Relict is the result of the author's struggle to determine what the death of his father means to him and to find his place in his family's history while feeling himself unworthy of the legacy left by the previous generation. Does a person become something different on the day they no longer have any living parents? A child becomes an adolescent, becomes an adult. A single person becomes part of a couple, becomes a parent, becomes again single either as a widow or through divorce. But we have no word for the stage of life that begins once both a person's parents have died. This book is an attempt to document the author's feelings of grief, and to reconnect to a lost past through stories about ancestors, all without losing sight of a hopeful future.