About the Author
Thank you so much for being here. I know you have many demands on your time and attention, and I appreciate you spending some of it with me.
Photo Credit: Hugh Saffel
I play many roles in my life. The one that brought me to the writing of Never Really Left is that of Hugh’s mom. I reflect on—with a bit of humor—how my husband (also named Hugh) and I created a pros and cons list to help us decide if we wanted to be parents. Neither of us were people who just always knew we wanted to have kids. We ultimately decided that if we didn’t have kids, we would likely regret it. Becoming a mother is one of the greatest gifts of my lifetime, even though it brought with it the deepest heartbreak imaginable after my boy Hugh died at the age of twenty from fentanyl poisoning. Would I ever want to go back and make a different decision about being a parent? Not a chance. I am such a lucky mom to have loved Hugh that much, and to be loved by him.
I am also Mom to Jordan, two years younger than Hugh. Jordan is an entirely different person on an entirely different path—and momming Jordan is a completely different experience than momming Hugh. I’m equally grateful for and cherish that role in my life, as well as my role as a happy and grateful partner-in-life to my husband, Hugh. When you get married, you have absolutely no idea what’s coming, and our thirtyplus years together have been surprisingly easy, and there has been much laughter. How lucky are we that we’ve grown together, especially after tragedy struck?
One of the longest roles I’ve played in my life is that of dancer. Growing up in Bend, Oregon, my mom enrolled me in ballet classes when I was seven. You know how parents sign their kids up for a million things and hope that something “sticks”—something that your kids feel passionate about doing? Man, did dance stick with me. I have been a dancer ever since and am still performing at my ripe age, with a company of mature dancers.
I’m also a marketer by profession, a traveler, a lover of all arts, and a writer. For decades, I’ve written about my experiences and have had stories published about holistic health news and arts festivals. Little did I know that it was all really priming my pump and building my voice for the thing I would never, ever want to write about—my journey after the death of my son. No way would I have had the courage to put pen to paper about this if not for the persistence of my Grammy telling me repeatedly, from the Other Side, that I was supposed to.
If you haven’t read the book yet, I hope you will. I hope you will walk away with great hope and comfort that the relationships with our loved ones absolutely do not end with physical death. They are more here than they ever were before. I certainly didn’t expect this, but now my experience is that Hugh is very much right here, right now—he was never anywhere else. And I hope you will pass the book along to anyone else who grieves and aches for one they miss so dearly. My wish is that it finds its way into the hands of anyone who could benefit from my story.