The loss of a parent is a multifaceted, complicated, emotional experience, filled with myriad feelings and thoughts that would take endless volumes of text just to begin filtering through it all. It can be difficult to allow yourself to think about any of it in depth as the pain can be indescribable.

Recently, my mind has been on one particular aspect, and I’d like to unreservedly share it today.

My siblings and I lost our mum two, nearly three, years ago. Thoughts of questions I never got around to asking her have swirled around in my head since, many of them revolving around her amazing cooking, and some around her talents and preferences: Can you show me how to make your delicious meatloaf? How do you get your roast chicken so perfect? Can you teach me how to knit? If you could choose just one genre of music to listen to for the rest of your life, what would it be? Do you really believe that (the TV show) Supernatural is a reality show?

But there’s one question that’s come to the fore lately and has taken hold: who were you before us?

When losing a parent, particularly way before what we would consider to be ‘their time’, the loss involves so much more than just the person. There’s a future that they will not have or see, and nor will we; they won’t see their kids continue to grow or their grandkids become proper little people. That’s something we tend to think about when a parent’s life comes to an end, but because we often take our parents and their existence for granted, we may realise we never asked them enough questions about themselves and their past. As adults grow into old age, we look to them for wisdom from their experiences and anecdotes from times gone by. But what about when a parent passes before reaching that old age?

I knew a few things about my mum, Julie, and her life before she settled down, such as where she grew up, how she ended up in Jersey in the Channel Islands (where my siblings and I were all born) and why she became a ‘model housewife’, a far cry from the motorbike-riding, rock-music-loving rebel she had once been. I had asked her to teach me how to make her most fabulous apple pie, and though I haven’t made it in years, I still have the recipe somewhere. I asked her why the heck she married our dad (she did tell me) and why she wanted so many kids (six in total). I’m not even entirely sure she answered all the questions truthfully – she often kept her cards close to her chest – and so I’m perhaps left with more questions than I thought.

I feel I am finally at an age where I would feel comfortable talking to my mum as a fellow adult, an adult who now fully understands that humans are more complicated and colourful than our younger, undeveloped brains would allow us to believe or process. To that end, I wish I could have learned more about her from her, asked her many more questions, ask about her wins and losses, her achievements and disappointments, her view on how the world has considerably changed since the year of her birth (1957) and just to understand the events that shaped her.

In comparison, in 2016, we also lost our sister Klaire. She was just a few months shy of her 23rd birthday, and she really had so much going for her at that point, so it got me thinking about how she would never have an after persona. Whether or not she would ever have had children is something we will never know, but even so, wondering who she would have been as an older person is something I think about often.

This is a subject I could write much more about, and perhaps I will one day, but as someone who never really talks much about grief and what it looks like for me, I feel this has been a good, therapeutic start, and if you made it this far, I sincerely thank you for giving me, and my amazing mum, your precious time. I hope it may have got you thinking about your own parents and what you might want to know from them if/when you’re ever ready to ask the questions. Parent-child relationships can be very complicated, but if you’re in the lucky position to have a good relationship with either or both, I would encourage you to get to know them and ask the hard questions, if they’re willing, because to know them is to understand them better, and perhaps ourselves, too.