New Essay on Young Adult Review Network

Usually I'm snarky, or sarcastic, or otherwise deflect-y, because THAT'S HOW PEOPLE DEAL WITH EMOTIONS, RIGHT?

Well, some people. 

Today, though, I wrote an essay for the Young Adult Review Network about one of the many absurd events that orbited around my dad's death. A version of this moment made it into my young adult novel, It Could Be Worse (still looking for representation, possible agent soul-mates!). I'll give you the classic teaser paragraph here; I'd love you to continue reading it there! 

Our Father, Who Art in Heaven (Maybe...)

Note: while I’ve tried to be as honest as possible in this essay, it’s just one person’s memory of very complicated events. It’s not “the” truth, just one version of it. -Jilly

We’d already done the hushed-voices, bedside consultation about whether it was time to pull the plugs.

We’d already suffered through the shock—in one of the endless meetings with the doctors during that last week—of learning that P., the woman we thought of as my dad’s girlfriend, had in fact secretly married him about a week after the attacks started, and in the four months that followed, had told no one. Which made her my secret-stepmother. Which  thought made the inside of my stomach itch.

We’d even managed to make it through the last, agonizing moments, after they pulled out the ventilator that had been keeping him alive; the gurgling, gasping, knocking sounds bubbling up from his weakened lungs as they tried—and failed—to draw breath; the moment, just like in the movies, when the heart monitor’s syncopated rhythm collapsed into a single, drawn-out note, filling the space where my dad used to be with its agonizing, unending screech.

Somehow, it never occurred to me to dread the meeting with the priest.

Naïve, naïve, naïve.

Read the rest at the Young Adult Review Network, an awesome spot for young adult readers and writers!