Becoming a Parentless Adult: A Hidden Rite of Passage

This summer, with the death of my second parent (my mom in 2021 and my dad this past May), I entered a stage of life I had never heard anyone talk about: becoming a parentless adult.

It’s a strange and sacred threshold.

Losing my parents was an enormous loss—not only because of who they were to me, but because of the monumental impact they had on their communities. And yet, their passing has not only brought grief. It has also shifted my consciousness in ways I never anticipated.

For the first time, there is no buffer between me and the universe. No parent in the background to hold unconditional love for me, to be the fallback, the quiet safety net.

I’ve always been very independent—leaving home at 15 to go to college, traveling bohemian-style, moving to the United States at 18. I made all of my major life choices without waiting for anyone’s permission.

But beneath all that, I knew there was someone I could turn to—someone who would meet me with the unwavering acceptance of a parent.

Now, that person has to be me.

I am the matriarch now. The end of the family line. The elder-in-training. I can no longer metaphorically sit at the kids’ table.

I am joining the cohort of people directly responsible for caring for others and providing leadership in this world—the ones who don’t wait for others to tell them who to be or what to do.

This is the real transformation: stepping into radical self-responsibility. Not in the sense of isolation, but of deep empowerment. I’m no longer delegating my sense of safety, purpose, or belonging—not to a parent, not to a partner, not to a religion. I get to create it.

That is not to diminish the role of my beloved community. I am incredibly blessed with an amazing spouse, lifelong friends, family members, mentors, and dear acquaintances who would “have my back” in a heartbeat. I credit these relationships with giving me the strength and security to move through the loss of my parents without feeling destabilized.

And yet, even with all this love around me, something deeper has shifted. It is not the same as having parents alive. A new sense of maturity, responsibility, and capability is taking root.

This realization feels empowering—even inspiring.

My father often said that the point of having children is to give them a chance at deeper evolution than you had. That wisdom feels like a torch being passed.

My task is not to replicate my parents’ lives, but to go further—to dissolve the inner barriers they couldn’t, to free myself from inherited patterns that no longer serve, and to live with more love, clarity, and courage.

Becoming a parentless adult feels like an initiation. It’s an embodied shift, asking me to lead myself at a level I had not yet imagined.

I want to acknowledge that not everyone has, or has had, parents who fulfilled this role of psychological pillars of safety. For many, parents may have been absent, unsafe, or unable to provide unconditional support. In that sense, the transition I’m describing is a profound privilege. Some had to take that leap into radical self-leadership much earlier.

And yet, whether or not we received it in childhood, there comes a moment in adulthood when we are called to become that source of unconditional care and leadership for ourselves.

And perhaps that is the ultimate gift my parents gave me: bringing me to a place where I can be okay without them, and continue the adventure of human evolution in my own way.