Katharine Whitehorn Quotes

Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off.

All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist

When I lost my father, I thought I learned about grief and transition. However, nobody tells you what it's like to lose your mother. They don't tell you that you're going to feel like an orphan at whatever age you are as an adult.

Once you lose your parents, you get this numbness, this feeling of having to really be able to connect yourself with someone. I depended on my brothers for that connection, but to have that feeling of being taken care of... I lost it when my parents passed away.

If you lose a parent, it never goes away. As a kid, I dreamed about my father coming back for 15 or 20 years. I still do sometimes.

I lost my father was I 10 years old, and I always looked for a father. I missed my father very much.

It's true you never know the full depth of a parent's touch in your life until they're gone. Even if you cared for them in their old age, there's never a way to prepare yourself for the death of a parent.

It's hard losing a parent, especially dad because he was always behind me. It was his dream and my dream for me to become a footballer.

It's difficult in your life when both parents pass so quickly and you're not really that old when they move on. There is a big gap in your life. There's a hole. You learn to live with it but never forget it.

I don't remember much of my childhood. My father passed away when I was six, and sadly, I don't have the fuzziest, foggiest memory of him - what his voice was like, anything he ever said to me, nothing. My early years are a total blur.

Losing a parent is always a terrible thing for anybody. It's no more or no less for me.

To lose one parent is a tragedy, to lose both is utter carelessness.

When someone who's always been in your life is gone, it's a stunning adjustment of your own identity.

the death of any loved parent is an incalculable lasting blow. Because no one ever loves you again like that.

What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other.

My dad passed away...and suddenly I found myself at the top of the tree and looking at the sky instead of at my mom and dad.

When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.

The void Papa's death left in me became a kind of cavity, into which later experiences were to be laid.

After most deaths, I imagine, the awfulness lies in how everything’s changed….there’s a hole. It’s person-shaped and it follows you everywhere…. For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We’d been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life.

When you lose a child in an accident as I did, it's final - you're not caught in this longing for him, to search for him, knowing he's out there some place.

Losing my parents was probably the hardest and deepest blow from which I've had to recover.

When you lose your mother at 20 and then your father soon after, melancholia is part of your life.

I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shattering blow when she died. I was 16.

It's a very difficult thing losing a parent, but I think there's an added complication for me, because he was so well-loved and he had this very open charm that made people feel they had a personal relationship with him.

Obviously, at this age, I've lost people in my life. But with a parent, it's just different. I was very attached to my father and had this naive little-girl notion that he'd always be around. So I'm finding acceptance of my father's death is the hardest thing to accept.