At 38, I am realizing how much losing my parents affected me.
Now, I was not unaware - as soon as my mother had an aneurysm when I was nineteen, and I was suddenly parent-less, I was very clear that my life differed from those around me. Friends were either in college but went home for the summer, weren't in college but were still living at home, or, for the most part, still strongly connected to "home" as being where they grew up, and the house in which their parents lived.
For lots of reasons, certain of my friends were more "out there" like I was - divorced parents who both moved to new cities and left no bedrooms for them, people who left abusive childhood homes and had nowhere safe to go back to, etc. However, I knew no one else in my particular circumstance: parent-less.
