The origins
The story behind the story
My first book, Holding Grief: A Dad’s Memoir, grew out of lived experience of love, loss, and the ripple effects that reshape identity over time. The story began more than thirty years ago and was first shared publicly in my Agawam Advertiser News column, “Life Through Stories” (originally titled “Let’s Talk About It”). Written from my perspective as a marriage and family therapist, the column traced grief not as a single event but as an ongoing force that disrupts family systems, challenges roles, and asks who we are becoming in the wake of loss.
Decades later, I returned to these writings to complete the story with the clarity that only time allows. Holding Grief revisits and reshapes the narrative, not to preserve the past as it was, but to name what endured, let go of what no longer fits, and honor how love and loss continue to shape who we become. Its forthcoming companion book, The Scent of Self (working title), takes a different path by returning to the original newspaper columns much as they were first written, preserving the voice and moment in which they met readers. Together, these books reflect the lived process of becoming through family, faith, trauma, humor, and ordinary moments, offered as a shared human invitation to consider how we hold loss, change over time, and grow into something new.
