“What is clear is my bone-deep need to be my own witness, to figure it out in writing, in remembered conversations … I see how I learn from elders who teach as they talk, who allow me to witness their aging. Their stories imprint me. Like an archaeologist, I brush away years of sand from emotional fossils; this allows me to see connections between their worlds and mine. In showing me how to go backwards in order to move forward, they turn me into my own teacher.”
— Clarissa Green, Grownupedness, 2020 (pp. 24–25)
Clarissa P. Green has spent her life exploring and teaching how family relationships are changed by aging, illness and death. In her decades-long career as a therapist, Green has helped families reconfigure their relationships and conceptions of self in the face of trauma and aging.
Drawing on personal experience and her years as a family therapist, Clarissa Green brings to life her deep understanding of the stories, insights, and struggles that shape the ways families navigate relationships changed by aging, illness and death.
CNFC co-founder Betsy Warland (author of Lost Lagoon/Lost in Thought) provided the forward. She writes,
“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.”
Grownupedness is available now from Granville Island publishing, Amazon.ca, Chapters/Indigo, and local bookstores.