Alicia Afterimage was born from, again, my observation that there was a tremendous need for a book like this. And it happened
it happened in a very unusual way. When my daughter passed in 2004, I was
one of my first thoughts was how do I tell her sister?
It happened on a Friday evening. And the Saturday morning my second thought was how do I tell all her friends in the pom squad? How are they going to feel? And even immersed in grief, I was feeling for these kids and for the parents of these kids. What are they going to do when they find out?
So that was the very first thought that I had about is there anything out there for teens that lose a close friend? Three days later at the funeral mass I was struck by the hundreds of adolescents that were there of all socioeconomic backgrounds, of all ethnicities, of all shades.
And I wondered, “How did Alicia touch them? How are they going to go on?” So I started interviewing them. With their permission I recorded every single interview. And during these sessions in my very beautiful sunlit studio, I didn’t take any notes. I was there as a mother. I cried with them, I laughed with them, we remembered, we had the most wonderful times just reminiscing.
And what happened was that my memories and their memories joined, and then they enlarged each other. And all of a sudden Alicia became
more for both of us than what she ever was for each one of us apart. And I learned through many months, because this interview lasted for more than a year and a half, and I interviewed 22 of her friends, I learned that teens have a very difficult time when they are grieving. I learned that they feel very isolated. They don’t want to talk to the counselors because why would they know about what they’re going through? They didn’t know about Alicia. You know, they didn’t know about their friend. Why would they know?
I learned that they won’t talk to their parents because, of course, many of them
they don’t want to worry their parents. They want to fit, they want to be normal. And it is very difficult to be normal, to go back to your SAT studies, your visits to colleges, your, you know, you have to do all these tests for the different seven periods that you have in high school.
And you still have to smile and be your normal self when you are internally going through a lot. So what happened in that studio was a marvelous thing.
They still visit me. It’s just wonderful. I see in each one of my daughter’s friends, a little bit of my own daughter. And that, I think, is a marvelous thing.
And I thank each one of these 22 teens that opened up to me and told me the most
the most personal feelings and what they were going through because they are now models in this book. Through their voices, other teens that unfortunately might have to go through a similar loss will have a book where they can see themselves.
They can recognize their feelings. They can see that “Oh, I feel exactly like Amanda. I can’t talk to anyone. I can’t really go back to my same
my same lunch group because it’s too painful. I can’t. I just
I feel like her.”
Or no, “I feel like Chad. Now, all of a sudden, I feel closer to God because I do know of someone that I truly love that is with God right now.” Or. “I feel like
like
like Lauren that back when it happened, she was so connected to Alicia, and she really believed in an afterlife. But now she doesn’t anymore. She’s lost all that. She doesn’t know where Alicia has gone. For her there’s a wall.”
So, teens that are grieving will have models. And this… this is really, you know, thanks to these wonderful young people that open up their hearts and minds to me.