And She Was Never the Same Again is a book about you. It is about your family and your friends. Everyone you've ever met, and all the strangers you have yet to meet. It takes you on a journey of gains and losses that stretch generations, cultures, identities, and decades of time. Losses that are individual and collective, death and non-death. It awakens you to the inevitable and makes you look at the things most people want to avoid seeing. It explores near-death experiences, medical, individual, and intergenerational trauma, the stigmatized death of a partner, perfectionism, death's destruction of a family's structure, athletics, chronic illness paired with the denial of death, first loves, identity transitions throughout life, and the gaping holes that become permanent fixtures within us when those we love the most die.
Each chapter is told through in-depth narratives crafted by weaving together key player's perspectives as you are taken on a family's multigenerational journey of loss. Each chapter concludes with a synthesis of how grief was manifested and maintained over time within and outside the self. It educates you on various aspects of grief and encourages you to take away questions for yourself and your loved ones.
It is not a "how-to" book. There is not just one way to grieve, and to suggest there are universal, concrete steps that must be taken discredit the human experience of suffering and the uniqueness we each embody on our respective paths through pain. You will feel, you will learn, you will grow, and hopefully, you will never be the same again.