The night their dad died, the Dennison children awoke to a confusing new world.
Amy, 8, didn’t know what to think. She’d helped her father with a household chore earlier the night he died of heart arrhythmia. He was perfectly fine the last time she saw him. Her twin sister, Allie, awoke to hear her grandmother screaming, which made no sense. Her grandmother didn’t live with them. What was she doing in the house, and why was she screaming? When David, 4, learned of his father’s death, he’d just been dreaming about a farm, and he didn’t know what to think. As he wrote in a journal years later, he didn’t know that dead meant forever. The police came, and the family. Neighbors dropped by. The children wanted their father back, and, barring that, they wanted to be free to laugh or cry or do whatever they wanted without everyone looking at them.
No one can tell you how to act when you’re sad, and the Dennison children — for privacy’s sake, that’s not their real name — learned that early. Adults often just don’t get it, even the well-meaning ones.
The funeral was hard. Nothing felt right. The unveiling of the cemetery stone was hard, too. The children discussed this and other things with their mother, and they started writing down what they felt.
Friends and family members bought the children books about grief, about loss, about letting go, but the books seemed aimed at a much older crowd. The children kept writing. That was February 1996. The family moved to Florida, and then returned to Connecticut, to a pretty house in the woods near New Haven.
They kept writing, and when they felt like they’d written down everything they could think of, they and their mother, Sheri, a corporate attorney, started talking about what they’d learned.
After the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the children stapled some of the pages of their journals together to send to relief agencies around New York City.
“We knew there were a lot of kids who had become victims,” Allie says now. “We really thought what we had written might help them get through.”
Counselors told them their manuscript was helpful to kids and to counselors, who perhaps forgot how children face sadness. So the Dennison kids turned their journals into a kid-specific grief book, “Our Dad Died: The True Story of Three Kids Whose Lives Changed.” The book, published by Free Spirit Publishing in Minnesota, takes the reader through death, funeral, anniversaries, celebrations without the parent, and ways of dealing with friends who have their own ideas of what grief should be.
The book is open and raw, and, ultimately, hopeful. Boiled down, Amy, Allie and Dave want other grieving kids to know that whatever they’re feeling, it’s OK. When Amy was angry that the adults around her kept smiling during the darkest times, that was OK, too. When Allie had a pain in her heart and went to see a doctor, the doctor told her she was physically fine, but the pain she felt was grief, and that was OK, too. It’s pretty cool being an author, but the family has had plenty of other things going on. The children got involved in cleaning up beaches in their hometown, and later were recognized by the White House and the Walt Disney Co. for their environmental work. Amy and Allie just started 10th grade. Dave is in the sixth. The girls play field hockey. Dave plays soccer.
They’ve kept living, even though there will always be what each of them calls the “Dad thing.” They want to be doctors, Amy an internist, like her father. Allie talks about being a pediatrician. Dave’s still not sure. But even if they change their minds, that’s OK, too. Life does go on. It’s never the same, but it goes on.
- 7 September 2003
