Losing my parents as a teenager saddled me with an identity I felt powerless to shape—until now.
By Kristen Martin
On a bright day in July 2006, just before I turned 17, I realized just how little control I had over how others saw the part of my identity I most wanted to hide. It was the final afternoon of a journalism program for high school students at Northwestern University—five weeks gloriously spent reporting stories, taking pop quizzes on the news (I’ll never forget how to spell Rod Blagojevich), and swimming in Lake Michigan with new friends until my muscles felt like frozen chicken cutlets. Two of my aunts had come to help me pack up my dorm room and fly back to New Jersey. I was steering them to the dining hall for a farewell lunch with other families when I heard a yell go up from two Californian kids whose folks hadn’t made the trip: “We’re the orphans!” they exclaimed, as they mimed begging for more gruel like Oliver Twist.
Those kids didn’t know that both of my parents had recently died. I had only divulged the story of my back-to-back losses to the two girls I’d grown closest to—and even then only after we’d already spent every waking hour together for the better part of a month. That summer at Northwestern was my first taste of what it was like to introduce myself to people who had no idea of what I had recently been through, and figuring out the most natural time to slip in such devastating information had proven impossible.
In the middle-class Long Island community where I’d grown up, everyone knew my parents. My mom had been the PTA president. My dad had coached my brother’s basketball and baseball teams. My peers were there when my mom died of lung cancer at age 49 in January 2002, and when my dad died of prostate cancer at age 50 in January 2004. They also knew me—a smarty-pants who loved to dance and had an entire wardrobe of Chuck Taylors—and they knew that even after my losses, I was still that girl. When I moved to New Jersey to live with my aunt Alice the summer after my dad died, and had to start sophomore year at a new high school, my cousin Matt helped make the transition as smooth as possible by linking me in with his friend group before orientation. He explained why I was now living with his family, but also introduced me as a person well beyond my tragedy.
When I started that summer at Northwestern, I didn’t want to talk about my parents because I couldn’t do so without bursting into tears. My grief was so raw, so bottomless, that to even allude to it by explaining the bare facts of my life to people I had just met was unbearable. But after the “orphan” incident, I had a new reason to keep quiet about my parents’ deaths: I feared being reduced to a pitiful archetype.
Until that moment, I hadn’t connected my experience of losing both my parents to the stories about orphans I had grown up consuming, from Little Orphan Annie pining for a sunnier tomorrow where she’d be adopted, to Harry Potter sleeping in a spider-infested cupboard under the stairs at his aunt and uncle’s house. My brother and I didn’t languish away in an orphanage—those were long shuttered in the United States—nor were we wishing to be adopted by strangers. No one could ever replace our parents, who had raised us to teen-hood. And rather than neglect us, our extended family embraced us and tried their best to approximate normalcy.
It was hard enough to share my personal traumatic baggage—but the cultural baggage surrounding orphanhood made it even worse. It threatened to flatten my entire identity.
I took this lesson with me to Penn, where my inelegant solution to avoiding the pity of my peers was to wait to drop the bomb of my parents’ deaths until well after I had already grown close to them. Of course, this meant holding an essential part of myself at a remove for months, which—shocker—made it difficult to forge meaningful friendships.
Harder still was navigating the creative nonfiction workshops that I adored. By my junior year—eight years after my mom’s death and six years after my dad’s—I wanted to start writing about my parents, to be with them again on the page. But I worried that if I wrote about losing my parents, the feedback I would receive would be “I’m so sorry” and “I couldn’t imagine,” words that had long ago ceased to provide comfort and only served to highlight how isolating my experience actually was.
And it was indeed isolating. The only other person I knew who had lost both of their parents as a child was my own brother. Why, then, were there so many orphans in American popular culture?
I didn’t think to ask this question until more than a decade after that moment at Northwestern, when I was in my late 20s. I had long since surmounted my discomfort around sharing writing about my parents with an audience, thanks in no small part to Professor Paul Hendrickson at Penn, who ensured that my classmates gave me substantive comments during workshop. I pursued an MFA in nonfiction writing at Columbia University, where I wrote essays that plumbed my grief and sought to understand the people my parents had been before they became my parents. I even wrote an essay about why I hated being thought of as an orphan—even though that’s what I literally was—reviving an idea that I first tried to wrestle with in my Common App personal essay for college years earlier.
After I graduated from Columbia, I began focusing my writing career on cultural criticism. I returned again to that orphan essay and refocused my lens from inward to outward, picking apart the tropes that dominate representations of orphans in literature, from adventurous Huckleberry Finn to resilient and optimistic Little Orphan Annie. The more I researched, the more I realized that not only did popular fictional orphan stories fail to represent my personal experience of losing my parents, but our cultural obsession with orphans has long been unhinged from reality.
I couldn’t have known it then, but that day at Northwestern planted the seed of discomfort that grew into the curiosity that would fuel my first book, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood. Over the past few years, as I researched, reported, and wrote this book, unravelling how badly our culture’s symbolic orphans have led us astray from the harsh reality of how the United States has long treated its most vulnerable children, I have realized just how lucky my brother and I were despite our losses. We lived in an era when we never had to worry about suffering in a regimented orphanage, or being used as pawns in the social experiment of orphan trains, where religious charities sent poor children from northeastern cities to new farm towns in the Midwest and beyond. Our class and race protected us from the trauma of foster care, which disproportionately separates poor families of color.
Writing my book helped me reclaim the identity of “orphan,” in that it allowed me to counter our country’s myths and illuminate a path for a better future for children and families. But I still mourn for the teenager I was, and the way she felt she had to hide her grief and erase her parents.
Kristin Martin C’11 is the author of The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood, forthcoming from Bold Type Books in January.
