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.
Preface of the First Edition (written, 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. Everything in this book is true to my life, although my opinions and reactions to events are probably (hopefully?) not universal.
This book is about dealing with the death of a parent when you are somewhere in your 20s. However, since I use the term “young adults” a lot, I need to clarify what I mean by that as most people usually think that phrase implies teenagers (as in, “YA literature”, etc.). I specifically mean an age group ranging from late teens to about 30 years old. I know some people in that age group might bristle at being called a young adult, but in modern society someone who is under 30 is still, in many ways, considered young and “just starting out.”
I also tend to use the terms “our culture” and “our society” quite a bit but that is limited to American, Westernized society. That is the only culture I can speak for comfortably and on the whole I am assuming I am addressing fellow members of that society through this book. It is more a matter of familiarity than any purposeful exclusion of any other world views, so I welcome hearing from people in other cultures/parts of the world in regards to this subject.
I need to give special thanks to Debbie Wiles, LCSW. I worked with her through Lee’s Place Counseling center, and she helped me pick myself up from where I had plastered myself to the ground, dusted me off, and gave me a strong push on the road to salvaging what is left of my life. She is intelligent, witty, insightful, and straightforward, and just the person I desperately needed when we met. Without her, this book would never have been written, either. Hopefully she will accept the “blame” gracefully!
