Two griefs, one funeral
The parent who died, and the parent you never got to have.
Someone had to find your number. A sibling, a hospital administrator, a neighbour who still had it from years ago: someone had to go looking for the estranged child and tell them the parent was gone. That call arrives strangely, formal and distant, informing you of the death of a person you may not have spoken to in a decade, and the first feeling is rarely simple sadness. It is often confusion about which feeling is even allowed.
Grieving an estranged parent means grieving twice. There is the actual person who died, flawed and specific and now gone, and there is the parent you needed and never had, the one who would have called on your birthday or apologized or simply been safe to be around. That second parent was never real, but the loss of the possibility of them is still a loss, and it can be the heavier of the two.
No pressure to forgive, in either direction
People will ask, gently or not, whether you have made peace with it now that it is too late for anything else to happen. You do not owe anyone forgiveness because the other person died before you offered it. Estrangement was often the safest, most honest choice available at the time, and a death does not retroactively obligate you to feel differently about the reasons for it. The reverse is also true: if you were the one who was pushed away, you do not owe the memory of them your absolution either. Grief and forgiveness are not the same transaction, and one is not required to complete the other.
There is no version of this that has to resolve into a tidy verdict on the relationship, good or bad. You are allowed to grieve someone and still believe the distance between you was necessary. You are allowed to have wanted a different ending and to have refused to chase it while they were alive. Both of those things can sit in you at once, unfinished, without one cancelling the other out.
A grief other people don't recognise
Condolences are built for a different kind of loss, the kind where the relationship was close and uncomplicated, and they can land badly here. Explaining a grief like this to someone who assumes you were close is its own quiet labour, one a lot of people decide is not worth doing, so they carry it alone instead.
The anger is often still there, sitting right next to the sadness, and it does not cancel the sadness out. Neither does love. Both can be true about the same person on the same day. Whatever never got resolved between you does not have to stay unresolved forever. You can say it now, to no one, which is sometimes the only version of that conversation that was ever going to be possible.
Say what you need to say. The line is connected to nothing: no one hears you, nothing is recorded, nothing is stored.