There is no doubt that dead is a tough word. It is even tougher to handle when attached to the name of a child. If there were a top-10 list of unimaginable life experiences, the death of a child would be number one.
On August 20, 2001, the unimaginable happened to me: my daughter, Kalei, was killed in a car crash.
She was 16 and a half years old.
Desperate for insight into the new world in which I found myself, I bought every book about death that I could lay my hands on. Most of what I read back then focused on the primary feelings or emotions associated with the five-stages-of-grief cycle.
I did not need someone to describe anger or depression to me; what I needed was someone to interpret the heightened situational postapocalyptic bent and twisted emotions I was feeling and to rationalize them in a way that made sense to me.
To make matters even worse, it felt like the books and the people I encountered were determined to have me acknowledge an eventually-it-will-get-better perspective of the future that I was not even remotely capable of comprehending. Reading about or being told too soon and too often that my world was going to get better just made me angry, for I could not imagine a future with those words in it.
Some truths are so painful; most people would rather believe in an altered it-will-get-better reality in order to create a more palatable picture for themselves. In the case of the death of a child, they do that by trying to pretend the grieving process will follow the less scary model associated with the normal circle-of-life, live- long-and-die-elderly design, which sadly is nothing like the actual journey.
Could there be a way to communicate the truth about unimaginable grief—to help not only those caught in the grip of its brutality but, equally as important, those who support them? For that to happen, emotionally powerful information needed to be presented in a way that spoke to everyone, not just the grieving.
Is there a risk that increased knowledge might force parents of living children into becoming one with the real pain and agony of a grieving parent’s world? No, that kind of knowing comes only to those who are forced to live that reality. The fact of the matter is, no matter how many unimaginable curtains you peek behind, you will never be able to truly imagine the death of your child.
This book offers an opportunity to advance our thinking about life, death and the incredibly complex world of unimaginable grief.
It is real; it is raw and it absolutely resonates.
