Sooner or later we're all orphans.

Unless you die before your parents do -- which does happen but isn't the norm -- you and I will someday be orphans. Parentless. Alone as adults in the big wide dangerous world.

Of course kids do sometimes die before their parents do, and as sad as it is, it's not what usually happens. For most of us, our parents will die first just because they're older. It may happen when we're young, but more often it happens when we're in middle age or even older.

Whenever it happens, it's a shock. The people who literally created you and me from nothing are gone. At some point, and on some level, it doesn't matter if they were kind or cruel: they made us. Not just metaphorically but in reality: your father's sperm mixed with your mother's egg (and, yes, you know how), and you became you. So when our parents die, we have to feel sad, for all kinds of reasons.

What the death of both parents means differs, of course, depending on your age. If you're young, I'm sure your world is turned upside down, since you depended on them for almost everything, and now they're gone. Maybe they made provisions for you, maybe not. Good luck. If you're older, as is usually the case, your life -- already established away from them, maybe a spouse and even kids -- isn't uprooted, but you still have emotions to deal with. Having become an adult yourself, you look back on time spent with your parents with different emotions, some good, some not so good, maybe some really bad. You have to talk over their passing with your siblings, if you have any. Your memories and opinions will likely collide.

But what the death of parents means most to those of us who are forty or fifty or beyond is that we are now the seniors of our families and our generation. We're the adults now, the ones passing down judgments and trying to look smart -- while we're all still hoping to get high at least a few more times!

And we acknowledge the most important thing about our parents' passing: we're next. For those of us who thought we'd be young forever -- yes, the Sixties crowd -- we've come up against that big brick wall of mortality. Ouch!

Once you're an orphan, you're on your own. No more pleasing Mom or Dad, no more playing the kid. Time to grow up. And whether you're twenty or forty or sixty when it happens, you better get ready. It can happen at any time, and we're never -- at any age -- ready for it. We all come into this world with a mom and a dad (whether they stay together or not). That's a fact. But what's also a fact is that at some point we lose them both. We become orphans. On our own.

How we deal with that is a personal matter.