Funeral for a Whale
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2023
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MFA in Creative Nonfiction
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This work is restricted for 10 years from the date listed above. No access will be permitted until the embargo has expired. Once the embargo expires the work is available only on Goucher College's campus.
Abstract
At ten, queer adoptee Michael Todd Cohen witnessed the bloody burial of a thirty-foot whale on a New England beach near his home. Five years later, in the last months and days of his adoptive father’s battle with terminal cancer, Cohen sees it as a metaphor for the life-altering secret buried between them. Then, widowed at thirty-two, when his husband is lost in a high-rise fire, Cohen struggles to make sense of a world that takes more than it gives.
This lyric field journal from the fraught borderlands of sexuality, home, family, grief, and faith asks: in the land of capitalism, who determines our worth? What precisely is the value of grief? And how do we invest in each other when futures are uncertain?