Griffin Clark

Griffin was welcomed into the world on a very cold January day to Joe and Anna Clark. His parents were ecstatic – they were the kind of people that thought of the life they were "supposed" to have (marry, have a house, have a kid) and it worked for them. They met through work and they fell in love; so much so that they were eager to have a child together. And Griffin was everything they could have wanted. Though they didn't spoil him, he understood the comfort he was coming from. He didn't want for anything, but his parents made sure that it was through hard work and not just because he "deserved" to have things given to him. It was a mixture of hard work and budgeting and living maybe a little under your means, it was living with the idea that sometimes you had to have patience or sacrifice something if you really wanted something. His family was very firmly working class and Griffin was very grateful for that. It taught him more life lessons than he could have hoped for and prepared him for the great big world. Growing up, he was maybe just a little above the other students – just a little higher on the grades, never top of his class but he was a contender for the upper ranks; his gym performances weren't the best, but he did all right; he participated in a handful of after school clubs. For the most part, Griffin sailed under the radar and he was okay with that. He didn't need to stand out like some of his peers desperately did. He'd rather keep his head down and work than be in a spotlight; being in a spotlight meant people could see you as you messed up, as you were having an off day, always ready to judge.

After graduating high school, he quickly moved into the college circuit, taking on his classes and trying to figure out what his major was going to be. Eventually he decided on what his parents thought would be a good fit for him: a lawyer. He had heard lots of jokes and bad things about lawyers, but they made decent money and he had always been strong at debate. Settling into the classes felt oddly comforting, like sleeping into a shoe that had all ready been broken in. While they could be difficult at times, Griffin still found them oddly easy, something that he took to almost naturally. He was a lawyer before he even realized he was a lawyer, he joked. It was there that he met Samantha Day, a woman going to college for social work. The two of them hit it off, finding a friendship easy and blooming quickly into a spot of romance. They dated throughout college, moving in together because it was easier than living on campus or alone, and they both had the same idea that they wanted to wait until after they graduated and had found jobs to get married. It was important to them both to be established before they took that last leap before the family grind started. Things were fine, they were happy; they graduated, they got jobs, they worked for awhile, and they got married. It was a very happy marriage until about five years down the road, Samantha wanted to talk about a family. She wanted kids, she told him, it wasn't necessarily a life long dream of hers, but it was important to her. Griffin, on the other hand, didn't want kids; he didn't hate them, but he liked the life he had, he liked doing what they always did without having to worry about a tiny person in their midst. They talked for another year about it, until eventually they decided it wasn't fair to either of them – one of them would have to sacrifice what they wanted to make the other happy and this was far too big and risked there being a poison introduced to their relationship no matter which way they went. They decided to divorce shortly after, but they remained friends.

Life continued on for Griffin; he dated off and on, but nothing was serious. His career kept advancing. He was happy. One day, though, he got the news that his father had had a stroke. It was serious. He needed to come to the hospital, so he did. He sat at his father's bedside as the older man passed away within the hour and he was wrecked. But he did what he had to do and boxed it away, pushed it down to focus on his mother. Unfortunately, his mother didn't fair too well. She was alive, she survived, but it wasn't easy, it wasn't comfortable. No one was really surprised when about six months later, she passed away too. Griffin was, at that time, thirty years old, but he couldn't help feeling a bit like he was an orphan now. Again, he did what he had to do and kept moving forward. He kept pushing himself, kept working, kept working to be at the top of his game. Griffin just kept living his life as best he could.

The rest of Griffin's story is explored in the To the Moon, Through the Stars story, The Stars Will Shine.

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