Our Story

Everyone experiences some form of grief in this life. Sometimes it is sudden, like the loss of a relationship or a move. Sometimes it is more obvious, like divorce or death. Sometimes it is subtle, like when we take our children to college. I had always understood the concept of grief. I never imagined I would know it so intimately.

On August 8, 1998, my family was in a violent rollover accident with my four young children on the drive home from a summer vacation in Colorado. My son Johnny died. My son Christopher survived a catastrophic brain injury and had to relearn how to walk, talk, and so much more, while my other two had to grieve the loss of a sibling and witness and grieve the losses their brother experienced and his long road of rehabilitation.

From that day forward, our lives would be defined as before the accident and after the accident.

What is rarely said about a day like that is who else is grieving in it. Christopher's brain injury became the story most understood, the visible one, the one with a hospital and a timeline. Johnny's death became the story everyone grieved with us, publicly and openly. But there were two other children in that car who lost a brother and, in a different way, lost the brother sitting beside them, the one who came home from the hospital changed. Sibling grief is often the least tended grief in a family, and it does not end when childhood does. It travels into the choices a person makes about work, about family, about how much of themselves they are willing to let anyone see. I have watched it in my own children for over twenty-five years, and I have come to believe that a family's grief is never really one grief. It is as many griefs as there are people in the room, each one moving at its own speed, each one needing to be seen on its own terms.

Over the years since, I have not only lived the grieving process as it continues. I have studied it, survived it, and built a career as a licensed clinical social worker working with mothers, fathers, and families who have lost a child, and with the siblings, partners, and communities who grieve alongside them and are so often overlooked. I want to reach the people in the throes of the deepest pain from a loss like this. I also want to reach the people standing beside them, trying to help, and not knowing how.