Sometimes I ask myself why I even bother to write, to share my story. It's a question that I've asked myself a million times, especially on days like today, when I'm at a loss for words and the pain is all-consuming. But I always come back to the same moment—the moment my world changed forever.
It was the night Dylan died.
The pedestrian struck outside our neighborhood in a hit and run turned out to be my son.
In a panic, I had immediately driven to the scene after seeing the Facebook post - my own son not having come from his walk that night. Hysterically, I approached an officer, begging to know if it was my son. The officer led me across the road and left me standing there as he went to handle the scene. He didn’t have to answer my question—I already knew. Years of crisis work had trained me to read situations like this. It was Dylan.
Under that night sky, my legs trembling beneath me, I realized I knew nothing about the pain of grief. I had read every book—on parenting, psychology, even grief itself. I had spent years learning about human pain and suffering, yet none of that prepared me for this. How could it?
The glass house I had spent my life building seemed to shatter as I finally hit the ground refusing to leave the scene of the accident, hoping for one last moment with my son.
Life had already taught me hardship. I grew up feeling alienated in a home others easily percieved as loving, the all American home. What people didn't see was how different I felt within my complex blended family. As a young, single mother, I raised two very different children while carrying the weight of society’s labels and judgments. I had left an abusive relationship, tried so hard to give my children a better life, a life away from alcoholism. I knew what it felt like to be pushed aside, to struggle alone. But none of those experiences compared to the agony of losing Dylan. I knew I had to share this pain and help other's understand. To open up a society that allowed others like me to feel our pain.
You see, Dylan was more than just a son to me, we shared so many conversations about life and death. He understood suffering because he lived it too. He had been the quiet, invisible child. Like me, he often felt unseen. We weren’t alone in those conversations—at least I wasn't, not until now. Without him here, the silence feels unbearable.
No amount of knowledge could have prepared me for this loneliness, this intellectual thirst to explore the meaning of life and suffering. The one person who could understand this better than anyone is gone. I felt truly alone, regardless, of those who surrounded me with love.
Looking back, I can see how much faith I had in theory and knowledge. I thought I could understand pain if I just studied it enough. I even wrote my graduate paper on integrating two opposing psychological theories: Freud's psychoanalysis and Rogers’ humanism. My professor thought the two didn’t fit, but I believed they did. You can’t keep putting a Band-Aid on a festering wound without uncovering its cause. You have to dig deep to understand human behavior. I knew that anger and pain don’t disappear just because you try to suppress them. No amount of counting to ten is going to do the trick!
But even with that understanding, I dismissed other worldly perspectives. I scoffed at transpersonal psychology because it didn’t fit my rational worldview. Freud made sense to me, but Jung? He seemed too abstract. It wouldn't be until the year before Dylan’s death that I stumbled upon a film about a man often compared to Freud. His story opened my mind to new ideas, ideas I couldn’t fully grasp until I was forced to face my deepest pain.
After Dylan died, I sought out others who might understand. But no one could match the depth of understanding that Dylan had. He was unique—curious, passionate, and wise beyond his years. He had a vision for a better world, and we shared that vision in our conversations. Now, as I try to carry that vision forward, I feel lost in a world that seems irreparably broken.
I wake up haunted by questions: Is there a better way? Can we heal? Can we learn to speak to one another again without tearing each other apart? These questions drive me to write, even when I’m not sure if anyone is listening.
It causes those around me pain, those who can't understand my need to find meaning within my life of struggles.
I realize my family doesn’t expect me to return to who I was. They know I’ll never be the same career-driven woman, the mother, the wife, the daughter I once was. But I think they wish I could. They don’t understand why I feel this urgency to share my story, to speak my truth without apology. To spend hours and hours analyzing my own pain to find meaning from it. What they don’t see, is that resilience isn’t born in comfort. You can’t move forward without confronting the harm that shaped you. How can I hope to help others if I'm not authentic about what shaped me?
Healing, I’ve learned, requires bringing the unconscious to light. Carl Jung said, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate." You can’t ignore harm that was done. You have to face it head-on, not just for yourself but for those around you. That doesn’t mean cutting off the people who make you uncomfortable. It means finding meaning in your pain. Every hurt carries a lesson. Once you accept that you control your suffering, in this moment, you can choose to let go—but only after learning the lesson it has to teach. Otherwise you will keep repeating the same karma, waiting for it to cure itself.
I know my family sometimes thinks I’m hurting them by bringing up the past, but that’s not it. I’ve accepted that I chose this pain. I want to share it so that nobody else feels alone in their pain.
I know I made so many mistakes along the way, trying to make sense, trying to understand. In the end, the reality is, we were all doing the best we could with what we knew at the time. I’ve never claimed to be a better than anyone else. We all make mistakes. But I ask my pain be acknowledged, not brushed under the rug to make others feel comfortable. Real growth comes when we acknowledge those mistakes and learn from them. When we accept that we are all human, we are also all unique in our needs and desires.
Yes, this mindset has hurt me, but I respect the honesty it has fostered—especially with my children who astonish me daily with the insight they have gathered by questioning life, authority, and what society perceived as 'norm'. Even when that means they are questioning me!
So maybe that’s why I write. I write because it isn’t just my story. It’s Dylan’s story, my family’s story, and the story of all the pain and love that shaped me. I write to offer these lessons to anyone who might need them. I write because stories are what keep us alive... And maybe more than anything I write because I have to believe that all my struggles and pain have meaning, to help let other's know, they are not so alone in their own journey.
This is why I still write.
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