There's a discussion of sorts, in romance right now about grief. Now, split as the social medias are these days, I am only seeing one corner of it. I have some theories, and I know other do to.
First, I lost a parent in my twenties. It was hard. But it also absolutely changed how I felt about parents dying in books I read. I grew up on Disney movies where parents die all the time. As a writer I totally understand that two parents seem like so many when it comes to managing kid characters, and so sometimes it seems easier to be like they only have one parent okay, two is too many. (Obviously two is not too many, but yanno, as worldbuilders, we get mean sometimes.)
So, the first part of my argument is that the death, and the grief has always been there. Watching "Hamlet" as an adult I was struck how we tend to perceive Hamlet seeing ghosts as him going mad rather than rightly attempting to grieve his father while everyone around him is trying to move on. Ophelia 'goes mad' after her father is killed. Like they tell her her dad is dead and then are like, well, you don't seem to be handling this well. Plays move fast, but wow.
In romance a very common trope is that someone has died and now in order to get the inheritance, someone must marry. Or someone is dying, but would love to see their relatives married before they go. Or the sibling who was supposed to inherit has died, and now main character must get married. Or sibling or parent has died, and therefore the house goes to some sort of male heir, and female character must get married. Or someone is or might die, and we need to decide who will take over the business. And it would help if they were married. Or maybe they don't need to be married, but they fall in love with the person they are competing against. Okay, I could actually come up with more examples, but I will stop there. My point is the death, the dying, the grief has always been there.
Olivia Waite posited that we are seeing more dead of the cancer parents because we all went through COVID, and yet as a disease, COVID has become political in ways that cancer is not. So writers grappling with such are subbing in cancer. (To be clear, I am aware that both COVID and cancer still exist.) I think this could well be true. I certainly am seeing COVID show up in just about every genre that is not romance, and romance is so rarely a genre in lag. While COVID has shown up in some romances, including some of mine, so I am very biased, it is not yet common. It could be, as suggested, a wish to stay away from thorny political things. It could also be a result of a wish not to date the book. I think it is almost impossible to not date books. Books written pre-smartphone are obviously pre-smartphone. There are things that will date your book that you cannot plan for. But being early, or mid pandemic places the book firmly in place.
But the grief, in whatever form exists. I think many more people have experienced grief, given how many people were and are affected by COVID. So perhaps they are more aware of the prevalence of grief in romance. I think finding happy things, even when one is grieving can be one of the joys of romance. That good things await even after bad things. But I am also aware that pre-pandemic a number of people recommended a book as fluffy that contained sudden parental death as a major mid-book plot point. And when I pointed out that a characters parent dies in the middle of the book, a lot of people gave me the okay, so what's your point head tilt. We all have our own journeys with grief. The days we need a book that will let us grieve with the characters, and the days we absolutely cannot. But I suspect that maybe we are all, collectively, a little more attuned to grief. And so are noticing the grief that has been there all along.
I am a person who has lost both parents, and I think people like me deserve to see romances about characters who have lost one or more parents. I'm not saying all books need to have dead parents. And certainly we can label and recommend carefully so people can all find the books they are looking for.
