Photo courtesy of Living Water Publishing
Junior Katie Williams recently published a book chronicling her coping with her brother's death.
Some are black and leather-bound with stiff pages. Others are small and worn, with a lock proudly guarding the contents and a tiny key stowed securely in a sock drawer.
Journals may reveal the name of a secret crush or, as in the case of the large, hardcover notebook junior Katie Williams received as a Christmas gift, they bear the contents of the heart—words so deep from the soul, that they can only be written.
Over a four-year span, Williams used this journal as a necessary outlet for all her pent-up emotions following her brother's suicide and, much to her surprise, the journal would be published in a thin book called Journey of the Heart .
The first entry in Williams' diary marks the one-year anniversary of her older brother Gabe's death. The journal apparently intended for “Notes” with the cute Anne Geddes photo on the front was transformed into what Williams described as her “Journal of Mourning,” and knowingly waited by her bed for the next entry that was sure to come.
“The first year [I was] trying to just get through each day,” Williams said. “I didn't even think about writing then because it was too fresh.”
While friends and family members thronged her house in memory of Gabe and in support of the family, Williams, saying she was working on homework, picked up the journal that would soon be published and wrote.
“[That] night, I got it all out,” she said. “There was so much in me that I could have written about it forever.”
Williams struggled to jot the words down as fast as they came from her heart and found the therapeutic nature of writing helped her endure her brother's absence.
“I remember that first honest prayer, that time when I came to the Lord, broken and unable to handle the pain myself,” Williams said in her book. “I was looking for help, and He gave me the peace that surpasses all understanding.”
Through a series of events and encouragement from friends, Williams turned her own personal diary into a book with the goal of helping others deal with the loss of a close friend or family member to suicide.
This thin volume is almost entirely comprised of Williams' journal entries, with memories and stories of the brother-sister relationship sprinkled throughout in such a way that at the close of the book, the reader feels a personal connection with the subject.
The entries are written with poignant honesty and reprinted without any additions and minimal editing for Williams desired to publish it in such a way as to preserve the distinct nature as “a story of hope that anyone can relate to,” she said.
“The appeal [of the book] is the personal story,” Williams said. “It's completely real, even down to the grammar.”
Even as Williams described writing in her diary as “emptying my cup,” so the reader is continually confronted with the deep sense of loss, the knowledge that life will never be the same and the growth that accompanies learning to move on.
In the entry dated August 27, 2003, Williams writes, “And of greater importance that [sic] his smell and his clothes, are how I choose to remember him and be grateful for the things he did give me. Because it is both his life and his death that I respond to that really shape how he has affected me so powerfully.”
Although Journey of the Heart is one person's account of personal tragedy, growth and healing, the underlying themes relate to anyone because “everyone can relate to having a family struggle and [knowing] what pain is,” Williams said.
Williams said people who have had a loss in their family, cannot typically read her journal straight through, but need to take it in chunks, while others whose lives have been untouched by the death of a loved one can read it almost as a story. Although not a typical book, Journey of the Heart has a definite story line as the reader progresses through Williams' pain and loss and the eventual healing she discovered.
Currently, Williams' goal is to place her book on a shelf at Barnes & Noble under the category of “Self Help.” Under this heading, she hopes to be able to reach a more secular market with her personal experience and the underlying theme throughout the journal of a deep faith and trust in God.
“My ‘journey of the heart' . . . began with me wishing my brother Gabe was in my arms, and ending up with me in God's arms,” Williams said.
Journey of the Heart can be purchased online at www.livingwaterpub.com, which provides a poignant introduction by Williams about her journal. For immediate purchase, contact Williams at kgwilliams@hillsdale.edu.