Grieving Futures - 3rd Ed.

By KimBoo York

Grieving Futures: Surviving the Deaths of My Parents (Third Edition) is a book that explains a lot about how I got where I was in 2010, when I was forty years old, and yet had not gotten very far in life.

The depressing backstory is that I was 24 when my mother died, and 26 when my father passed away. Because of that catastrophe, I lost the family home and any stability I ever counted on. It was, in the parlance, a clusterf*k. In the aftermath I made some bad decisions, but mostly I did not make any decisions at all and fifteen years later I was falling down into a dark well of depression and anxiety. I hit bottom in 2008 in the form of a major psychological breakdown, which eventually led to therapy and the cathartic experience of writing this book about how I got there.
This book is for anyone who has been told that they are doing grief "wrong," are "taking too long" to grieve, or simply "get over it." It's for anyone who has lost the anchor of their life and is listing in the wild seas of grief, wondering what they are supposed to do now? It's for the lost souls who have crashed and burned after tragedy, and so believe their life is nothing but ashes now.
You are not alone. You are not doing grief wrong. Even if you are still listing in the waves of a broken-hearted sea, making mistakes and poor choices or no choices at all, this book is here for you. I don't offer solutions or poetry or trite catchphrases of comfort. It's a raw look at how I crashed and burned and kept going, through it all. It is about grief and anger and codependence and triumph and infinite sadness.

The latest edition includes a new preface and an afterward discussing what has happened in my life since the book first came out in 2010, and my thoughts on the evolving nature of the grief process.

• Language: English
• Publisher: York Enterprises
• Release date: Jun 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201320256

KimBoo York

KimBoo York is a multi-genre writer with more imagination than brains. She's also kind of grumpy and mostly enjoys the company of her dog, Keely, who is perfect and beyond reproach in every way. 

Book preview

Grieving Futures

Surviving the Deaths of My Parents

KimBoo York

York Enterprises

To my parents:

Lt. Col. Garland Alvin York (ret.), 1923-1996

Sue Gale Cooke York, 1943-1994

If you find that this book helps you or a loved one, I request that you give to Lee’s Place, so they may continue their incredible work in helping children and families deal with grief and trauma:

Lee’s Place – A Grief and Loss Counseling Center

Tallahassee, Florida

http://www.leesplace.org

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution:

NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

To view a copy of this license, visit or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Contents

1.Preface to the Third Edition (2017)

2.Preface to the Original Edition (2010)

3.Introduction

4.Circumstances

5.Reflection – Myths and History

6.Aftermath – Logistics

7.Aftermath – Waste Disposal

8.Aftermath – Pets I Have Known

9.Aftermath – Furniture and Defiance

10.Aftermath – Friends and Freak-outs

11.Aftermath – Disintegration

12.Aftermath – Life, Death, and Taxes

12. (or, ‘It’s All About the Money’)

13.Aftermath – Paperwork and Ribbons

14.Reflection – The Lonely Codependent

15.Aftermath – Recuperation

16.Reflection – Grieving Futures

17.The Happy Ending

Appendix I

Independence Day, 1996 (Being a Letter to a Dead Man)

Appendix II

Wedding 1966

Appendix III

Troy 1973

KimBoo York

author + fangirl

image-placeholder

Preface to the Third Edition (2017)

This book was initially written partly as a therapeutic tool, and partly as a way to reach out to others with similar experiences. It worked well on both counts, and while I sometimes cringe while re-reading parts of it, I’m still proud to have written it at the time I did.

I remember waking up one morning and thinking to myself, "I have no reason to live. It was not a suicidal statement but rather the realization that my life was without purpose, meaning, or joy. I was getting up every day for the sole purpose of going to work for the sake of paying the bills, and coming home from work for the sole purpose of following through" on a marriage that I did not want to admit was on a downward spiral (and had been for a few years).

I talk a lot about the negative effects that my mother’s mental illnesses had on my life, but one thing I can credit her for is teaching me to recognize that moment when I have gone too far in a dangerous direction, psychologically speaking. Knowing I was at crisis, I reached out for help, and I was lucky in turn to receive it.

In spring of 2010 I was filing for divorce and applying to graduate school. I was still on very rocky financial waters (which to this day I have not quite calmed completely) but I felt freer and more complete than I had since…well, since long before my parents died.

And I wrote this book.

Now, seven (!!!) years later, I look back on that time as epochal. I consider it the breakthrough I should have had in my twenties, had my life been different. I’m still nowhere near where I thought I would be, in terms of life experiences and conquests, but I have hit some important mile markers: I got my master’s degree; I got a dog (!); I have a professional job in a field that is personally rewarding; I am a published author; I am an artist.

In the spirit of change and progress, I’ve decided to return to this book, edit it, and add an afterward detailing the arc my life took after the events described here. If there is one thing I have learned, it is that grief cycles back through our lives, and colors everything we do, think, and feel. I feel good about where I am now, but the journey continues.

image-placeholder

Preface to the Original Edition (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