“Spend a day with me…walk a mile in my shoes.”

You have undoubtedly heard the saying – “You can do this the easy way or you can do it the hard way!” However, what if the task at hand, as in grief, is already hard? The reality is there is no easy way to grieve. When grieving a loss – whether it is a death, catastrophic injury, chronic illness or transitional loss – the journey is hard, long, and difficult. Furthermore, the grief journey can be longer and more difficult if we do not engage in the process.

Can someone tell me?
Where is my son is he lost for ever?
How come he can not talk to me,
what is his purpose now?
If he is here then how come he does
Not know me?

Visits from demons in the night
I awoke in a cold sweat, my nightclothes soaked and clinging to my clammy, quivering body. My heart was racing like a speeding jaguar and my breathing was so erratic, it felt as if some unseen hand had me by the throat, squeezing the life out of me!

The single most important element to successfully surviving a brain injury is learning to live with the inevitable mix of impairments—physical, cognitive, emotional, and/or behavioral—that accompany a major insult to the brain.

In my favorite photo of us, we’re astride Ken’s BMW motorcycle in our Tucson driveway. Ken is laughing at the camera as I, sitting behind him with arms clasped around his waist, kiss his ear. We wore none of our usual protective equipment—full-face helmets, boots, jackets, gloves—because we had jumped on the bike strictly for the photo.

What would have happened if he had died that night? What if, while pacing in that small private waiting room, the doctor had walked in and told us they did everything they could and he was gone?

This story is about a young man of 16. A young man that had the sense of humor of a comedian, was full of one-liners and loved WWII history. A young man that was an honor student, a son, a brother and had the dream of one day becoming a pilot

When my seventeen-year-old son, Daniel, sustained a severe brain injury in a car crash, we didn’t know that Tic Tac Toe would be an important element to his recovery.

Dixie Fremont-Smith Coskie’s articles by herself and two of her children give readers a special glimpse into the many ways that a traumatic brain injury can touch every single member of a family. Her son, Paul, who had a brain injury, also gives his point of view.