Grieving Futures: Preface to the Third Edition (2017)
I am slowly posting the entirety of Grieving Futures: Surviving the Deaths of My Parents, here on Patience & Fortitude for free.
Feb 19, 2024 3 min read
Grieving Futures
Surviving the Deaths of My Parents
I am slowly posting the entirety of Grieving Futures: Surviving the Deaths of My Parents, here on Patience & Fortitude for free. General warnings are in place: this book address grief, mourning, self-harm, anger, poverty, and pet death, all in the context of becoming an adult orphan in my twenties. You can still buy the book if you would like (doing so helps support my writing!).
Preface to the Original Edition (2010)
This book was fifteen years in the making, even if in the end it took several months of intense writing and editing and reliving the past to make it happen.
Introduction, 2010 (Grieving Futures)
I am slowly posting the entirety of Grieving Futures: Surviving the Deaths of My Parents, here on Patience & Fortitude for free. You can still buy the book if you would like (doing so helps support my writing!). I am doing this to make it as available as...
Circumstances (Grieving Futures)
I often relive moments of destruction. I cannot call them moments of fear or sadness or even grief, which, as words, fail to convey the feeling of being emotionally shattered. Destruction, on the other hand, is perfect. It beats you down for no reason and makes your heart thump wildly and painfully while you try to breathe.
Reflection: Myths & Histories (Grieving Futures)
That is my Troy. My childhood is nothing but transitory pieces of brittle paper and tape that, when gone, will leave no trace of us, of my family.
Aftermath: Logistics (Grieving Futures)
It is easy to just do something when a person dies, because there is certainly enough to do...
Aftermath: Waste Disposal (Grieving Futures)
I did not realize that when a person dies, their body does not magically disintegrate a lá Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. Let this be a lesson to young adults everywhere: do not base your conception of reality on your favorite movie...
Aftermath: Pets I Have Known (Grieving Futures)
Dealing with the pets after my parents died was just the beginning of my realization that grief was not just something that hit me at night, in the dark under the covers: it reached out into every mundane aspect of my life.
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.
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: 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: 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: 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.
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: 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.