Grieving a parent while parenting is its own kind of hard—here’s expert advice for getting through it

My dad died last summer. Even eight months later, it’s still surreal to type that. He’d been diagnosed with cancer just seven weeks earlier. Looking back, I think I knew deep down pretty early on that there was no fight to be had—that the descent toward the end was already in motion with little to do besides brace for impact. I spent the last week of his life at his bedside in Florida while my teenagers were home in Vermont, and I felt fortunate that I could simply be present for my dad while my kids had the support of their dad and stepdad at home. Coming back and dealing with the waves of grief has been—and still is—layered and ever-changing. Our relationship was complicated. But the truth I always knew was that he was proud of me and loved me the best he knew how. And somehow, that’s both enough and not enough at the same time. I seem to have a lot of friends who’ve lost their dads . We joke about being in the Dead Dads Club, which is somehow oddly comforting. And once I pulled up behind a car with a bumper sticker that said “Don’t honk at me—my dad is dead” and I laugh-cried all the way home. Grief is like that: absurd and gutting in the same breath. When I set out to research this piece, I’ll be honest—I wanted these answers for myself as much as for anyone reading. So I reached out to Toni Filipone, a certified grief educator, international grief expert, and founder of MasterGrief , a global platform that has supported thousands of people through loss in over 80 countri…