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When your parents die, most grief advice assumes your relationship was simple and your loss was clean. Real life is messier than that.

I lost my mother to lung cancer in 2008. She was diagnosed four days before my wedding and died four days before my first anniversary. That was a first year that sure proved our marriage could last.

I lost my father suddenly in 2019 after six months of barely speaking and 40 years of barely relating.

Two very different relationships, two very different losses, but the same discovery: everything people tell you about grief is either wrong or incomplete.

After years of figuring it out the hard way, I founded Dead Parents Press and started this newsletter. This isn't another grief resource full of stages and healing journeys. It's the weekly gathering place for adults who've lost their parents and are tired of being told how they should feel about it.

Here, we dig into the stuff nobody talks about. The weird inheritance that isn't money but anxiety, relationship patterns, and ways of thinking you didn't know you'd absorbed. The friends who disappear when death makes them uncomfortable, and the surprising heroes who show up instead. The ongoing conversations you have with dead people in your head that everyone pretends don't happen. The empty chairs at holiday dinners that nobody mentions but everyone sees.

We share resources that actually help instead of platitudes that don't. We tell the truth about how grief changes you rather than how to get over it. We acknowledge that losing your parents as an adult kicks your ass, and we figure out together how to start kicking back.

If you're here, you've probably discovered that there's no graduation from the Dead Parents Club. Membership is permanent, but the clubhouse doesn't have to feel empty. Every week, we gather to discuss the things no one else wants to talk about, to create the resources we wish we'd had, and to navigate this reality with honesty instead of false comfort.

This is where adult orphans come to feel less alone. Where complicated grief gets honest conversation. Where we build community around shared experience rather than shared solutions, because sometimes the most helpful thing isn't advice but recognition that you're not the only one going through it.

Welcome to the clubhouse. The membership dues are terrible, but the understanding is unmatched.