Where the Words Began

Why writing sits at the heart of this work.

Writing didn’t arrive as a choice.
It arrived as necessity.

After my daughter, Kahlia, died, language was one of the few things that didn’t abandon me. Not because it made sense of what happened, but because it allowed me to stay with what couldn’t be made sense of. Writing gave form to the chaos, weight to the love, and somewhere for the questions to exist without needing answers.

At first, it was private. Scraps of thought. Lines written in the dark. Words that weren’t meant for anyone else.

Over time, that writing began to surface. Essays. Reflections. Longer pieces that grew into books. Not as explanations. Not as lessons. But as witness. As a way of telling the truth about grief without softening it or rushing it toward resolution.

This page holds the beginnings of that work, and the writing that has grown from it.

Here you’ll find:

Kirsten’s blog
Ongoing essays and reflections written from inside grief, love, and survival. This is where thoughts are explored as they unfold, not neatly wrapped, not resolved, but honest and lived.

Books
Including The Year After Kahlia and Silence: The Truth About Suicide and Those Left Behind. These grew from the same writing practice, where words became record and resistance, memory and meaning.

Process, not perfection
Reflections on writing itself. How words arrive, disappear, repeat, and change over time. Writing as a companion to grief, not a cure for it, and never something that needs to be done “properly.”

Writing didn’t give me answers.
But it gave me somewhere to place the love, the ache, and the questions that didn’t stop.

If you’re here, you don’t need to know what to write yet.
You don’t need to begin properly, or at all.

The words will come when they’re ready.
And when they do, there’s space for them here.