Bryan Burgess was killed in action during a 2011 deployment to Afghanistan just 16 days before he was scheduled to return home — a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday.
Telling and re-telling the story of his son’s life and sacrifice pulled Terry Burgess from deep depression
In the early morning hours before Terry Burgess learned that his son Bryan had been killed in action in Afghanistan, he had a vivid dream.
“We’re in this outdoor movie theater, me and Bryan,” Terry remembers. “He’s on the movie screen in his combat uniform and there’s a glass coffin beside him. He steps into the coffin and, when he lays down, he turns into my little boy Bryan, like seven or eight years old. Then little boy Bryan steps out of the coffin and becomes Bryan the soldier again. He gives me a salute and then the movie screen just goes — bam — white. That’s when I woke up to the phone ringing.”
The call was from Bryan’s wife, Tiffany, with the news that Bryan was gone. Terry and his wife Beth would receive an official notification through a visit from Army officers later that morning.
The next days and weeks were a whirlwind of events honoring Bryan. They met with their Casualty Assistance Officer from the Army, whose job it was to handle paperwork, and anything else they needed for a year.
Soon the cards and letters slowed, then stopped coming, Terry said. “The casseroles stop, people stop checking on you, and you’re just isolated.”
“After his funeral, after we got home from all the ceremonies, I just sank. I just literally sank. I was unemployed, I was laid off, I had no purpose,” he said.
Terry’s wife Beth was afraid for him. “He would just spend days and days and days just sitting… not talking, not eating, just sitting. While I’m at work, I’m terrified that I’m going to come home, and that he’s going to be gone, and I don’t know what to do about that….it was a very, very scary time,” she said.
Beth started looking for organizations that could help Gold Star parents and couldn’t find much. “There was a lot out there for the widows — understandably — and for kids and moms. But there was almost nothing for dads,” Beth said.
A documentary film changes everything
More than a year after Bryan’s death, the producers of a documentary called “The Hornet’s Nest” contacted Terry and Beth. The film used footage collected by an embedded journalist who traveled with Bryan’s unit in Afghanistan. Helmet and hand-held cameras captured the 360-degree firefight with the Taliban that claimed Bryan’s life, and included an interview with Bryan, talking about how much he missed his children. The film’s producers asked Terry and Beth to screen a rough cut of the film, hoping to earn the approval of the Gold Star families before releasing it to the public.
“Beth got me out of bed and got me cleaned up,” Terry said. They traveled to Dallas to watch it. “And there was Bryan in his army uniform on screen. It was a slap in the face for me.”
Terry felt he suddenly understood what his dream on the morning of Bryan’s death had been about. “I thought, ‘that’s what Bryan was trying to tell me,” says Terry. “I can’t just spend my life mourning the loss of my little boy. The innocent little boy had to die when Bryan became a soldier. Now he wants me to salute him back however I can.”
Bryan’s story reflects others’ combat experience
For over a year, Terry and Beth toured with the film, visiting military bases and colleges and other venues. Every time they watch it, “it rips us apart,” Terry said. “But I tell people that it saved my life.”
Terry, Beth and the other families involved in the film were asked to speak at each screening. “It was a lot of holding hands and squeezing hands… a lot of tears,” Terry said. “It was kind of cathartic for us because we got to tell Bryan’s story to so many people who wouldn’t have heard it otherwise.”
Bryan with his children Makya and Zander.
The screenings also gave them an opportunity to help educate the public about the ways that combat changes the lives of the veterans who survive.
“Bryan changed the very first time he went to Iraq and came home. He was a completely different person. And it was very hard to connect with him,” Beth said. “A lot of what we did was just to help everybody understand everything that the guys were going through when they came home, because they all carry a huge amount of survivor’s guilt.
Reaching other Gold Star fathers
Last year, Terry published a memoir about the family’s experience of losing Bryan titled When Our Blue Star Turned Gold. It’s given him a broader audience to continue to tell Bryan’s story and reach out to other parents, especially fathers.
Bryan and his dad Terry, who started Gold Star Parents retreat and network.
“My biggest hope is to reach more dads,” Terry stressed. “There is a very high suicide rate among Gold Star dads. The more of them we can reach, and save, or just help…. We just want to let them know they’re not alone.”
New speaking engagements and publicity for Terry’s book, including an interview on NBC’s Today show, have helped to fill the annual retreat he and Beth created for Gold Star parents. They aim to keep making room for any parent in need.
“We tell Bryan’s story,” Beth said. “And we help as many people as we can to tell their stories.”
America salutes Terry and Beth
As the nation searches for ways to recognize another Memorial Day weekend, they can draw inspiration from a 2011 American Airlines flight. Following Bryan’s funeral, Terry and Beth boarded a flight to head home. They were crouched in the very last row of the plane, emotionally exhausted. The Casualty Assistance Officer, who had been with Terry and Beth since Bryan’s death notification, contacted the airlines.
Touched by their sacrifice and Bryan’s service, the pilot took time to meet the Burgess’. Sitting across Terry and taking Beth’s hands he said, “I want you all to know how very, very sorry I am for your loss. I’m fixing to be deployed to Afghanistan myself.” They shared stories of Bryan and appreciated the compassion and comradery.
As the plane approached its destination, the pilot announced, “We have parents of a fallen soldier on the plane. I would appreciate it if everyone would stay seated and let them disembark first. Let them go home.”
With Beth carrying their newly received flag in her arms, fellow passengers stood still, applauding them as they disembarked. As they passed through first class, a veteran stood up and saluted Terry and Beth.
In that moment, America stood with Terry and Beth. They were not alone.
*Read more in the story of how Bryan’s dad recognized his son’s caring, protective nature early and continues to honor him: “A Legacy of Protecting Others.”
Bryan Burgess (center) was killed in action during his final 2011 deployment to Afghanistan just 16 days before he was scheduled to return home — a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday. His parents Terry and Beth created Gold Star Parents retreat and network in his honor.
Grieving Bryan, their son who gave all, Texas parents Terry and Beth Burgess found hope by creating supports for fellow Gold Star families
When Bryan Burgess was seven years old, he and his father Terry visited a friend’s house, where the family was having an Easter egg hunt. Asked to join the fun, Bryan won handily, earning the day’s prize — a great big, cellophane-wrapped Easter basket full of foil-wrapped chocolates, toys, and other sweet treasures.
From a young age Bryan showed a special manner of caring for others.
“Some of the other moms were clearly upset because we weren’t family, you know, we were just visiting,” says Terry. “But before anybody could say anything, Bryan unwrapped the basket and stepped back from it. He said ‘dig in!’ and he let all those other kids and the moms take all the candy they wanted before he took a single piece.”
It’s one of Terry favorite stories to tell about his son, because he says, “it’s when I knew that he had a very special spirit.”
Bryan’s manner of caring for others continued, according to his stepmother Beth. “He was always very protective and security conscious,” she says. He wanted to be a policeman and would remind his dad to fasten his seatbelt in the car.
At 22, Bryan enlisted in the Army, determined to become infantry in the wake of 9/11. “As soon as he signed up, we knew that he would almost immediately go to war. And sure enough, he did,” said Terry. Bryan’s commitment had already been made when they were told. “All we could do was support him in his decision.”
Bryan loved his new military career. He served two tours in Iraq, met and married his wife Tiffany, and they had two children, Makya and Zander. He was killed in action during his final 2011 deployment to Afghanistan just 16 days before he was scheduled to return home — a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday.
The wait for answers
Upon learning the devastating news about Bryan’s death, the Burgess family was given little information about what happened. “It was frustrating,” says Terry. He and Beth, along with all of Bryan’s other close family members, traveled to Dover Air Force Base, where the bodies of the fallen are brought back to U.S. soil for the solemn tradition of the “dignified transfer.” There, they met five other families, each of whom had lost a solider in the same mission where Bryan was killed, all of whom knew very little about the circumstances.
At 22, Bryan enlisted in the Army, determined to become infantry in the wake of 9/11.
“We were all thrown together at the worst possible time and each of us was trying to piece things together,” Beth said. But the process created connections that they could lean on for years. “We had an almost immediate support system.”
Bryan’s wife decided to postpone his funeral until the rest of his unit returned from Afghanistan, widening the circle of people Beth and Terry could connect with over their loss. As they began to piece together the story, they learned that answers would be so slow to come, in part, because Bryan had been killed on day one of a nine-day classified mission.
They bonded with three of the families from Bryan’s unit — others who would receive the deeply painful honor of receiving the Gold Star pin that signifies losing a loved one in service. They remain in contact to this day. Bryan’s spirit loomed so large that four men from his unit have named a son after him.
The Gold Star parent “grief calendar”
Bryan with his wife Tiffany.
According to Beth and Terry, the number of dates that cause spiraling grief is exponential: Bryan’s birthday, the date he was killed in action, the dignified transfer, the date he was supposed to return home alive, and the last day they spent together when he was home on leave. Bryan’s final deployment began on Mother’s Day of 2010, permanently changing the meaning of that holiday. “It’s an ongoing grief calendar, all year long,” says Terry.
“We have many ways to honor and remember Bryan on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Veteran’s Day, but they tend to be painful holidays,” Beth said. “It’s hard, because everyone’s very patriotic, and you know what that really costs.”
When someone says “Happy Memorial Day,” it hurts, Terry said. “For us, it’s not a three-day holiday. It’s not barbecues and mattress sales.”
The Gold Star parent network
Beth and Terry discovered new purpose in supporting a network of Gold Star parents. But they found that the label is often restricted to combat-related deaths. They wanted to change that, and give every parent who had a child die while in service to the country a way to connect and help each other.
In 2017, they established a non-profit called Gold Star Parents Retreat, It is an annual, free retreat held in Gainesville, Texas for parents who have lost a child serving in any branch of the military, under any circumstance, including training or car accidents, complications from vaccinations before being deployed, and suicide.
“We bring them together to just connect with each other, talk to each other. We may now know what they went through,” Beth said. “We don’t try to fix,” Terry adds.
“We want to give them just a tiny bit of hope,” says Beth. “You’ll never get over it, but you’ll learn how to carry it. I guess you get better at carrying it. You’re not alone — there are lots of us out here who will help you carry it.”
Read the second post in this series: “He Wants Me to Salute Him Back” — how a documentary film featuring the firefight with the Taliban that took Bryan’s life led his father Terry to strengthen support for grieving Gold Star fathers.
Child deaths, especially those that occur in mass tragedies, are the subject of significant news coverage. Frank Ochberg, chairman emeritus of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Michigan State University, said that journalists have an important role to play in covering child death and trauma.
A pioneer in trauma research shares how news stories can provide solace
Not every child death makes front page news, but the headlines seem to blare details about another one daily. Mass shootings and their anniversaries. Teen suicides. Car accidents. Drug overdoses. Police shootings. Military deaths. And the list goes on.
And just about every time those deaths make the headlines, news reporters place a call, attempting to reach out to the families for comments about their loved ones.
Some might consider those reporters opportunistic as they attempt to contact families at their lowest depths for a quick sound bite. And, certainly, some families won’t want to field those phone calls as they grieve.
Photo courtesy of Frank Ochberg.
But in a recent interview with Evermore, Frank Ochberg, chairman emeritus of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Michigan State University, said that journalists have an important role to play in covering child death and trauma.
When done right, Ochberg says journalists’ calls to families and the subsequent news coverage can help families and communities as they mourn the death of a child.
Pioneer, founding father
A trained psychiatrist and a founding father of modern psychotraumatology, Ochberg’s resume is extensive. He is a founding member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, founder of the Trust for Trauma Journalism, a former associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health and a clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State.
He edited the first text on the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and served on the committee that defined PTSD, according to the Dart Center’s website. He supported school staff after the 1999 Columbine school shooting.
And, through his volunteer work with the Red Cross, he’s helped victims of disasters, such as earthquakes and plane crashes, sometimes connecting them with the news media for interviews.
The Dart Center is dedicated to “informed, innovative and ethical news reporting” on violence, conflict and tragedy, according to its website. It’s touched as many as 10,000 journalists around the world, providing resources to help them do their job well.
The first act comes immediately following the disaster or death. Those stories serve a need beyond simply alerting a community to a breaking news event, Ochberg said. People seek out news that’s shocking or sad, he said.
“Unfortunately, there’s something that we can call paradoxical pleasure on the part of the reader in seeing something that is horrifying, but being attracted to it,” Ochberg said.
“It exists in every culture, and it goes back to Bible stories and fairy tales and campfire scary stuff. It’s a way that our species has evolved, introducing our children to terrible themes and images and getting them to laugh about it, giggle about it. We apparently need exposure at an early age to these images, whether they are mythical or real … It serves a purpose,” Ochberg continued.
“Now it’s about the impact of what happened,” Ochberg said. “It could include lessons for others who care about the post traumatic stress disorder; good ways that communities or families have healed; ways a troubled family failed to heal.”
The third act of coverage is reserved for those occasions where there’s no good news report or lesson to be learned other than evil happens. Ochberg gives the Holocaust as one example. “In Act 3, you’re not trying to find the silver lining,” he said.
Evermore’s Joyal Mulheron said it’s important for these kinds of stories to acknowledge the ongoing struggles bereaved parents and families face.
“Just because the headlines will move on doesn’t mean the families are,” Mulheron said. “It can be affirming for news coverage to acknowledge this kind of profound grief and how it continues. As one mother put it, bereaved parents make “a daily decision to accept grief and keep going.””
Writing the unspeakable
In the case of a child death, the best stories come when all parties are mindful about the role they play.
And those articles and relationships often begin when reporters contact family members for quotes for a story about a news-making death. Tip sheets for journalists and survivors that were created by Queen’s University Belfast, which the Dart Center links to on its website, spell out what should happen next.
Journalists, for example, should avoid cold-calling a family and find a go-between instead. They also should be prepared to take no for an answer. “Remember,” it says, “that your request will evoke powerful and painful emotions, which may include anger.”
Victims and survivors, the tip sheet recommends, should feel free to say no to an interview or to decline to answer specific questions that they find intrusive. It also recommends that interviewees take care of themselves and have a friend or family member there to support them once the interview is over.
When it works, victims, survivors and family members can find some solace and journalists can write a story with deep impact.
“So often, a person who has been traumatized and aggrieved lacks the language to explain themselves to others,” Ochberg said. “… Being scared speechless is true. Some people lack fluency when we need it most.”
He added: “We have to encourage the journalists, both the mature journalists and the up and coming ones, … that they give words to what many people find unspeakable, but are necessary to communicate.
An award-winning USA Today reporter talks about why she’s covered child death for so long
It’s been nearly 23 years, but USA Today reporter Jayne O’Donnell won’t ever forget the moment.
Jayne O’Donnell, health policy reporter, USA Today.
After writing a series of articles in 1996 that prompted the federal government to make airbags safer for children, a group representing the families of the 26 children who had died invited O’Donnell to their first meeting.
They presented O’Donnell with 26 long stem roses, each one representing a dead child. “Nothing has ever been so powerful,” O’Donnell said.
Decades later, O’Donnell has covered all manner of child death causes — from dangerous consumer products to, more recently as the USA Today’s healthcare policy reporter, tween and teen suicide. She co-founded the Urban Health Media Project to give kids a voice.
O’Donnell invited Evermore founder Joyal Mulheron to attend the Association of Health Care Journalists’ annual conference in Baltimore and participate in a workshop session aimed at helping reporters generate health story ideas and provide research sources and techniques to support their work.
In this Q&A, O’Donnell shares more about her work, why she’s felt compelled to report and write about child deaths and why Evermore has an important story to tell.
Q: Tell us how you got started covering the death of children.
In the late 80s, I was asked to write about the auto industry from the Washington, DC, perspective. Because that was regulation, it immediately got into safety and environmental issues. … And child deaths have always really resonated. It just strikes a nerve with people. There’s no tolerance for anything that kills children.
People seem to move on fairly quickly from some of the other deaths of older people, even 20-somethings. But young kids getting killed became a theme of my reporting, partly because it was very unusual at the time for women to be writing about cars at all. In all the years I wrote about cars, I still can’t really write a cohesive explanation of what makes them run. But I never cared to.
I was really writing from a woman’s perspective and more of a mother’s or father’s perspective long before I became a mother. …
When you start interviewing people who have lost children, that stays with you and has always stayed with me — never being able to imagine what it’s like to be those people.
Q: How can we create greater awareness about the public health crisis bereaved parents and families face?
Recognize that reporters have so little time. You guys have to have the numbers, the trends and the victims available to make it really easy for reporters to write. It’s so hard to get the time to do a project on something like this … And keep the stories out there.
Q: What stories have really stuck with you?
After the airbag story, I co-authored a two-part series on teen driving deaths, and that was really the story that made me become even more obsessed with the concept of how do you get over the loss of a child.
[As part of that series], I had lunch with two women who were featured on the front page of USA Today. Their daughters were 17 or so and had been in a car with two young men. The car crashed and both of their daughters died and one of the boys died, but not the driver. I had lunch with them a year after the crash and the one mother cried almost through the entire lunch, a year later. She couldn’t really leave the house. I was like, wow. I couldn’t even imagine.
Then, I found auto safety too narrow and expanded to cover the Consumer Product Safety Commission. I covered kids product safety — window blinds strangling kids, the cords on the baby monitors strangling kids, a lot of different products that were killing kids.
Right before I had my daughter, my only child, in 2000, I did a series on the company called Cosco. They were hiding the complaints about cribs collapsing and hurting kids. That just terrified me too. When my daughter was born, I used to lie in bed, saying, ‘Oh my God, her crib is going to strangle her.”
Q: What interests you about the work of Evermore and Joyal?
I also had a high school friend who carried a baby to term and then her baby died hours after the baby was born. I knew that she had always included a mention of the child on Christmas cards and was still affected by it. That would be now 30 years later.
So, the fact that Joyal was focusing so closely on grief and related issues really appealed to me.
Q: What are the challenges for reporters covering issues like child death?
There’s so much pressure to write about the latest thing. In a downsized newsroom you can’t spend much time writing about the aftermath of one shooting when another shooting has happened. It’s difficult to do the kind of important aftermath stories that are needed.
One of the other challenges is this: If it hasn’t happened to you, you wouldn’t think of it. … Just the fact that there are more than 19 million parents in this country who have lost a child is fascinating to me. In Barbara Bush’s new biography by USA Today reporter Susan Page, they talk about how affected they were their whole lives by the loss of their daughter at an early age. People forget that.
Q: Why was it important for Joyal to be on the panel?
Because infant and child mortality are such important issues, I think that people need to think of new ways to write about them.
Q: How can Evermore get the word out?
Recognize that reporters have so little time. You guys have to have the numbers, the trends and the victims available to make it really easy for reporters to write. It’s so hard to get the time … And keep the stories out there.
Editor’s note: And that’s exactly why we’ve launched this blog and are working hard to spread the word about the devastating effects on parents and families when a child dies.
The numbers and research are stark:
71% of surviving siblings suffer serious health consequences after the death of their brother or sister.
Parents suffer job and income loss, isolation, marriage and relationship strife, poorer health and even shortened lives after their child dies.
Medical professionals agree that parents and siblings experience a “medical event” after the death of their child, brother or sister. Research shows that they actually are biologically and psychologically altered.
There is a disparate impact on black and Hispanic parents. By age 60, black parents are twice as likely to have experienced a child’s death than white parents.
And while all signs point toward a public health crisis, there are so many ways to help these grieving parents and families — from changes to the Family Medical Leave Act so families can take the time they need to grieve to training educators to safely help students express their grief.
At Evermore, we look forward to sharing the data and the personal stories that will help make changes for the families who desperately need it.
Evermore’s founder to speak at journalism conference
Raising the visibility about the long-lasting effects on parents and siblings after a child dies is a central goal for Evermore, and Joyal Mulheron, Evermore’s founder and executive director, will do just that when she addresses healthcare journalists in early May.
Mulheron will attend the Association of Health Care Journalists’ annual conference in Baltimore and participate in a workshop-style session aimed at helping reporters recognize that the far-reaching impact of a child’s death is an urgent public health crisis.
Health Journalism 2019 will draw hundreds of the country’s top healthcare reporters to Baltimore for three-and-a-half days of workshops, panels, roundtables and field trips that cover the latest topics in medical science, health policy, public health, medical education, consumer health and the business of healthcare, according to the association’s website.
“There is so much coverage, and rightly so, about child death, but there is often very little follow-up about what happens to grieving families,” Mulheron said. “We’re eager for the opportunity to share what we know about the aftermath and why this is truly an invisible public health crisis.”
During the workshop, Mulheron will share her expertise and information about researchers and other sources where reporters can get more information for stories they may be working on.
After a child’s death, studies show that grieving parents are more likely to suffer from depression, marital disruption, psychiatric hospitalization and premature death. For siblings, researchers also link the death of a brother or sister to a higher risk for agitated depression, chronic illness, guilt, lower self-esteem and performance at work and school and premature death.
At the same time, there is little safety net for families who need time to mourn their child. The Family and Medical Leave Act, for example, does not list child loss as a qualifying event for job protection, and more than half of employers allow their workers to take just three days of paid leave to grieve a child.
“These are the kinds of eye-opening issues and statistics that I plan to share during the workshop,” Mulheron said. “We hope that the information will encourage journalists at the conference to start looking more deeply at this very important issue.”
The panel will be moderated by Jayne O’Donnell, the award-winning healthcare policy reporter for USA Today. O’Donnell has explored the causes of child death in her work and was behind a series of articles in 1996 that prompted the federal government to make airbags safer for children. O’Donnell first wrote about Mulheron and her work in 2016.
Two other guests will join Mulheron:
Brie Zeltner is a health reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer with an interest in the lifelong health effects of poverty on children and families. She has written extensively about lead poisoning and infant mortality.
George Hobor is a program officer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a New Jersey-based nonprofit focused on health. He works to promote healthy and more equitable communities, “using the power of data and research to find solutions to social-economic conditions that affect community health, such as residential segregation, housing security, and social mobility,” according to the foundation’s website.
