You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan and his wife, Becky Allender, talk about the painful journey of grieving the death of a parent.

This conversation was sparked by their own experiences of grief after Dan's mother passed away just a few weeks ago.

Dan and Becky reflect on the intersections between grief and honor, the beauty of close-trusted

others inviting us to remembrance and forgiveness, and the ways in which even this experience

can point us toward the goodness of God in the land of the living.

I'm thrilled to be able to have my wife join me. So Becky, thank you for stepping into a topic

that in one level, neither of us would ever wish to have to address. And that's the issue of grief

over the loss of a parent.

You're welcome.

It's something that has certainly affected our lives.

And it's good to reflect on.

Well, and it begins largely for me as a reality that several weeks ago, my mother died on March 21st at 847 in the morning.

And the fact that I have to practice, I have to practice saying that my mother is dead,

and I have to practice saying when she died, as those words and even the specific time of her death

is almost a kind of, I know it's true. We have known that her health has been decreasing over

a number of years, but there is a kind of unreality to losing a parent or any significant

grief that's related to the death of someone whom you love. And so to step into this, it's

still a pretty raw reality for me and less you, but the reality is you had a relationship with my mom, at times

tumultuous and times very deeply loving. So as we begin to talk about the reality that now,

both of us have lost both of our parents. And to enter into that is a club.

It may be a profane way of putting it,

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