Grieving Futures continues with “The Empty Bowl”
I am in the midst of working—slowly, so very slowly—on what you might call the next installment of Patience & Fortitude: “The Empty Bowl.” Whereas the first installment, “Grieving Futures,” was about the trauma I experienced during and after the deaths of my parents, “The Empty Bowl” is going to be a bigger-picture story. It will be the memoir of two very broken people trying to raise a very odd child.
30 Years Later
It’s almost thirty years later and only now do I feel like I have a grasp on who she was and what her death—and her life—meant to me.
The Happy Ending (Grieving Futures)
“The End” means the end of the story, not the end of life, and so a happy ending is one where the characters live blessed and personally fulfilling lives.
Reflection: Grieving Futures (Grieving Futures)
I am always at a loss to explain the title of this book. It has had the same title, for the same reason, since I first toyed with the idea of writing it back in the late 90s.
Aftermath: Recuperation (Grieving Futures)
It took several cracks in my amour and a year of blinking at the world in shock before I sought the help I needed. It is no lie to say that after that, things got really difficult, but it is no less true that they also got better.
Reflection: The Lonely Codependent (Grieving Futures)
I miss my parents, as I loved them very much and they loved me, but I would be lying if I did not admit to being glad sometimes that my mother is dead and that my father is out of his misery.
Aftermath: Paperwork and Ribbons (Grieving Futures)
The only real ongoing mourning practice we have now is an unofficial one: paperwork — death certificates, hospital bills, legal papers, financial documents ad nauseum.
Aftermath: Life, Death, and Taxes (Grieving Futures)
Finances were another way I performed the dance of denial. Of all the long-lasting effects the early death of a parent can have on a young adult, money is quite possibly one of the most complex and damning.
Aftermath: Disintegration (Grieving Futures)
More accurately: I begged for help. We could not afford to hire nurses, Poppa was suffering from his major stroke a few months prior, and I was just this side of a nervous breakdown.
Aftermath: Friends and Freak-outs (Grieving Futures)
Freak-outs for mourners are moments where we are out-of-sync with our own personality, those times when those who know us best give us strange looks followed by “how are you doing?” And we do not understand why they are asking.
Aftermath: Furniture and Defiance (Grieving Futures)
After Poppa died, there was a week of shock and paperwork and calling distant relatives and then…nothing. It was just me, the pets, the furniture, and memories.
Tragedy changes us; Patience tempers us; Fortitude keeps us going.
Lessons in grief, crisis, and recovery from 30 years of life as an adult orphan from a GenX woman who has resentfully struggled every step of the way.
