Cover
Green left childhood behind at age ten, a year of “pandemonium,” a reminder that “terrible things do happen to good people.” She shares, with honesty and humour, a chronicle of crisis and change, a brilliant legacy of wisdom to anyone who has been bewildered by their family.
— Alex Fancy
professor emeritus, Mount Allison University
3M National Teaching Fellow
In Grownupedness, Clarissa P. Green blends her professional and personal experience to help the reader navigate painful choices with loving clarity.
— Leslie Hill
author of Dressed for Dancing:
My Sojourn in the Findhorn Foundation
These probing and reflective essays show us that there’s no free pass — aging is rarely easy, and renegotiating the terms of our relationships with loved ones as we all grow older requires us to reckon with old demons, to examine outgrown assumptions, to acknowledge and respect our losses. Honest, moving, yet hopeful.
— Susan Olding
author of Pathologies: A Life in Essays
Part memoir, part analysis of the human condition, Green’s brilliant book holds you in its warm embrace and says, “It takes courage to grow up.” From the first chapter, when you begin to understand the author’s lifelong commitment to understanding how crisis restructures families and personalities, until you arrive at the final chapter, you’ll laugh, weep unexpectedly and be caught off guard by moments of insight.
— Ethel Whitty
author of The Light a Body Radiates
With unflinching curiosity for the complexities of the human journey, she shares naked emotions and truths she discovers along the way. Poignant, insightful, humorous, inspiring and visceral — a must-read for anyone living a life.
— Jane Mortifee
singer and author of Out of the Fire
Her personal stories will move you. Her professional wisdom will give you hope that the inevitable tensions brought about by aging can also provide rich experiences worth the effort.
— Sally Halliday, MA, RCC, CCC
registered clinical counsellor
specializing in mid-life changes
and former CBC journalist
In her astounding Grownupedness, Green banishes clichés and psychobabble. She tells disquieting life stories. Green’s book confronts us with lurid details about getting old and about living with people getting old. We are all headed that way. Green dares us to pay attention.
— Guy Allen
professor, director of the Professional
Writing and Communication Program
University of Toronto
As we travel with Green from her earliest memories of childhood in Upstate New York through life’s inevitable losses and joys, she reveals a woman who cares deeply about making sense of her well-lived life. As she faces her own end-of-life, she leaves us with the bountiful wisdom gleaned from those labors, as well as a primer for how to confront our own mortality. A book to treasure.
— Rick Gore
retired science editor of National Geographic
Green writes a powerful narrative about the complexities of family — coping with elderly parents, parenting as best one can, and connecting with adult children while managing severe illness. Becoming a grown-up (grownupedness) is something we all seek . . . Green, weaving stories from her work as a therapist with personal memories and reflections, helps us get there.
— Elaine Carty, CM, OBC
professor emerita of nursing and midwifery
University of British Columbia
So far in our efforts to understand aging, we have relied on a host of systematic approaches. Here Green offers us something different. Green takes vignettes from her practice as a family therapist and expands our understanding of how another family can develop their own strategies to resolve a similar issue, and suddenly we have genuinely unique strategies. Further, Clarissa’s lean, fresh, and above all personal language supports our learning, and the reader emerges changed.
— JoAnn Perry, RN, PhD
educator and researcher in gerontology
A work that incorporates tenderness and openness, experience and wisdom. Green is a storyteller who reaches out beyond the page to touch the humanity in us all. Seeing the human condition from many vantage points, she has a unique ability to seamlessly weave the professional with the personal. Green, with her poignant questions, insights and skill with the written word, takes us on a thoughtful journey toward grownupedness.
— Sandi Bojm, MSc
counselling therapist and speech language pathologist
specializing in anxiety-related speech disorders
Wise, honest and full of warmth, reading this moving collection of essays means spending time with an insightful and generous writer. A compelling and comforting book. In reflecting on her passage to adulthood and all the trials and tribulations strewn along the way, Green illuminates the path and enlightens everyone about the struggle to grow up. A gutsy examination of family, aging, illness, loss and love.
— Eufemia Fantetti
author of My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me
and A Recipe for Disaster
A wonderful read, thanks to the author’s superb syntheses of self and other, past and present, personal and professional. The never-ended-ness of grownupedness is everywhere in this savvy interplay of story and insight.
— Sheila Martineau, PhD
writer, copy editor, book designer and researcher
currently writing her memoir of a complicated childhood
A deeply compelling conversation on aging and maturity — a marvellous montage of visuals, words and feeling. Reflection, often lost in our seemingly ever-troubled world, is found here. Clarissa’s professional knowledge and personal insightfulness push us to reflect on our own stories and those we love.
— Carol Anthony, RN, MSN
retired specialist in gerontology
Grownupedness
Title
This book is dedicated
to my sons Chandler and Larson
ever my best teachers
Cover Note
Legacy logs and stumps are common sights in most forests. Also known as nurse logs, the elegant beauty of their decomposition and how the felled wood nourishes new growth and future generations is on artful display. As does the nourishment from a felled tree fuel the future, a family’s history similarly flows forward from story, tradition and the wisdom of elders to foster an ongoing unique expression of family.
Cover photo:
Eternal Journey
by Karen Cooper
www.karencoopergallery.com
Contents
Foreword
Part One
Anatomy of a Crisis
The Search for My Elderly Young Girl
Notes on Music
Part Two
The Change
Hurricane Days
Lost and Found
Driving Lessons
Voice-Over
River of Loss
Part Three
Follow the Money
How Touching
It’s Never Just About the Hair
Grownupedness
Acknowledgements
Foreword
I can count on one hand the gifted storytellers that I know, and have known, and Clarissa P. Green is among them. Storytelling is our terra firma. Research over the past couple of decades repeatedly confirms that storytelling is far more persuasive than fact-based narratives. Stories take up residence in us; fact-based narratives do not. Research confirms that facts and persuasive-based narratives seldom “stick.”
As a young girl, Green knew she was irresistibly drawn to storytelling. This isn’t a skill one learns but rather, a role and skill one inherits. When Green’s elderly great aunt (who was the consummate family storyteller) informs her that she would be the next family storyteller, she understood. Although the onerous responsibility of the role was daunting, she felt deeply recognized. Ever since, Green has collected, recorded in journals and letters, and recreated these stories in her creative writing.
I met Clarissa P. Green in The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in 2007. She had been accepted into the poetry mentor group; I was on faculty and directing the program. I was struck by her passion for writing then and subsequently struck by her devotion to doing the hard-hard work to bring a piece to fruition which always requires years to do. Bette Davis famously said, “Getting old ain’t for sissies!” The same could be said for writing.
A few years after The Writers’ Studio, I had the pleasure of working with Clarissa on her nonfiction manuscript. She wrote prodigiously. She had a remarkable cache of stories to tell. This early manuscript was an unusual mix of professional and personal inter-related narratives. It was groundbreaking. For me, when reading a number of these stories once again in Grownupedness, it was pure pleasure to see how they have evolved over the years.
In Grownupedness, Green speaks directly to us. She skillfully circumvents binary ways of knowing and telling, moves seamlessly in and out of personal storytelling and related professional vignettes of struggling clients. Clients in their early 90s overwhelmed by their own diminishing abilities, and clients who are their elderly “children” vexed by how to navigate their own diminishing vigor, professional and familial demands as they care for a needy parent.
Over and over we are on the edge of our chair in the room with Green and her client(s), or in the car or bedroom with her struggling mother, or in the ER with Green’s own serious health crisis and son quietly by her side. In this close-up proximity we witness: when the heart opens, the mind opens to new understanding, new ways of being that enable compassion for oneself, and for one another.
This book is a radical act. There is no turning away or tuning out either side or perspective in these stories. It refuses to extract the story out of the complicated decision-making of old age. Without the possibilities of story, to put it simply, we flounder. Are lost — all of us.
Two of Green’s stories: “Driving Lessons” and “Hurricane Days,” featuring her very elderly mother and stepfather (riddled with dementia) are utterly unforgettable. Poignant and humorous, this is Green at her zenith of storytelling. These are stories that I will reread again and again over the remaining years of my life. There are, indeed, many such stories in Grownupedness. Green’s “cast” is rich, all encompassing, and her evolving relationship with her two sons is touching; inspiring.
Clarissa has always been an avid reader and I believe that this — her own book — will attract an equally avid readership.
— Betsy Warland
author of Lost Lagoon/Lost in Thought
(published 2020)
Part One