What their conversation brings to light is how tenacious and recurrent childhood grief can be. It often flares up around anniversary events, such as birthdays and holidays; makes appearances at life milestones, like graduations and weddings; and sneaks up at age-correspondence events, such as reaching the age a parent was when he or she died. That’s a big one.

It also appears in regular, everyday moments. Mr. Colbert spoke about still being undone by the song “Band on the Run,” which was playing in heavy rotation the month his father and brothers died. Similarly, every time I hear “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain and Tennille I’m transported back into a wood-paneled basement circa 1978 where I’m teaching my mother how to dance the Continental, and missing her feels raw and fresh again. Then it passes.

To lose a parent in the 1980s was to do so in the Dark Ages of grief support. Stoicism, silence and suppression were still the ethos of the day. It would take me five years to be able to say “my mother” without crying. I wish I could say I was an anomaly, but I’ve met so many others with this story that at some point I began wondering if we were the norm.

Yet despite all the progress made in organized bereavement support over the past 40 years, very few services exist today for adults bereaved during childhood and adolescence. And this is a puzzling omission, because millions of Americans fall into this category. A New York Life Foundation nationwide survey of 1,006 adults age 25 and over revealed that 14 percent of those surveyed lost a parent or sibling before the age of 20. If we apply that percentage to the United States adult population as a whole, even conservatively, nearly 30 million people in America experienced the death of an immediate family member during childhood or adolescence.

Why is this important? Because we know that mismanaged and unexpressed grief can surface later as unregulated anger, take root as depression or disease and fuel a desire to self-medicate. Imagine a population of 30 million people with stories of major, early loss, many of them unspoken and suppressed. Then look around. Unmourned losses from the past could be a public health crisis.