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!).
We all want the Happy Ending, no matter how unlikely. I am still looking for it, and in the meantime, I own boxes and boxes of my parents’ keepsakes that I do not know what to do with. They were a unique pair of pack rats, keeping documents more than things. I have my father’s entire military career documented all the way back to World War II (carbon paper! It is not an urban myth!) and all of their tax returns. Yes, all of their tax returns. From the 1950s on up. No denying it is a daunting legacy
and that does not particularly make me happy. It also feels quite endless, whenever I am sorting through it!
There is, of course, always an ending though — every life ends, because everybody dies. No one is particularly happy about that, even if they find a way to make peace with it, so what makes a “Happy Ending”, then?
When a story ends, the implication is that the characters live on. Even a “Happy Ending” presupposes not that everyone actually ends (dies), but that they continue on contentedly for the rest of their lives. “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. Similarly, in real life, we tend to separate parts of our lives into disparate stories: the high school years, the college years, the newlywed years, the parental years, the retirement years, etc. Something goes wrong when we cannot end one story and move on to begin the next. It is like the friend who never left the glory years of high school or college, forever bemoaning the loss of youth and how miserable life is now compared to then. It can become a dangerous pastime to be stuck at the “The End”, and never move on to “In the beginning…” In my case, it was catastrophic.
I spent a long time living at The End of “My Family”, figuring there was nothing for me past surviving that particular story. I decided that my parents’ deaths were also my own ending, and that the best I could do was simply survive, happiness be damned. Although I hoped that eventually I would move past the worst pangs of grief, I did not understand that happiness is not the absence of misery. It is its own tangible emotion that must be cultivated and pursued. It can be gifted upon you, but never demanded, and it is most easily crushed by indifference (which is the opposite of love).
After ten years, when I finally started unraveling, the worst part was not how much I missed my parents but how much I missed me. I was barely a person. I had few characteristics I could recognize as genuinely myself. Physically, I was unhealthy and out of shape and not eating nutritiously. I had shuffled through convenient but uninspiring career options, leading me in turn to a series of dead-end jobs. Socially, I hid in a marriage that was comfortable and friendly but in many ways loveless, both physically and emotionally. I got up and lived from day to day with no sense of purpose or self-worth.
Obviously, I was not happy either.
What took me a while to figure out (amidst other issues completely unrelated to my grief process), is that being happy is the journey, not an end in itself. Teaching myself the art of happiness is something I have to address every day, one way or another, much as I have to face my grief. Avoiding my emotions, hoping for a stalemate, leads to even bigger problems. I certainly do not have all the answers I need and probably never will, but most days, I am genuinely happy. My “happy ending” is waking up every day remembering who I am, who my parents were, and where I want to go with my life. It is being able to write this book without falling apart.
In a way, I guess I would say that my “Happy Ending” is simply a perpetual state of “In the beginning…”
