These Winter Months: The Late Orphan Project Anthology
We are 25 writers, expressing our thoughts, feelings, confusion, relief, realizations, even humor after the death of our mother or father. In many cases, grief was delayed by activity. In some, the role of parent as caregiver was pushed off on the child. In others, something was learned after cleaning out the family home.
In each case, however, the writing is a portrait of a family, a loss, a complicated or troubling relationship, or the lack of one. The stories are human, personal, and ultimately universal in nature.
It is an honest assessment of how the death of a parent impacts the child.
The fact that the child is also an adult is what makes these stories so rich. They are filled with regret, with questions left unanswered, with late admission of the depth of the parent’s love, or the ever-present understanding that this relationship, between parent and child, is one of the most complicated of our lives: sometimes satisfying, often incomplete. The stories cover a broad and varied view of the days – and even years – after a parent’s death. A period referred to here gently as “these winter months.”
Prompted by a need to express the impact of the death of the editor’s own father in the fall of 2015, The Late Orphan Project is a vibrant celebration of real life. Poetry, essays, journal entries – each writer facing the days after the services, the burials. Some days are better than others, some events are easier than others, some anniversaries are impossibly hard.
The idea that the impact of this close loss is felt somehow less by an adult losing an older person is easily refuted.
Look for These Winter Months: The Later Orphan Project Anthology on Amazon, September 2016.
The Late Orphan Project 