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.
