Forever Kalei’S Mom: A Story About Life, My Child’S Death and What Forever Really Means

By Lorene Holizki

In the space of a heartbeat, author Lorene Holizki was thrust into a world she did not know or want. On August 20, 2001, the unimaginable happened; her 16-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Kalei, was killed instantly in a head-on car crash.

Desperate for insight into the emotions that threatened to crush her from the inside out, Holizki learned everything she could about her different world and new life. Along the way, she discovered there was an entire lifetime housed within the world of grief. In Forever Kaleis Mom, she offers a deeply personal analysis of death and her journey through the grieving process. Divided into three sections, this memoir gives a sense of Holizkis relationship with her daughter, discusses the inner turmoil of the unimaginable grief and shares how grief and the future learn to cohabitate.

At times heartbreaking, Forever Kaleis Mom discusses the lessons she has learned during the process. It presents an honest look at the chaotic mental and emotional grieving journey from Holizkis perspective as a mother.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491768198

Lorene Holizki

Lorene Holizki has written and published several technical papers about the grain-transportation and natural-gas industries. She is a senior business analyst in natural-gas processing and transportation in her hometown of Calgary, Alberta.

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Copyright © 2015 Lorene Holizki.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-6820-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-6819-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015909282

iUniverse rev. date: 7/22/2015

Contents

Author’s Note

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Preface

A Lifetime Ago

Chapter 1 Once upon a Time

Chapter 2 There Lived a Hawaiian Princess

Chapter 3 They Travelled to a New Kingdom Far Away

Chapter 4 The End

A Lifetime I Could Not Imagine

Chapter 5 The First Step

Chapter 6 No! No! No!

Chapter 7 Mother Nature and Man’s Little Blue Pills

Chapter 8 La-La Land

Chapter 9 The Red Phone

Chapter 10 God Talk

Chapter 11 Balancing Life in Two Universes

Chapter 12 Grief Cruelty, Mine

Chapter 13 What If?

Chapter 14 Why?

Chapter 15 Understanding D-E-A-D

Chapter 16 Blame

Chapter 17 Thought Transition Bridges

Chapter 18 God’s Will

A Lifetime Ahead

Chapter 19 Like an Animal Caught in a Trap

Chapter 20 Memories

Chapter 21 Faith

Chapter 22 It Happened Only to You

Chapter 23 A Secret Life

Chapter 24 Future Blackboard

Chapter 25 The Student Becomes the Teacher

Chapter 26 Forever

Biography

Treasures

For

K

alei

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A flower that is loved

Author’s Note

To write Forever Kalei’s Mom, I relied on the personal stories I have written over the years; interviews with people who were close to my daughter, Kalei; information from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; court documents; and my own memory of all the associated events that occurred.

There are no fictional characters or composite events in this book.

If I took liberty in the telling of a story, I did so only when my words had no impact on either the truth or the substance of the event.

If you are grieving or supporting a loved one in unspeakable pain, please know I did my best to present the stories in a way that follows the natural passage of time; however, the wildness of the grieving process sometimes made that difficult to do.

There were times when I was sure I had grasped the meaning of a lesson in its entirety one year, only to find myself circling back and rethinking the subject four years later. While that might seem confusing at times, I felt compelled to present the chaotic mental and emotional grieving journey in as honest a manner as possible, even if it gives the reader pause every now and then. That is just how grief works.

Foreword

The first time I met Lorene, she was kneeling down beside Kalei’s grave. She was gently and lovingly cleaning and polishing her daughter’s memorial marker. Before she left, she leaned over and kissed the hard, cold stone that separated her from her child.

Watching her from my son’s grave nearby, I could feel her pain. I knew at that moment we would become friends.

For nearly 14 years, we have cried together, laughed together and survived together.

Love for her child gave her the strength to relive so many dark moments in order to write this book.

Faith in the knowledge that she will see her beloved daughter again kept her going when sorrow and pain tried to make her stop.

I wish I had never met her, but I am also glad I did.

Sandra Alley

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the friends and family members who encouraged me to finish this book. As it has taken nearly 14 years, their patience is quite admirable.

My sister, Karen’s, empathetic support and amazingly thoughtful Angel Kalei gifts provided the background for many of my lessons and stories.

This book would not have seen the light of day without my friends Sandy and Jack, who are the proud parents of two children—a daughter, Lauren, and a son, Jarrett, who died at 13 years old from a brain aneurysm. They made room for my grief alongside theirs in order to provide the grieving insight I so desperately needed.

My nephew, John, gave me the gift of Kalei’s website. The forum became my therapist as well as the forum for the stories for this book.

Special thanks must go out to my friend Angela. Without her I would not have had the regular-universe experiences critical to my Lifetime I Could Not Imagine analysis.

I would be remiss if I did not give honourable mention to my special friend Devin. He started out as one of Kalei’s school friends; after her death, he became one of mine. Brave soul that he is, he often played the role of devil’s advocate in our grief discussions.

I would like to thank my editor, Kim Nagan @ www.kimnagan.com. While a technical research editor by trade, she bravely agreed to take on my project in spite of the difficult subject matter. Thanks to her editing skills, Forever Kalei’s Mom is a much better book.

Thanks also to Christina Parker Photography for working so hard to capture the perfect cover photo, especially tough when one subject cannot physically be present.

Lastly, I send thanks to the heavenly angels who made sure I did not quit writing. The need to wallow in my misery was second only to the push I felt from them to finish. I suspect they are the real authors of this book.

Introduction

There is no doubt that dead is a tough word. It is even tougher to handle when attached to the name of a child. If there were a top-10 list of unimaginable life experiences, the death of a child would be number one.

On August 20, 2001, the unimaginable happened to me: my daughter, Kalei, was killed in a car crash.

She was 16 and a half years old.

Desperate for insight into the new world in which I found myself, I bought every book about death that I could lay my hands on. Most of what I read back then focused on the primary feelings or emotions associated with the five-stages-of-grief cycle.

I did not need someone to describe anger or depression to me; what I needed was someone to interpret the heightened situational postapocalyptic bent and twisted emotions I was feeling and to rationalize them in a way that made sense to me.

To make matters even worse, it felt like the books and the people I encountered were determined to have me acknowledge an eventually-it-will-get-better perspective of the future that I was not even remotely capable of comprehending. Reading about or being told too soon and too often that my world was going to get better just made me angry, for I could not imagine a future with those words in it.

Some truths are so painful; most people would rather believe in an altered it-will-get-better reality in order to create a more palatable picture for themselves. In the case of the death of a child, they do that by trying to pretend the grieving process will follow the less scary model associated with the normal circle-of-life, live-long-and-die-elderly design, which sadly is nothing like the actual journey.

Could there be a way to communicate the truth about unimaginable grief—to help not only those caught in the grip of its brutality but, equally as important, those who support them? For that to happen, emotionally powerful information needed to be presented in a way that spoke to everyone, not just the grieving.

Is there a risk that increased knowledge might force parents of living children into becoming one with the real pain and agony of a grieving parent’s world? No, that kind of knowing comes only to those who are forced to live that reality. The fact of the matter is, no matter how many unimaginable curtains you peek behind, you will never be able to truly imagine the death of your child.

This book offers an opportunity to advance our thinking about life, death and the incredibly complex world of unimaginable grief.

It is real; it is raw and it absolutely resonates.

Preface

As the days after Kalei’s death turned into weeks, I struggled with life. The pain of burying my child ate at me every moment of every day. I was becoming less and less human as my will to live was eaten away by the gangrenous entity called grief.

One morning, a month after she was killed, I was taking a shower. As during the start of most days back then, my tears intermingled with the water that fell on my body. As I wept, I rested my head against the glass, and out of nowhere this thought came into my head: I have to write a book about all of this.

I immediately threw that thought on the shower floor because I did not want to think about anything, let alone something that would introduce a commitment to living beyond the end of each day. I went back to my private world of grief.

Several weeks later I sat down at the computer to check for posts on Kalei’s website. After reading them, I thought I should respond in some manner. There was nothing I wanted to say, but I ended up typing for hours. Every thought, emotion, question or thought I had experienced since the moment I was told of Kalei’s death fell onto the page.

When I was finished, I felt good. Not great, but good.

The next time I was hit with a wave of grief, I did the same thing. After that, I started analyzing what I had written. I spend hours every day documenting every agonizing thought, experience and grief lesson as it happened; I called these my stories. Over the course of several years, I compiled thousands of pages that covered every aspect of my grief.

One day I said to myself, Lorene, you have all these stories now. Half the work is already done. How hard could it be to put them into a book?

In November 2010 I backed myself into a corner by asking my boss for a two-and-a-half-month unpaid leave of absence in order to work on Kalei’s book. As soon as he said yes, I thought, Oops! Now I’ve gone and done it. There’s no turning back now!

On day one, I sat in front of my computer, ready to conquer the literary world. I was a bit excited, but I have to be honest—the predominant emotion was fear. I did not have the faintest idea how to write, let alone publish, a book.

I asked myself, What was I thinking?

After a couple of hours of crying, indulging in self-pity and asking a lot of what-the-heck-do-you-think-you’re-doing questions, I said to myself, It’s going to be a long two and a half months.

Eventually I started sorting through the stories and creating the first of many-more-to-come tables of contents.

My biggest challenge was going to be to write a book that did not end up like every other five-stage book. I needed to explain the common grief feelings and experiences but do it in a way that not only spoke to the grieving but was easy to read, because the shock that envelops you makes it very difficult to pay attention and hold concentration for any length of time.

The words also had to evoke a meaning or responsive chord in the people around the grieving who desperately need insight into what their loved ones are experiencing. That part had to be accomplished by presenting the information in a way that educated them but made it clear to them that they were just spectators to the unimaginable and were at no risk for anything more.

Eventually I came up with a conceptual plan that separated the book into three lifetimes, or time frames, that capture the evolution within each as well as the in-between transitional aspects associated with moving from one to another.

The first life is A Lifetime Ago; it gives the reader a sense of Kalei and me.

The second life is A Lifetime I Could Not Imagine; it contains the inner turmoil of unimaginable grief.

The third life is A Lifetime Ahead, where grief and the future learn to cohabitate.

Most of the lessons and stories included in this book relate to what I felt as being the commonality of grief. By that I mean that many parents who bury a child could struggle with the same kind of experiences and emotions I did to varying degrees. That is not to say that everyone will go through exactly what I did. For sure that will not happen, but there is an above-average chance grieving moms and dads will touch on many of them throughout their journeys.

A Lifetime Ago

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While I know myself as a creation of God,

I am also obligated to realize and remember

that everyone else and everything else

are also God’s creation.

—Maya Angelou

1

Once upon a Time

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F or me, this once-upon-a-time story started on November 12, 1954, the day I was born. I was the third out of four kids my parents would have. We lived on a ranch nestled in the clay hills of southern Saskatchewan.

Times were tough back then, and we all worked hard in order to build a better life than the one that had been farmed by my grandparents, the original settlers, not that long before.

Life in our rural community was … well, rural. I went to school, participated in sports and worked on the homestead. There were cows to take care of, hay to bail, fences to fix, barns to clean, fields to cultivate, seed to plant and harvests to bring in. The work never stopped.

There was little time and even less money left over for fun. I often said to myself, I can hardly wait to leave and move into the city. Maybe there my hopes and dreams will come true.

After graduating high school in June 1972, I did just that. I packed my bags and headed off to Saskatoon to attend a technical school for the next two years.

Near the end of my schooling, I met a man, and we fell in love. After dating for a year, we married in the summer of 1975 and moved to Moose Jaw where I worked and he went to school. Five years later, my marriage ended at the same time I lost my job. My white-picket-fence world came to a grinding halt.

Feeling rudderless, I called home and said to my dad, Do you need any hired help? I am tired of city life and want to work on the ranch for a while, if that is okay with you. Extra hands are always needed on a cattle ranch, so it was no surprise to me that he said yes.

I loved working on the ranch as an adult. My dad is an equal opportunity kind of guy. There was no such thing as men’s work or woman’s work; it was just work that needed doing, and a person’s gender had no bearing on the matter. Whether it was throwing hundred-pound bales, teaching a two-thousand-pound bull to walk beside me on a halter or driving combines and tractors, I did what needed doing.

After nearly two years on the ranch, I started to get lonely and thought about giving city life another try. It was then that a school friend called and said, Lorene, is there any chance you could afford to come to Hawaii with me? I don’t want to go alone and hoped you could come with me. Please, please … is there any way you could come too? As I had been spending barely any of the money I had been earning, and had not taken a single day off in months, I replied, Yes! I would love to come with you. Just let me know where and when.

Needless to say, we had a great time in paradise. As soon as I returned home from Hawaii, I started planning to go back again the following winter, this time for four months instead of just 10 days. My self-talk went something like this: You have worked hard all your life. Other than those 10 days, you have never had a vacation. You deserve this trip!

It did not take very long to talk