I'm an orphan in my 40s

We are driving along a bendy, hillside road in north Wales. It is pitch dark and the headlights of the oncoming cars are exploding like fireworks in front of my tired seven-year-old eyes. I'm snuggled in these pre-seat-belt days between my mum and dad on the long bench seat in the front of our Ford Zephyr. She is singing me to sleep with a song called Lilac Trees. The last thing I notice before I drift off is a creepy, deserted castle caught in the headlights and seemingly right next to the roadside.

It sounds like a scene from a children's storybook - or the opening frames of a horror film - but I can picture it all so clearly. Or at least I think I can. I can even smell the inside of the car - the leather mixed with my father's pipe, the aromas of my teenage brother and sister in the back, and the clean, no-nonsense scent of my mother.

Yet a question mark always hovers over images you retain so vividly from the otherwise hazy early years of childhood. Are they an idealisation, approximation or straight fantasy? Have they been cobbled together from photographs in the family album and stories told subsequently by parents and older siblings about you as a child that have become part of your role in the family saga?

Until a few weeks ago, I had a very easy way to find out. I would ask my dad. Who better qualified to offer an authorised version of my childhood? But now he has died - five and a half years after my mother. And so I am, at 42, an orphan. I have lost my parents and lost too any handle on what really happened in my childhood. From now onwards it exists only in my head, with all the attendant drawbacks of a having such a singularly untrustworthy source.

Orphan may sound too strong a word. After all, I had the benefit of a mum and dad into ripe middle youth. They were there at my wedding; they held my son, their grandson; my dad even went to his first school plays. And they were both utterly available and mentally sound up until their last day. But being an orphan sums up how I feel.

"Eighty six?And a peaceful death? What are you complaining about?" is the unspoken chide from friends (usually with both parents intact) when informed of my loss. But great age does not override the trauma of losing your parents: my experience so far is that it is worse - far worse - than I imagined.

How so? Well, there's the obvious fact that I've moved up a place in the queue for the pearly gates. But once you've turned 40, the first signs of the body's mortality have become - sadly - fairly obvious. What is totally unexpected is finding myself in this strange, final stage of transition from childhood to adulthood. I thought I had completed the course - moved away, married, had children, found a job, acquired a mortgage and a pension.

Yet, however grown-up we are, part of us remains a child while our parents are still alive. The historian Antonia Fraser once remarked that as she approached 70 she still saw herself as a girl because her parents, Lord and Lady Longford, lived active lives until their mid-90s. Only now do I understand what she meant: I wish I had appreciated my own Indian summer of childhood more, because now unmitigated adulthood seems a bleak prospect.

Right now my strongest sense is of utter aloneness. Not aloneness before God and mortality, but aloneness with vast swathes of my life, particularly with those childhood memories. It's not just the images that have been grid-locking my mind at all hours of the day and night since my father's death. There are the practical questions that I never quite got round to asking. What, for instance, caused that little scar on my knee?

Some answers, I suspect, lie in our family house. Curious that almost 25 years after heading south from Liverpool with a smile of anticipation on my face, the place I longed to escape is still a part of who I am. Going back to live in the city is not an option, but there is real pain as those roots are now finally severed.

The house stands as a monument to something else that is now lost - the unconditional love of good parents. Even when I was well into adulthood, it was a place where I could go and act like a child and get away with it, a refuge from whatever I had done or said. The love of a parent for a child - however big they have grown - can never be matched by other adult relationships. Marriage is not unconditional. The challenge now is to go from being a receiver and a giver - as a parent to my children - to only giving.

Alone in my parents' house before the funeral, the last vestiges of the child in me hesitated before opening my father's briefcase. It was the one he always took to work (along with his brown trilby) and in which latterly he stored his papers. It was kept in their bedroom, in the wardrobe, the place you never peered into, especially just before Christmas. I took an adult deep breath and sifted through its contents, the bank books and documents that represent the last demarcation between child and parent, the final facts of life that he never quite felt ready to share with me.

And so the world goes on - but I now catch myself looking round dinner tables to clock who still has parents and who doesn't. I always seem to be in the minority. This is, presumably, one more side effect of our current affluence. My father's father died when he was 14; my mother's father when she was not much older. My parents were the first generation to live their adult lives with an ever-extending life expectancy. And so mine is the first generation to have come to expect - not just hope but expect - to have parents until late into our adult life. Part of that expectation has been to underestimate the pain and dislocation we feel when they do finally leave us as elderly orphans.

Now I am on another car journey. This time I am driving and my older brother is sitting next to me. It is late afternoon on the M1. Not a ruined castle in sight. We are on our way back from my father's funeral. Out of the blue he voices the fear that we three siblings might not stick together. That is his phrase. At first it seems such an absurd suggestion that I laugh. Having lost so much already why would we throw away more?

But slowly as he explains, I understand what he is getting at. Our parents were the cement that kept us together, even through the inevitable fall-outs. My brother could quote chapter and verse on estrangements, arguments and "I'm not going to be in a room with him/her ever again" declarations of war, but an oblique reference is enough.

What always brought about a ceasefire was a parental plea, or an 80th birthday party, with accompanying three-line whip. Someone else is going to have to play peacemaker now. Our parents are gone. We must remould our relationships with each other: but most importantly of all, we siblings, now fully fledged adults at last, must learn to carry on along the road without them.

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