What

Patience & Fortitude is the vanity side project of me, KimBoo York, who is an adult orphan of long standing. It’s a publication focused on grief and mourning, rage and love, fear and hope.

I’ll be posting original essays, refurbished essays, and chapters of my book Grieving Futures: Surviving the Deaths of my Parents. I will also start working on my follow up memoir, The Empty Bowl, although I cannot make any promises about that at this stage.

Why

My hope is that you, dear reader, will find aspects of my journey that resonates with you and helps you feel less alone. That mission might change down the road but for now, that’s enough.

When

I will be posting at least once a week, but at this point I do not have a set schedule as I have a lot of other gears in motion (check out my main website, House of York, for all of that!). You can expect irregular essays and chapters of Grieving Futures. 

I will eventually trial WIP chapters for The Empty Bowl, but that concept does not have much of a shape yet. Be on the lookout!

Who

I was barely over the line of 25 when my mother died in 1994, and just under 27 when my father died in 1996. Both deaths were preceded by extensive illnesses/poor health, which were built upon lifetimes of mental illness and self-sabotage. I had moved home in late 1992, giving up dreams of graduate school and an independent future to become their full time caretaker. It was a mess. It did not get better.

In the summer of 1996 I was left utterly alone, homeless, nearly penniless, and drifting like the Mary Celeste. In a state of shock, which arguably set in the second I found out about my mother’s diagnosis, I had not prepared for the inevitable, which inevitably came back to haunt me. I could keep going with the ghost ship metaphors…

Why a Separate Publication?

My main blog is KimBoo’s Scriptorium, which features an eclectic assortment of writings including productivity advice, rabbit holes down the subject of text technology, and fiction updates for my currently ongoing serials. It’s a bit of a hodge podge and I love that for me, it’s the kind of publication I’ve always wanted to have to my name.

But grief and mourning are heavy, heavy topics. I wanted to both give Patience & Fortitude the room to breathe into the heaviness, and to be a place undiluted by sundry other articles from all over the map. So, here we are.

Geography