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.
It is easy to just do something when a person dies, because there is certainly enough to do. After Mother died I was tied up in financial paperwork from all her medical and credit card bills, eventually helping my father declare bankruptcy in the face of a quarter-million dollars’ worth of debt on a retired officer’s income. Yes, dying is expensive.
As I wrote earlier, after Poppa died his small $10,000 life insurance policy barely got me out the door of the house before the bank took possession. The economy was sailing in the mid-1990s so I was not particularly worried about a job, even though I had been a de-facto homemaker for three years right out of college (it made for a very grim resume). I had my car, a few months’ worth of living expenses in the bank, and a garage-full of inheritance left from after the estate sale. Also two dogs and a cat, which I will talk about later.
I allowed people to help me after Poppa died because I knew I could not do everything on my own. I could not watch the estate sale, could not productively participate in it. Those people were generous souls who offered their time and advice simply because they liked my parents. They stood guard in the house while dozens of strangers traipsed through it, picking up my family’s belongings to decide if they were worth a dollar or five. I had tried to price things the week before but only got through one room before retreating to my safe bolt-hole (more on that later) and refusing to do anything. Most of the items were wagered for on the spot, and I know I let many precious things go at a steal because I refused to haggle. I stood out in front of the open garage door with my back to the house, the money box near me, and my heart and soul screaming in pain. The cash I made off that sale helped a lot, but it felt like blood money.
I set myself up in an apartment I could not really afford, clueless to my financial realities and still riding on the optimism of the economic high of the 90s as well as being a sheltered only child. I was floundering, utterly derailed in my projected life track, thinking I could just get back in the groove if I tried hard enough.
The lesson that trying hard does not always ensure success had not sunk in. You think I would have learned it already over the course of three years as I watched the people I loved most in the world — and who loved me most in the world — die. I’m not entirely sure if that lesson was supposed to be learned and there was a failing on my part. It is probably very common after a crisis for people to attempt to return to normal using the same techniques they have always used. You know what you know, and even hard lessons are often not enough to get us to change our ways.
There I was in an ugly apartment with a car, two dogs, a cat, a storage unit, and so much grief and rage that I could not even think about it without fear of shutting down completely. Sometimes I wonder how I ever kept moving.
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