CHAPTER 1, PART 1
One day, my life changed at the utterance of three words about my son Logan: “… and he died.” My world went from the familiar to the surreal in less than two seconds, but I am not alone. Jennifer’s son Tony died from epilepsy at the age of sixteen while running track at high school. Mary’s son Sean was murdered. Hazel, an eighty-six-year-old writing companion of mine, lost her son Peter over thirty years ago in a car accident. A close friend’s son died of a drug overdose six months before my son Logan died of the same cause. Doreen lost her baby less than 24 hours after birth. My in-laws had lost their daughter Carol Ann due to drowning over fifty years prior to their own deaths. Shirley, a woman I met at a Junior Achievement banquet, lost her daughter to leukemia decades earlier. Another friend’s son hung himself.
CHAPTER 1, PART 2
You have suffered the horror of losing a child. This loss comes in different forms and wears many faces, and our experiences differ. All of us—mourning a child may suffer many of the same grief symptoms—not all to the same severity, not all in the same order—and we might experience less or none of one symptom while having an overload of another. From the first knowledge of the loss, you have begun the work of reframing your brain to fit the unfamiliar. It is a process, and not a quick one, but what my friend Dorothy calls “mind work” might ease the burden: the active choice of an individual to work on how your brain views this horrible new world.
CHAPTER 1, PART 3
This book contains stories of children lost to us. So if you, too, have lost a child, this book might cause upsetting emotions to surface, but it is meant to help you cope with these emotions. By knowing how others dealt with different aspects of grieving, you might pick up some information helpful to you, and that is the hope of all the women who graciously allowed me to interview them about the deaths of their children. I offer them my thanks, and to you, I offer the hope that you might gain a new way of restructuring your life to make it bearable. Or, if nothing else, from reading this book, you will gain the knowledge that YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
