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!).
I am always at a loss to explain the title of this book. It has had the same title, for the same reason, since I first toyed with the idea of writing it back in the late 90s. I have explained the title more times than I can count, and everyone likes it, and the reasoning behind it, but that does not mean that I feel as if I have truly related it properly.
My idea is not bold nor particularly original. However it is an aspect of grief that gets glossed over because it is on first reflection a selfish one: that a large part of what we are grieving is not what was, but what will never be. I think parents dealing with the loss of a child feel this most keenly: they will never see their baby grow up, graduate, marry, see the world. When a parent dies, it is the reverse: they will not meet our future spouse, or know their grandchildren, or see us accomplish our heart’s desire. We are grieving for the future that will never be, which is as dead as the person we have lost.
I think, though, that it is not an unreasonably selfish response and deserves more respect. We are not only grieving for what we will never share with that person, but also for what they, themselves, will never experience.
In my mother’s case, I grieve for the fact that she died just when medications for bi-polar disorder were becoming advanced enough to actually help her. She suffered the majority of her adult life from crippling emotional swings, which shredded her massive potential. She lived as if she was locked her in a cage of fear, anger, remorse, and shame that she could only look out from, never escape. It is enough to make me weep that at the point when she was finally, finally able to construct a life outside of her mental illness, she died. Yes, I would have loved to see that evolution, to be a part of it. It seems that mostly my grief is in on her behalf. It was so unfair.
In my father’s case, it comes back to that lock box full of mementoes. He has no more chances to tell me about important times and places in his life. Poppa was a natural born storyteller, and even at 72 years old and stroke-ridden, he loved to spin a good yarn. We were just getting to really know each other as adults, and he had started to remember and tell me the stories that clearly weighed on his mind, good and bad. His military career, marriages, childhood were all experiences he wanted to share, and it was obvious that he had waited years to finally have a chance to talk to me as an equal. He died with many stories untold, so much left unsaid.
It is shattering to sit in a room full of the things that mattered to your parents and realize that any lessons your parents had to teach or learn or live with are over, that anything they wanted to explain will forever be a mystery. We certainly mourn for what was – those picture perfect moments of memory, traces of the lives we once lived with the people we still love – and rage at what was taken away from us. To me, though, the loss of their futures is the bitterest pill.
I will always want what might have been.
