My father died when I was seven.
There were five of us at home: my mom, my dad, my two sisters, teenagers about ten years older than me, and me. Dad worked the 3 to 11 shift at Northern Telecom. One night in October, on his way home, he stopped at the dépanneur to pick up milk. A drunk driver hit him.
There's more trauma around that night. I'm leaving it out.
What I do want to talk about is what happened after, and what the research says about kids like the one I was. Therapy at eight. Family therapy at nine. A social worker at fourteen. Gone at eighteen. Somewhere in there I picked up a habit I still have in my mid-fifties: I leave before I can be left.
So, how does losing a parent as a child affect you as an adult? The short answer: it raises the risk of mental health trouble later on, depression included, and the effect can last decades. The biggest study I found followed 7.3 million people across three countries. It also showed that most bereaved kids don't end up in crisis. Risk isn't destiny. Support helps.
What the big registry study found
The Nordic countries keep national registers of births, deaths and hospital care, which means researchers can follow whole populations for decades. A team led by Mai-Britt Guldin used registers from Denmark, Sweden and Finland, covering 1968 to 2008, and published the results in JAMA Psychiatry in 2015.
Out of 7.3 million people, about 189,000 had a parent die before they turned 18. The researchers compared them with children who hadn't lost a parent.
What they found, in plain words:
- Kids who lost a parent had roughly double the risk of dying by suicide later on.
- The higher risk was still there at least 25 years after the death.
- The risk was higher when the parent died by suicide, but it was raised for other causes of death too.
- Kids who lost a parent very young, before age 6, had among the highest risk.
Now the part that matters just as much. In absolute numbers, over 25 years, it worked out to about 4 in 1,000 bereaved boys and 2 in 1,000 bereaved girls. So the risk is real, and most of those kids still came through. That's not a small detail. If you lost a parent young, these numbers are a reason to take your own mental health seriously, not a prediction.
A separate Swedish study of more than 860,000 people, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry in 2016, looked at depression in young adults. Losing a parent to illness or other natural causes came with a small increase in risk. Losing a parent to suicide, an accident or homicide came with a bigger one. And kids who lost a parent at preschool age had higher risk than kids who lost one as teenagers.
So age matters. Seven is not preschool, but it's not fifteen either.
I'm writing this as someone who attempted suicide in 1998 and is still here. If any of this is hitting a sore spot, the help numbers are at the bottom, and I mean it.
Grief at seven doesn't look like grief at forty
A seven-year-old doesn't have the words. You can't say "I'm grieving." You just act different. Maybe angry. Maybe too quiet. Maybe weird in ways the adults can't explain.
I was put into therapy at eight. I don't know exactly why, beyond the obvious. What I can tell you is that a kid who's been through that doesn't get to finish grieving at eight. It comes back at every age, and each time you understand a bit more of what you lost.
I'll also say this. In my case, the grief landed on top of a brain nobody had figured out yet. I wasn't diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) until I was 50. So for decades I couldn't tell which parts of me were loss, which were wiring, and which were just me being me. I still can't, fully. I've stopped trying to sort every piece.
Is fear of abandonment tied to losing a parent?
For me, I think so. I can't prove the line. But I feel it.
If the most important person in a kid's world can be there and then not be there, the lesson goes in deep: people vanish. You don't get a vote. The way I learned to handle that, without ever deciding to, was to make sure I'm the one who goes first. Friendships, jobs, cities, countries. I've written about how that plays out in why I leave before I can be left.
Loss in childhood is one of the usual roots people point to for fear of abandonment, along with insecure attachment and repeated rejection. I went through those in where fear of abandonment comes from. I don't think one death explains me. But I'd be lying if I said it had nothing to do with it.
What helps, from where I sit
I'm not a grief counsellor. This is the stuff I'd tell someone who lost a parent young and is now a grown adult wondering why some things hit so hard.
Say it to someone who's trained to hear it. Not as the opening line of your life story you've told fifty times, but as the actual thing. That took me decades.
Watch for the exit reflex. When someone gets close and you suddenly have a list of reasons to go, ask where the list came from.
Don't let the statistics scare you off. They're about risk across millions of people. You're one person, and getting help changes your odds.
And if you're in Québec and don't know where to start, call Info-Social 811, option 2. It's free, 24/7, and they can point you toward grief support or other help near you.