Flights

The only thing that Chaya, an elderly woman in Mississippi, David, her estranged son in California and Leah, a nineteen-year-old college student in Maine have in common is that they are all unexpectedly confronted with the death of a loved one: and this is enough, and this is too much. As these three people traverse their own journeys through grief, they will question the structural systems surrounding mourning, they will interrogate the impossibility of continuing their lives with a rift through them, and they will all inevitably be disappointed by the deeply unfair nature of death. The reader will be forced to ask themselves what it means to be a mother, a husband, a sister, a father and a human being suffering the absurdities of life and loss.

Flights is a cross-genre lyrical novel that integrates both narrative and non-fiction excerpts from a wide variety of sources in order to examine the complexities of grief. It seeks to unravel the broken social systems surrounding the grief process and the structures dictating decorum immediately following a death. Flights is a novel that demands the reader to examine the gaps between those who have been affected by grief and asks them to bridge those gaps with understanding in an intimate and unflinching way.