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 possible because I want anyone who might relate to the situation I found myself in during the mid-1990s to know they are not alone. 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.
I have started this book many times over. I never know where to begin, even though the most basic advice given to any writer is “begin at the beginning.” When you are talking about the death of your parents, though, where is the beginning? When you were born? When you first remember them in your childhood? When you realized they were mortal, or dying, or already dead? Where is the beginning of the end to your whole life?
Yet, I always come back to trying to start this book, because back in 1996 I really needed it and it did not exist. I was 26 and had lost everything, which is not quite hyperbole: at the end of the most trying three years of my life I had lost my mother, my father, one of my cats, my home and nearly everything in it, and both of my dogs. It was more than a little traumatic, the description of which words utterly fail to convey.
Using my usual method of dealing with anything I do not understand, I read about it. I read a lot of books on grief, and I cannot say that was wasted effort. Books such as C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed and Stephanie Ericsson’s A Companion through the Darkness were important to me and remain so after all these years. But I was 26 and I had not lost my spouse or my child or a friend, but my parents. There is no way to claim that one type of death is more catastrophic than another (although personally I will always suspect losing a child to be the worst), but they each have different dynamics. As most grief survivors know, there is nothing more affirming than meeting someone who has been through what you went through and recognizing the shared experiences of it.
I am not a mental health professional, though, and this book is specifically about my own experiences. I hope that by writing it others who are going through the loss of their parents might find some common ground. What I needed back then was not just the usual bywords given to mourners (“it takes time,” “take care of yourself”, “don’t judge your grief process”, etc.), but also the particular observations of a young adult facing the rest of her life with her safety harness, her life raft, and her foundations ripped away. Everyone says “you can’t go home again” and they usually mean it as some deep, metaphorical statement. For me it was literally true: home was dead and gone.
I have found books over the years about losing parents aimed towards young children and alternately towards “mature” adults over 50. Honestly, I could never even read the ones aimed at the mature adults because I would become livid with jealousy: how unfair that they were only dealing with this after having their parents around their whole lives! It was, admittedly, uncharitable and unfair of me. I know that. Still, it was my gut reaction whenever I picked up one of those books in an effort to look for companionship. The books for young children were at least acceptable to my sensibilities, yet on the other hand made me depressed and guilty because at least my parents got to see me graduate from college and know me as an adult. I was lucky, comparatively.
Caught between the two extremes, I felt very alone.
Of course, I was not completely alone. I had friends and a couple of family members who tried to stay in touch, both before and after my parents’ deaths. In retrospect I realize that they were all desperately trying to help me. They were unsure of how to do that and I was always damned and determined to be “doing just fine” whenever they asked how I was dealing with my loss. When I wrote to them about the events in my life I always tried to project some overall sense of wholeness, that although I was in despair and thunderstruck by events, I was still functioning. But it did not feel that way. I felt sectioned. A piece of me was here, another there. I lived the role of daughter, caretaker, maid, and free spirit but these roles did not mix well, especially after my parents died since they were the reasons I played those parts in the first place. It felt impossible to explain myself to anyone without coming off as overly dramatic or depressed, and indeed I am sure it was impossible. The fact is that the events I lived through were incredibly traumatic and I had good reason to be depressed; all the messages I got from society at large were geared toward recovery: You’re young, it should be easy to move on! You still have your whole life ahead of you! Your parents would not want you to waste your life grieving for them!
It was a message of encouragement, of optimism, and more importantly of denial. I bought it and then turned around and sold it to everyone who asked me how I was doing because, despite the many books about the grieving process I devoured, nothing penetrated the false promise of “youthful resilience.” I wanted it to be true. I wanted to prove to the people who were worried about me that it was true. I also grew tired of trying to explain myself to those who were in no way able to truly relate to my experiences. It was a double edged sword of false promise + feeling isolated and it = ten years of emotional misdirection.
Which is another reason I kept stalling on continuing this project. I knew it was important and that it was something I wanted to finish, but given how messed up I felt and how poorly I handled, well, everything, I did not believe that anything I had to say was important, much less helpful. It seemed inappropriate to engage in an act that might be construed as celebrating my fucked-upedness.
I am not shy about admitting to going into therapy, and so I am not ashamed to say that it took two years and a damn good counselor for me to realize that the whole point of Grieving Futures is not to show how well I dealt with everything or to give directions on how others can succeed at grief. No, the purpose is the act of sharing what I went through. As in the Buddhist tradition, the goal is the process itself, and anyway there is no “there” to get to in mourning. It happens every day. We carry our grief for the rest of our lives, so what is important is not “doing it right” (as I spent years worrying about) but in understanding that however you manage to survive, the important thing is to stay present. Sometimes that means crying your eyes out, sometimes that means doing the laundry, and sometimes that might even involve ignoring the whole damn mess until you are emotionally stable enough to face it. The people you loved and relied on most are dead, so now your job is to take care of yourself.
I forgot that, if I ever knew it at all. I do not consider this a cautionary tale, but I do hope that sharing my experiences might give people tools for dealing with their own grief, or at the very least allow them to understand that they are not alone. My issues are not your issues and my experiences are in some ways extreme and in other ways not so much, but they are all I have. I just hope my story helps you with yours.
