Why I’m going to be sharing my old grief memoir here, after all these years…

Wayyyy back in 1998 or so, within a couple of years of my father’s death, I came up with the book title Grieving Futures.

That was it. That was all I had, the title.

To be fair, that is often the case with most of my ideas. I know the title of the story, or maybe the name of the main character, long before I know what the heck it is about.

In this case, I knew it would be a memoir-of sorts about the deaths of my parents.

I did eventually write it, and I’ll get back to that in a second. But back then, when the grief and so fresh and sharp, I really had no business writing something like that and that fact quickly became clear to me whenever I tried.

After a few false starts, I shelved the idea as something to return to later.

Later turned out to be 2009.

York family – Al, Buff, KimBoo, and Sue with our bikes in about 1973

I had a major psychological breakdown in 2008 due to my failure to deal with my grief and trauma, which had built up and built up and built up for over a decade like water behind a dam with no sluice gates to relieve pressure. Eventually it overflows or crumbles under the weight, and my breakdown was both a lot of overwhelm and disintegration.

A couple of years later, though, it resulted in a book, the long awaited Grieving Futures, which years earlier I had known I would eventually write.

I not just wrote it, I hand-coded the epub formatting (the early days of self-publishing were wild, y’all!), created an incredibly crappy cover using GIMP, and published it on ‘zon. All of this was done right before starting my graduate program in 2010.

It’s been out there for over ten years. While I upgraded the cover and made some additions/improvements to the text in 2016, there has not been much to recommend it and very few people have read it.

Honestly, I don’t blame them. It is more a product of catharsis than the result of literary ambition.

Yet, there is value there. I believed it then and I believe that now. Even before I knew what form it would take, I wanted it to serve as a beacon for others who were experiencing similar tragedies.

I can’t say that I wrote it as a self-help guide, because I very clearly did not, but one thing that cut deepest in the aftermaths of my parents’ deaths was the very real feeling that absolutely no one else understood what I was going through.

This was back in the mid 1990s and I was just becoming more familiar with the Internet, so I was uncertain about how to find other people like me on AOL or USEnet or some random web forum…if I could even find them, which in the era before Google was its own challenge. Asking Jeeves did not get me anywhere.

So I haunted the grief and mourning sections of bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, which were often next to the religious sections. I found some books that mirrored what I was feeling, yet nothing felt real enough. It was all platitudes and poems and nostalgia, when what I was feeling was rage and disappointment and bewilderment. They wanted me to process my grief by journaling, which is not a bad idea overall, but what I really needed was for someone to simply acknowledge just how fucked up my life had become.

I hoped, when I published it with that truly atrocious cover, that it would serve as just that kind of support for people who were in that same place.

It has, for a few people, but its reach has been minimal. I don’t advertise it or anything, and its sales numbers do not matter to me at all. I’ve given just as many copies away as I’ve sold, which is a number that ranges in the tens of ones. For many reasons, it never was and was never meant to be a best seller.

Now, 30 years after the crucible that was the slow deaths of my parents, one after another, I have changed a lot. I want to acknowledge that and talk about it. There are not many people in their 50s who lost their parents 30 years ago, and most people I know losing parents now are blindsided by the grief and wondering what a life without parents looks like.

Well, I’ve done that, both successfully and catastrophically.

Which is why I’m bringing Grieving Futures back from the brink, and posting it serially here on Patience & Fortitude.

More than just “reposting” the book, though, I want to talk about it through the lens of being much further along this journey.

As when I first thought of the title, I’m not entirely sure what my new commentary will look like or be about.

But my hope that it might serve as a life line to others is, all these years later, unchanged.