The Purple Balloon is a book that grew out of a conversation I had with a woman Ann Armstrong Dailey who created Children’s Hospice International. And this is an organization that she created it here in Washington. An organization that is politically active but also active in all things related to making the lives of children and families of those children, children with life ending situations, mostly illnesses of some kind.
And well the reason she started this group, as I understand it, while there was a lot going on for adults in this situation and a lot of thought and a lot of work and thinking about it, when it came to children, there was much less and partly that was the case because parents are so understandably and necessarily involved and it’s not just you who is, who might be dying, who — you have a strong voice as an adult.
A child does not have that strong voice and has to come through the parents. The parents of course are completely wrapped up in that child and often the other aspect of that situation as I have come to know from Ann is that the child is often leading the parents and the child often is the one who is comforting the parents.
Showing the parents that where we are going, understanding what’s happening more than the parents because it’s too impossible for the parents to do. So Ann said I went to book with this. Initially I said I thought she was just asking me for advice as someone who works in children’s books and I gave her my best thoughts and then I spoke to Anne Schwartz and Lee Wade at Schwartz and Wade and they were intrigued and they said all right but you have to do the book.
I was thinking maybe it would be a number of illustrators, that seemed to make sense but Ann said no you make this book. So suddenly I thought well I’ll see if I can do it. I have worked with different children over the years and I have a number of close friends who died as young people who were exactly in that situation so I felt like I could do it, maybe.
And my initial, my initial approach was to make it about a particular boy that I know and who has passed away and he had a muscular atrophy kind of situation and he was a great wheelchair hockey player and I thought okay maybe I’ll just kind of channel his own self and, and so the book began with — the very first lines were, Death sucks but hockey rocks — and it went on from there. It went through his day.
Well, Ann was a little gassed at this but — Anne Schwartz I should say, but Ann Armstrong Daily said, “Yeah, right great.” But she also said she did hope that it would be a more, more broad book that could encompass all kinds of children, not just a boy who happens to like hockey and I understood that.
But I was sort of — I was pleased enough that Ann was not dismissive of
