A year ago this week, I was having my first Zoom calls with editors who had read my book proposal, who wanted to talk to me more about what I had then titled American Orphans (with an s) and maybe make an offer to buy it. I was also, as I am every January, in a grief fog. Both of my parents died in January—my mom on January 4, 2002, and my dad two weeks and two years later, on January 18, 2004. Last January was particularly leaden, because it marked the twentieth anniversary of my mom’s death. And yet, amid my grief, I was hopeful that I would get my first book deal, for a book that I would never be able to write if my parents were still alive.
It is not lost on me that my writing career would not exist in its current shape if my parents had not died and if I had not felt that the only way I could begin to confront my loss was in writing. I avoided writing about my parents for a long time, even though I was already a writer—already loved and was “good at” writing—at twelve, when my mom died. I couldn’t even really bare to journal about my grief, which my therapist had urged me to do after my dad died. I only kept up with writing about my feelings for three months, leaving the rest of that black composition notebook empty.
The writing that felt safe to me in junior high and high school and for my first few years of college was journalism, because it put the focus on the world outside of myself. I found focusing on the “I” to be dangerous, a task that threatened to break apart the strong shell I had built to protect myself from looking too closely at the parts of my life that demanded reflection: the deaths of my parents. I lived the years between their deaths and college in active avoidance of thinking about my grief, terrified that if I did so, I wouldn’t be able to surface from the void.
By the time I was twenty, I finally felt ready to crack myself open, to begin to deal with my grief by writing about my parents. I spent my last year of college trying to reconstruct my parents on the page. I wanted to be able to access them as the people they were before they were parents, to move my relationship with them forward as it would have developed were they still alive. I found myself running up against the impossibility of the task, and reflecting on that impossibility, coming to terms with the way that death places a limit on knowledge: my understanding of the people my parents were would always be asymptotic. It is this impossibility that cuts through me afresh every January, when my parents’ death anniversaries come around, marking another year of distance.
In time, I realized that in writing about my parents, I was really writing about myself—the very thing I had been trying to avoid. I was circling around what it has meant for me to move through life without my parents, exploring the ways in which grief has stretched, rhizomatically, across my life, and how it has colored my experiences. Writing became a way of thinking through and sitting with my loss, something that I found I could not really do out loud with others. I started reflecting on all the ways I came up against the narratives of grief that run through our culture, which so often rely on the platitudes that everything happens for a reason, that every trauma has a redemptive silver lining, and that grief moves through five stages and then ends.
That reflection eventually led me to to question orphan narratives and how they, too, failed to capture my experience, and actually kept me from talking about my parents and my loss when I was a teenager. I hated being pitied and othered, and what is an orphan figure if not an object of pity, a symbol of otherness?
Last January marked twelve years after I had first started really writing about my parents and myself, and here I was, trying to sell a book about orphans that exists because I am one. And every editor I spoke with told me that they wanted to hear more about my experience of orphanhood, about my parents dying, about my grief. My initial reaction was to deflect and say that my experience of orphanhood wasn’t representative, but I realized that was part of the same impulse that made me clam up when I was a teenager and people started talking about their parents. Of course I have to be a big part of this book. Of course it should be titled American Orphan, no s.
It’s been twenty-one years since my mom died and nineteen years since my dad died, and now I find it easier to talk out loud about my memories of them, but I still rarely talk about their deaths and my grief, even to the people closest to me. It is still easier to be that vulnerable in writing, which is why every January 4 and January 18, I write about marking another year of loss in social media posts. Which is why I am writing this now.
This January feels a little less heavy than last—no big, round anniversary this year—but it is still very foggy, and I am trying to be kind to myself. I hope you are too.