must allow myself to remember, to grieve, to mourn, to adjust to my new life as an orphan.

Suffering is part and parcel of being human. There’s no escaping it as long as we are alive. There is only walking through it.

And so I walk on.