The death of a parent takes us into alien territory, a cold, silvery place we never could have imagined and a pain we never quite forget. As children, we revere our mothers and fathers; as teenagers, we loathe them, and it is only when one grows up, or becomes a parent, or goes through therapy, that a begrudging appreciation begins to form. Parents are truly the unknowable ‘other’ and the death of them startles the child in us, so much so that the adult in us is lost, with only a bewildering map of grief-behavior offered by outstretched, mostly sympathetic, hands. Inevitably, we feel as if much has been left unsaid. “Some apologies are unspeakable,” says poet Eula Biss in the essay “All Apologies” in Notes From No Man’s Land. “Like the one we owe our parents.”