More Than Papers, Voices of Resilience 2018

Teachers won’t give me bad grades on assignments when I talk about my dead father. I practiced trying on his clothes when I was little. They were large and comfy and smelled like something I wasn’t. One time at a sleepover at my house I let Genny borrow his sweatpants. She didn’t give them back for 4 years. He always thought this was funny.

The clothes are no longer his and will never really be mine. We both have no home. I wear them like my own when they are all I have left.

I wrote a four page paper in 2 hours for my professor about functionalism’s application to death rituals; to death rituals.

I described the pertinence of process and the way it yields emotional conditions. My professor couldn’t manage to spell my name right in emails. He took to sending me a rather detailed one after I emailed “my dad killed himself”.

The professor praised my ability to contextualize rituals in functionalist theory while detailing my own painful paradoxes. As if paradoxes, dead dads, or college is easy.