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If you only see two dead bodies in your life, then make sure they are your parents.

The death of a mother or father cannot be grasped from a distance. The phone call, the sealed coffin – it’s not enough to comprehend that kind of loss – that twice-in-a-lifetime loss.

Inevitable it may be, but the death of a parent has an unimaginable quality to it. You need to see for yourself that they are truly gone, to understand that the ones who brought you into this world have gone from this world. So go look at the body. That is not the end of losing your father or mother. But that is where it begins.

Even as the numbing bureaucracy of death clamours for your attention – the funeral arrangements, deciding what to do with the leftovers of a lifetime, the surreal task of choosing a coffin-would Dad like the simple pine number, or the Napoleon job with the brass handles? – you have to force yourself to go and see.

To the hospital. To the undertaker’s back room. Or – if they died at home, as my mother did – then to the master bedroom of the house where you grew up.

It helps. More than this, it is necessary. Yet viewing the dead body of a parent is a curiously flat experience. You feel it should be charged with emotion. There should be hot tears, and some final embrace, and Katherine Jenkins singing, ‘Time to Say Goodbye’.

But the emotion comes earlier – in the cancer ward, in the hospital café, sitting by the death bed drinking endless cups of bad tea – and it comes later – at the funeral, or when you go through dusty cupboards, and your dead dad’s clothes, or your mother’s heartbreaking jewellery, or their photograph albums, and it takes you many strange hours to realise the obvious.

Everything must go.

Those are the moments for the spikes of emotion. But when you summon up the nerve to gaze upon your dead parent-as you have to, as you must – you hardly recognise them. You even feel a bit cheated. Mum? Dad? Where are you?

And it is not because the undertaker has weaved his crafty embalming magic, or that a mouth is set in a line that you never saw in life. It is simply because the spark has flown. The thing that made that woman your mother, or made that man your father, has gone forever. And you don’t know if they have gone to a better place, or into black oblivion.

But that is not he. And that is not she.

You must look at the face of your dead parent not because it gives you a chance to say some last farewell but because until you do you will never even begin to understand that they are dead, and that you are alone in this world as you have never been alone before.

And even then it is hard. Even then it is next to impossible. Last month my mother had been gone for ten years. Ten years since the cancer overwhelmed her. Ten years since I returned to my home from her home to search for a hospice, leaving her in the care of an elderly friend, an ex-nurse – lovely Nelly, now gone herself-and got the call in the middle of the night to say come as fast you can. And it still wasn’t fast enough. Ten years dead – and yet, here’s the funny thing: I recently tried to call her.

I actually reached for the phone to relate some news that I knew would make her smile, and then I stopped myself, thinking – mental or what?

I got there not long after she died, and kissed her face, and saw an expression on that face that I had never seen when she lived, and yet it is still hard to believe.

Yet here is what you learn. There are two ways for your parents to die – quickly and slowly.

They go quick. They go slow.

But they go.

My dad was quick. My mum was slow.

My dad had lung cancer for a year and – being the hardest bastard in the universe – told nobody about it. His lungs were being eaten away and we never knew. Then one day he collapsed, was rushed to hospital and three weeks later we buried him.

A decade and a bit later, my mum had the same kind of cancer for the same length of time, but I was by her side and holding her hand when some busy NHS doctor told her there was no more they could do. And then she talked about it, and she weighed her chances of survival, and she confronted terminal illness with the combination of humour and grit that was peculiar to her generation of war brides. It was a very different experience to watching my dad go. But then she died too.

And I thought that the world should stop. Let me catch my breath. Acknowledge the passing of this woman – five feet nothing of bravery and jokes, even when the doctors were solemnly shaking their heads, and slyly looking at their fucking watches. It is only now I see the obvious.

Losing your parents is the most natural thing in the world.

And of course there are far worse things in this life than watching a parent die. Some people have to bury a child. Many people bury a spouse. Losing a parent is surely just another season, one more turn in the cycle of life.

Yet the world seems to change. First one goes, then the other.

‘You’re an orphan now,’ more than one person told me when my parents were both gone, and I thought that was a tad dramatic. I don’t see how a grown man can be an orphan.

It is completely natural to lose your parents. We all have our time. And then it’s up.

Then why does something so natural feel so completely and brutally unnatural?

You never know when they are going to go. Forget all that three-score-years-and-ten bullshit. I have a friend who lost his father before he was born. I have other friends who lost parents in childhood. I even have a friend who, when she was a girl, lost both of her parents in the same car crash – an incredibly common experience, as it turns out, because husbands and wives – fathers and mothers – regularly share a car.

Yet I have other friends well into middle age who still have both their parents living. And I have noted that the longer your parents live, the tougher it becomes to let go of them. You would think it would be the other way round – that spending almost half a century with your parents would make you more prepared to let go. But it doesn’t work that way.

And whenever they die – if your father goes when you are still in your mother’s womb, or if your mother goes when you see a middle-aged man you don’t recognise staring back at you from the shaving mirror – the world changes. There is nothing like the death of a parent to help you see the big picture, to truly get it, for the very first time. How could you have missed something so obvious?

Golden lads and girls all must. As chimney sweepers, come to dust.

When you bury your parents, you pull down the barrier between yourself and mortality.

When the first parent goes, the Earth shifts. When the second one goes, the Earth falls apart. When my father died in 1987, my mother left his suits untouched. She slept on her side of the bed. She stayed in the same house – for twelve years and one day – until her own death.

But when the surviving parent goes, the last link to your youth goes with her. Those strange hours spent wandering an empty house, opening drawers, peering into a vanished life, working out what to keep – what is priceless – and what to leave out for the bin men. It is the photo albums that do you in. Not because of all those familiar faces but because of all the faces that you do not know, as the memories of a lifetime dissolve like teardrops in the rain.

You don’t really know your parents until you watch them die. My father was the toughest man I ever knew, and then I saw him in that cancer ward, shot full of morphine, and he was afraid. I was shocked. I had never seen him afraid before, that scarred old soldier. I didn’t think he was capable of fear. That’s how little I knew him.

And my mum was a typical post-war housewife, as placidly faithful as a woman in a Tammy Wynette song.

Everyone thought she would just wither away with her husband gone, this man she had been with since she was sixteen and he was seventeen. And she didn’t.

She discovered some inner steel. She realised she had an army of friends. She even learned that loneliness had its compensations. She could play her country and western records very loudly, without my dad shaking his Daily Express with irritation.

When your parents are around – giving or denying approval to boy and man, diminishing you with just one look or a few sharp words when you break a window, or drop out of school, or get divorced – there are powerful forces preventing you from reaching true maturity. You are still some kind of child until both of your parents are dead. You don’t know them until they are dying and you don’t know yourself.

For most of us, losing a parent is our first real contact with death. Until then, death is an impossibly distant prospect, and we kid ourselves that it can be kept at bay forever if we eat up our greens.

We live in a death-free culture. If you make it out of the womb you are likely to survive childhood. There are no world wars. Your fussy modern car scolds you if you fail to wear your seat belt.

You think you have time to burn until your parents are dying. Then for the first time in your life, your own death is undeniable.

When your parents are alive, you believe you will live forever. From the moment they die, you start counting the years that you have left.

The classic text on bereavement, On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, cites the five stages all men must stop at on their path to death.

First stage – denial and isolation.

Second stage – anger.

Third stage – bargaining.

Fourth stage – depression.

Fifth stage – acceptance.

What is true of the dying is true of the ones left behind. You get over it. You do. With time, scar tissue covers the deepest wounds. You become grateful that this man was your father, that this woman was your mother. You learn to feel blessed for what you had, rather than rail at what has been lost.

Yet you never really get used to it. In an unguarded moment – always some happy moment, when I have some small good news to relate – I am capable of reaching for the phone to call a woman who died in the last century.

Maybe she is watching down. Or maybe not. When I kissed the cheek of my dead mother – already cold, already departed, already truly not her – I did not know if she had gone to heaven, or simply gone. There were no clues.

Only when your parents die do you realise that the clock is running like the meter of a bent mini-cab driver – and it’s running for you. And whatever comes after this short sweet life, be it heavenly hosts or a dreamless void or some great eternal kip, it will not be long until you find out for yourself.