How Parentless Parents Got Started

Allison Gilbert began researching and writing Always Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost Both Parents soon after her father passed away from lung cancer. By that time, unfortunately, death was not a new experience for her. Five years earlier her mother had died from ovarian cancer.

Always Too Soon is 277 pages long – but it’s what Allison wrote in the first paragraph of the book’s Introduction that has received the most attention:

“My first parentless Thanksgiving came two months after my father died. My husband, eighteen-month-old son, and I went to my brother's to spend the weekend with his family. Despite the smile I wore, the celebration was doomed before it started. I was thirty-one, and both my parents were gone. I didn't feel old enough to be responsible for Thanksgiving. I was no longer somebody's child going home for the holidays. Overnight, I had become a parentless parent, feeling, as a young mother, solely responsible for my son's experience of Thanksgiving. I felt overwhelmed, and despite my husband and brother's support, utterly alone.”

Nobody could have expected that these two simple words would have such an impact.

At book signings and media appearances, and through emails to the Always Too Soon website, the one topic we all wanted to keep talking about is how to bring up children without the benefit and support of our own parents. And that’s how the first Parentless Parents chapter started: a group of strangers simply felt connected because of these two unifying threads.

If you want to join a Parentless Parents chapter, go to “Join a Chapter.” If you
don’t see a chapter where you live, click on "Start a Chapter."

We know what you are going through. You are not alone.