Feder shows the difficult truth of surviving a loss: that life continues to move, though not in a carefully prescribed direction. Arrows flow in different directions, intertwine with one another, and point to other experiences-depression, fury, annoyance, nail-biting, screaming, neediness, wanting to be alone, dramatic sighing, and wild laughter. At the bottom, she draws her own version. At the top, she lists out the stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Though time moves forward, Feder makes a point to show that grief does not, or at least not in the same way.Īt the end of chapter two, after watching her mother take her last breath, Feder includes a page dedicated to the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Stages of Grief.
The narrative begins when her parents drop her off at college, then moves through her mother’s death and the decade of grieving that follows. And, like Feder, my life as a motherless daughter has been a rollercoaster of crying, awkward conversations, and dead mom jokes.įeder’s memoir moves linearly through time. Like hers, my mother sewed my Halloween costumes as a child, and I deeply miss the sound of her laugh. I won’t pretend that my story exactly mirrors Feder’s, but I did see both myself and my mother in her story – my mother’s process of deterioration, and my process of living through it. My own mother died when I was a junior in college. Dancing at the Pity Party: A Dead Mom Graphic Memoir is a moving visual narrative of Feder’s grief process and how she has spent the past ten years coping with her mother’s death. When she was a freshman in college, Tyler Feder’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, and when she was a sophomore, she watched her mother die.
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