A special foreword from Seth King commemorating the one-year anniversary of
The Summer Remains
“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.”
- Kait Rokowski
Grief has been described a million different ways by a million different souls, but I’d call it a neighbor. Grief moves in next door and takes up permanent residence, and you can ignore it, deny it, or even grow comfortable with it and accept it – but it will remain with you for as long as you live.
I didn’t really know this when I first set out to write the book that ended up changing my life. I thought I was going to turn sadness into triumph and be done with it. I was two or three years out of the death of my brother at the hands of an incompetent doctor, and his loss was still everywhere I looked. How could it not have lingered? His wasn’t a typical death. He was thirty years old, he had just graduated from medical school, he had an unparalleled passion for life and adventure and humanity, and he had a young wife and two beautiful children. (And eight months after his death, those two children became three. He never knew about his third daughter.) People who knew him still gasp when they think about what a waste it all was. I thought that sitting down and pouring my grief into the pages of this book would heal me. I was so right, and so, so wrong.
The Summer Remains came to me at a very peculiar moment in my life. Looking back, I was clinically depressed, although of course I did not even know what that term meant at the time. I was going broke, I was one month away from being homeless, and I had no backup plan. So when Martin started calling to me, saying he wasn’t finished, I couldn’t deny him. I’ll never forget where I was when the voice started speaking to me, actually. So I took all my brother’s traits – an unusually strong passion for life, a sense of wonder at the universe, a massive stubborn streak – and turned him into a character named Summer. I love her more than anything. She is funny and independent and so, so special, but that’s not to say she didn’t almost kill me, too. The writing process was so brutal I was often on the edge of vomiting, but I kept going. Today, I suppose this was my own form of bloodletting – I’d gone straight into caring for Martin’s children and wife after his death, and therefore I’d never allowed myself to feel anything. In three years, I’d only cried a handful of times. I had to be strong for the kids, and so that’s what I did. Until I started writing. I finally opened up the gates I didn’t even know I’d closed, and at last I let out all the anger (and anguish) I’d been pushing into the corner.
At the end of the writing process, though, I hit another closed door. According to the publishing powers in New York, my book was hard to pin into a single category and hit on no current trends, and there was also fear that a book with a female narrator written by a male could be an awkward pitch to publishers. Sick and tired of being faced with dead ends, I held my breath and pressed publish on Amazon’s self-publishing platform. I had absolutely no idea what would happen next.
One person read the book and told ten people. Those ten people then told a hundred more. Through word of mouth the book started trickling across the country, and then the world. It was not a huge hit, but it was enough to transform my life and enable me to move away from my embattled family for the first time in my life. (That sounds strange to say, since I was twenty-five at the time, but the situation was more complicated than I could ever explain here.) It spread across the world, in very small doses, but those doses were still enough to inspire readers to email me the most beautiful messages I’ve ever received. Bearing my pain to the Internet was an uncharacteristic and perhaps impulsive decision, but the letters I got from people in similar situations made all the bloodletting worth the pain.
This is from a note I posted on social media after the book started spreading:
I have no delusions that this book is a megahit, and I know that in the great scheme of things, it is still a speck of dust on the lens of the world. But change is not measured in leagues as insignificant as worldly or monetary success. Every human that reads the book is another human that now knows my brother lived and breathed here on this planet; every soul the story sinks into can be counted as another of his accomplishments after his actual time to accomplish things was cut so short. Now that my brother’s lessons are in lights, even dim lights like this, I just wanted to say thank you.
The first stages of grief, for me at least, involved shock and anger and fury. I’m not sure if I believe humans go anywhere after life, but I do know they leave things behind. Everyone who knew my brother agreed that there was a sort of anger around his life and departure – the energy felt dark, stormy, angry; like he hadn’t left on good terms. We all knew he wasn’t looking back and smiling, not in the beginning at least. But lately, for the first time, we’ve felt peace. I hope it has something to do with this book. And I hope he’s floating on.
Martin’s been gone for four years now, and I miss him every day. Of course, there’s a sadness that he’s not here to see what his life has done. There’s a sadness, period, that he’s gone. As anyone who has ever lost someone knows, I simply miss him. I would give anything for another day, another hour, another walk on the pier under the sun. I miss the way he laughed and the way he waddled when he walked and the way he wasn’t afraid to be as goofy as he wanted. But I’m okay. I have accepted grief as my neighbor. And his legacy is still around, in the form of the book you are reading.
The harsh reality of the media business, especially today, means that without friends at publishing houses – or a last name like Kardashian or Jenner – it is almost impossible to get a big project out to the world, no matter the merits of your work. I’m bigger now, career-wise, but I am no Jenner by any means. I’ve never made a bestseller list, and this book was never even purchased by a publisher. But I don’t care. It still made the mark that my brother couldn’t. He’s found a short second life, and I’m grateful.
This evening I’m going to walk to Martin’s favorite pier where I took the original cover photo of this book while on my first date with the love of my life, and I’m going to drink a can of Martin’s favorite beer for him. Because victories don’t have to be on a cosmic scale for them to still be victories. He died before his time, but his existence still touched a young medical student in the Philippines and an elderly woman in South Africa and a mother in Chicago. You are all part of the global tapestry that made him matter and turned his blood into poetry. Thank you forever.
This is The Summer Remains.
- Seth King
Florida
March 2016