After his son Reid died in a car crash, Tim Hollister helped transform Connecticut’s teen driving laws. The provisions include earlier curfews, no electronic devices, a two-hour teen driving safety course for both teens and their parents and restrictions on who can ride with young drivers.
Evermore is dedicating this Father’s Day week to bereaved dads who will always be fathers.
A teen driver on an unauthorized joy ride. At night. On a road he probably had never driven before. With teenage passengers who needed to get home by their 10:30 p.m. curfew.
“You had a combination of circumstances that was almost guaranteed to end up in a crash,” said Tim Hollister, whose son was behind the wheel.
And it did. In December 2006 on a Connecticut interstate, Hollister’s 17-year-old son Reid was rushing to get his two passengers home, but never made it. After getting too far into a curve, he overcorrected and hit a guardrail, crushing the left side of his chest. His two passengers survived.
It was the beginning of more teen driving deaths in Connecticut. Nine months after Reid’s crash, seven teens died in six weeks. Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell quickly formed a task force to overhaul the state’s teen driving laws, which, at the time, were the most lenient in the country, and appointed Hollister to the task force.
Tim Hollister’s 17-year old son Reid died in a 2006 car crash. Nine months after Reid’s death, seven teens died in car crashes in six weeks. Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell quickly formed a task force to overhaul the state’s teen driving laws, which, at the time, were the most lenient in the country, and appointed Hollister to the task force.
“Basically, in warp speed, … we transformed our teen driver laws into one of the strictest in the country,” Hollister said.
The provisions include earlier curfews, no electronic devices, a two-hour teen driving safety course for both teens and their parents and restrictions on who can ride with young drivers. In the last decade, the law has resulted in a 70 percent reduction in teen driving fatalities in the state, said Hollister, an attorney.
“It’s a remarkable public safety achievement, and states around the country have taken notice,” he said.
A re-education
As the task force wrapped up, however, Hollister continued his study and work to spread the word about the dangers of teen driving.
“When I served on the task force, I got a re-education in safe teen driving and learned that I really, even though Reid had driven crash free for 11 months, that I really had not understood how dangerous teen driving is and why,” he said. “After the task force finished its work, I kept going, reading everything I could get my hands on.”
He launched a blog and eventually wrote “Not So Fast: Parenting Your Teen Through the Dangers of Driving,” which both the Governors Highway Safety Association and the National Safety Council have recognized. A second edition, co-authored with Pam Shadel Fischer, co-founder of the New Jersey Teen Safe Driving Coalition and a longtime transportation safety consultant, came out in 2018.
Hollister also wrote a memoir, “His Father Still: A Parenting Memoir,” which Gayle King endorsed in Oprah Magazine. Proceeds from both books go directly to the Reid Hollister Fund, which supports infant and toddler education in the city of Hartford, Conn.
Can’t just ‘hope for the best’
Hollister said parents often aren’t aware of the dangers of teen driving when their own son or daughter gets behind the wheel.
“Most of the literature that’s available to parents tells you that teen driving is dangerous, but it doesn’t tell them why and what you can do to prevent very predictable situations that most often lead to teen driver crashes,” he said. “It just doesn’t tell them how to work with their teens to make them partners in safety, as opposed to turning them over to a driving school and hoping for the best.”
Hollister recommends a parent-teen driving contract and says parents should be aware of the five biggest dangers for teen drivers that can lead to distracted and dangerous driving. They are other passengers in the car; alcohol and drug use; not planning enough time to get home before curfew; texting and checking electronic devices; and not wearing a seatbelt.
For Hollister, his work on teen driving is focused on preventing another parent from suffering the same grief.
“People ask me, ‘Was it cathartic? Did it help you with your grief?’” he said. “My grief recovery, which was basically all of 2007 and into 2008, was based on the three Fs: faith, family and friends, which I’m blessed to have a lot of.”
“My teen driving advocacy, I think of as a public service,” he said. “I had to put this information out there.”
More information about Hollister and his work is on his website — FromReidsDad.org.
Also read:
Am I Still a Father? — After his son Jon’s death, Ron Kelly helps other fathers live with their grief.
Kelly Farley and Barry Kluger are the dads behind the Parental Bereavement Act.
Evermore is dedicating this Father’s Day week to bereaved dads who will always be fathers.
Kelly Farley and Barry Kluger met because of a horrible coincidence: They knew what it was like to mourn a child.
For Kluger, it was his 18-year-old daughter Erica, who died in a car crash in 2001. For Farley, it was two children — his daughter Katie, who died by miscarriage in 2004, and his son Noah, who was stillborn in 2006.
The two met several years later after Farley launched a blog that covered his own experience grieving the death of his children, and Kluger invited him on his talk radio show.
As they chatted about what they both had been through, the two fathers started talking about finding an issue they could work on together. That discussion eventually turned to better bereavement leave for parents mourning the death of their child. Soon, they became the dads behind the Parental Bereavement Act.
“Your employer will give you three or five days of bereavement leave, if you’re lucky. That’s just not enough time. You bury your child, and you’re expected to get back to work the next day. We didn’t think it was realistic.”
Updating FMLA
Right now, the Family and Medical Leave Act gives eligible employees 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a newborn or a sick family member, but not to grieve a child who has died. And private and public employers aren’t doing much better. An industry survey shows that 69 percent of employers give parents just three days off after a son or daughter dies. It’s barely enough time to plan a funeral.
In 2011, Farley and Kluger crafted the Parental Bereavement Act, an update to the Family and Medical Leave Act that would allow parents to qualify for unpaid leave when a child, who is under the age of 18, dies. Twelve weeks, they say, is not enough time to fully mourn a child, but it’s a start.
“It gives them time to assess what has happened to them and, maybe, start the grieving process,” Farley said.
Not so fast
By the summer of 2011, the two dads got some great news. Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat from Montana, introduced the bill in the Senate. They hoped for quick action, which hasn’t come. But the bill has continued to get backing from lawmakers through the years. And, in February, it received bipartisan support in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate.
Supporters said it was time to help grieving parents. Senator Martha McSally, a Republican from Arizona and a co-sponsor of the bill in the Senate, stated in a news release:
“Parents coming to grips with the loss of a child should not have to worry about anything other than taking care of themselves and their loved ones,” said . “It is critically important to ensuring mourning parents have the peace of mind to be able to take the time they need while going through the grieving process.”
Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia and a co-sponsor of the House bill, added in his press release:
“Expanding the FMLA to include parental bereavement is the most compassionate action we can take to do something, no matter how small, to help bereaved families. This legislation is a good start to make a positive change and I’m proud to support it.”
The latest endorsements make Kluger and Farley hopeful once more.
“We continue to build momentum and support, and a couple of weeks don’t go by without another senator or another representative signing on,” Kluger said. “We’re hopeful, but we’re looking at the bigger picture because there are so many people who have a stake in this.”
Uphill battle
Despite the bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, the two know that they still have an uphill battle. As the country grapples with an opioid epidemic, mass shootings and other pressing issues, helping bereaved parents isn’t top of mind for many.
Kluger and Farley continue to build momentum and support, and say that a couple of weeks don’t go by without another senator or another representative signing on.
“Bereavement leave is something where people say, ‘That’s a pretty good idea,’ but … the passion is not there,” said Kluger, who wrote a book about his daughter and her death called “A Life Undone: A Father’s Journey Through Loss.”
But, they say, it’s still worth the fight.
“I made it through the dark tunnel, and it is my responsibility to be an advocate for parents who follow in our footsteps,” said Farley, who now travels the country to work with grieving fathers and is the author of the book, “Grieving Dads: To the Brink and Back.”
Say something
To move the bill forward, Farley and Kluger are encouraging more people to speak out. So far, through an online petition, more than 120,000 people have sent messages to their lawmakers in support of the bill. There, parents also are sharing their own experiences after the death of a child.
“Three years ago we lost our first born. My husband received one weekend, then back to work,” wrote one mother. “How can you return to work when your mind and heart are somewhere else completely. We needed more time!”
Another mother wrote that her child’s father was fired for missing work to pick up their son’s ashes.
The two dads also encourage people to directly contact their representatives and share their own stories about why they support the bill, so that it gets the attention it deserves.
“I’m not discouraged,” Kluger said. “But I’ve learned the way it works. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.”
Also read:
Am I Still a Father? — After his son Jon’s death, Ron Kelly helps other fathers live with their grief.
In a new memoir, Once More We Saw Stars, father Jayson Greene vividly recounts the raw feelings after his two-year-old daughter Greta died and his continuous journey through grief.
Evermore is dedicating this Father’s Day week to bereaved dads who will always be fathers.
A stunning accident claimed the life of two-year-old Greta Greene in 2015, when a piece of masonry fell from a building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and struck her in the head.
In a new memoir, Once More We Saw Stars, her father Jayson Greene vividly recounts the raw feelings after the loss, his journey through grief with his wife Stacy, and the couple’s striving toward hope.
Q. You’ve spoken about writing as a tool for survival. Is that what brought you to write this memoir?
A. Journaling is a common approach to grief. I wrote a book because I’m a writer, but writing is an instinctual thing. I mean, I’ve been to Compassionate Friends meetings and other sorts of grief retreats.
People have written pages and pages and pages about their child or their loss, because writing is a profound way to process grief.
Q. How is promoting the book and talking to people and continually retelling the story?
A. It’s cathartic.
Telling the story of what happened to Greta is a way of testifying. I think that’s probably true for many.
One of the things that you do when you go to a grief support group is — because there might be somebody new there every time — you retell the story. And you know, every time you do that, it’s a way of acknowledging that you’ve been marked, because people might sort of intellectually know, ‘oh, yeah, there’s, there’s Jayson, that horrible thing happened — they lost their daughter, and how tragic.”
But in the course of a regular day, it’s not exactly at the surface of your interactions with people. It’s often several layers down. Sometimes you yourself forget the degree to which you are always grieving that person. I’m doing what most grieving parents do in a somewhat different set of circumstances. And through the sort of conduit of a book, and I’ve written the book, and it’s out there, and people are asking to speak to me.
I am grateful for the fact that I’m able to talk about my Greta all the time right now. And there’s a context for it. And there’s a receptive audience for stories about Greta.
There are a lot of people who will listen to me talk about her life, how much we loved her, how much we still love her. And what happened. So in some ways promoting this book has been healing.
Q. What would you like people to know about Greta?
A. She was very talkative from a very early age. She learned how to talk really early on, around 13 or 14 months- words and some sentences -which was startlingly early. But it gave us a chance to hear a lot of what she thought which was very, very meaningful. We feel very lucky to have had that.
She was very opinionated. And she had a really developed sense of humor. She always seemed to be smiling at a private joke.
Q. What does it mean to be a writer finding the right words and language to convey the vast and continuing consequences of grief?
A. As I’ve talked to people, I have learned a lot about the words that we assigned to our feelings. I’m a writer. And that’s basically what I spent my life doing is assigning words to my feelings, I’ve thought about it maybe a little bit more intensely, because it’s been my focus forever.
Healing has been a word that’s meant something to me. I remember thinking about my grief as a massive wound, even right in the days after the accident, My mind seized on this metaphor of wound care — the idea that I had massive life-threatening wound on my body, and if I didn’t spend every single day cleaning it and tending to it, and changing the bandages and applying salve that it would infect and kill me.
That’s what blunt force trauma, emotionally speaking, feels like. That’s what acute shock and catastrophic loss feels like. It is very literally threatening the fabric of your existence.
Everything you’ve ever understood is completely destroyed in an instant and that does feel life threatening. I mean, it is not going to literally stop your heart. But it feels like annihilation, because it erases everything that you thought you knew, it erases all your context.
Q. Jayson has written a Washington Post column about being a grieving parent on Father’s Day and other holidays. He says people struggle to know what to say to grieving parents.
A. People worry so much about what to say to grieving parents.
I always try to say that you’ll never say the right thing because there is no right thing to say what’s most important is that you listen to the person, and that you’re there for them.
The other thing I would say to that person who’s worried about what to say, is that you might step on a landmine. And that’s also not the worst thing that happened to that person that day.
If you’re talking to someone who’s just lost their kid, you saying something dumb is not going to matter. all that much, because they are grieving something so much larger than you, or your concerns about what to say. The only thing you can really, truly offer — the only true currency you have — is yourself. And if they get mad at you, just take it as part of what you can be there for, but they’re processing a lot of feelings. If they momentarily flare up, and you have the strength to absorb that and sit there with it and allow them to work through it, the chances are that they’ll probably vent at you and then soften and say that they’re sorry. And then you can both sit in that together.
Q. As you have what have other grieving parents connected with?
A. The stuff about the shock really speaks to grieving parents, as much as I can tell.
When I was sort of reeling from the loss, I had the nastiest, most poisonous, bitter thoughts I probably ever had in my life. And they’re all very clearly rendered in the book.
I think a lot of people have felt that — it spoke to memories they had. People have found a lot of resonance in some of those feelings — I don’t know that those kinds of feelings have made it to the page in a lot of published books about grief.
Q. What is your favorite passage in the book?
A. Probably the last two pages where I’m talking both to Harrison (his living son, who is now three years old) and to Greta, because it’s such a hard, hard and long journey to the place where I felt like I could hold them both inside of my heart.
I wrote it shortly after Harrison was born, and he was still very new to the world, closer to where Greta was, than he is now. Now, he’s very much of this world, which is a joyful thing. But you know, it also means that there’s distance between who he is and who Greta was. But in that moment, they were very close. And so I felt like I could sort of address them both. And it was maybe the only time in my life I’ll be able to feel that and so being able to capture that feeling and write it. To have it be the last two pages of the book is very meaningful to me.
Also read:
Am I Still a Father? — After his son Jon’s death, Ron Kelly helps other fathers live with their grief.
June 2013, during recovery from what was supposed to be a routine heart catheterization to assess his heart condition, Ron Kelly’s son’s heart failed. Doctors weren’t able to revive 16-year-old Jon. Today Ron helps other grieving fathers, particularly those in the workplace.
After struggling with identity after his son’s death, Ron Kelly helps other men mourn
*Evermore is dedicating this Father’s Day week to bereaved dads who will always be fathers.
R. Glenn “Ron” Kelly’s son was supposed to make it.
Jon was born in 1997 with a rare and potentially deadly heart condition, but doctors were optimistic. He’d need medical intervention, including three open heart surgeries before the age of two to rebuild his heart, but, they said, he’d live a full life.
“He had a wonderful childhood,” Kelly said. As a teenager, Jonathan picked up golf, and the family moved to a golf course community where he could play all the time.
“The year that he passed, he was in line to be the first freshman to make the high school golf team,” said Kelly of his only child. But, in June 2013, during recovery from what was supposed to be a routine heart catheterization to assess how he was doing, Jon’s heart failed. Doctors weren’t able to revive the 16-year-old.
Ron Kelly said his son Jonathan had a wonderful childhood. As a teen, he picked up golf, and the family moved to a golf course community where he could play all the time.
“I take a lot of comfort that I got to hold him when he took his last breath,” Kelly said. “To me, that meant a lot. Not at first, but it certainly does now.”
Still a dad?
The death left Kelly and his wife reeling. Kelly, a former Marine and cop, grappled with an identity crisis and tried to quash any emotion. After his son was born, he had walked away from a career serving others to work as an executive in the defense industry and focus on being a father. But, after his son died, he didn’t know if he could still call himself a dad.
“I went back to work where I could control things,” he said. “I would go back as the number two man in a large company and control my environment and repress my grief in that way. I’d walk by pictures of Jon and avoid looking at them. I was repressing the grief, but I was still wondering, ‘Who was I? Was I still a parent?’”
Six months after his son’s death, said Kelly, “I think Jon came to me and said, ‘How dare you.’ He asked, ‘Are you still a Marine?’ Of course I’m still a Marine. ‘Are you still a cop?’ Part of being a cop will be in me for all my life.”
Then, Kelly said his son asked him, ‘How do you think you’re not still my father?’ It was a good point.”
It was a watershed moment for Kelly, who realized that he needed to let himself grieve. But as he looked for healthful ways to mourn his son, he found few resources.
“There was nothing out there for men by men,” he said. “I had to strike out on my own. I met some wonderful people in the field who nurtured me on my way. I studied human emotions and why we are the way we are.”
As he navigated his grief, he decided to share what he learned with other men by writing a book. And that book, “Sometimes I Cry in the Shower: A Grieving Father’s Journey to Wholeness and Healing,” launched a new career that’s focused on helping men and working with employers to build grief-friendly workplaces.
“It’s been a wonderful opportunity to go out and help others heal,” he said.
Today, Kelly is the author of four books, including “Grief in the Workplace,” “The Griefcase: A Man’s Guide to Healing and Moving Forward in Grief,” and “Grief Healings 365: Daily Inspirations for Moving Forward in Your New Normal.”
Before his son’s death, for example, his managers would stop by his office each morning to let them know what their plans were for the day.
“When I lost Jon, I came back to work and nobody stopped by my door anymore,” he said. “It’s a small anecdote alone, but think about what that did for productivity.”
Those managers just didn’t know what to say, said Kelly. And they weren’t trained in advance to know how to interact with Kelly upon his return.
Now, he said, “I’m going around to businesses and civic organizations and advocating the care and feeding of the bereaved once they return to work.”
Those efforts don’t have to take up a lot of time and money, Kelly said. It can be as simple as sharing, with the employee’s approval, details about how their loved one died before they return, so they aren’t bombarded with questions from curious co-workers.
It also could include teaching managers to spot signs that an employee might need to take a break from time to time. Giving those employees a little grace, said Kelly, “beats rehiring fees and retraining costs and turnover costs.”
Kelly recommends that grieving employees take off their “grief mask,” and be honest about the moments when they need a few minutes outside the office to take a walk.
Serving once more
For Kelly, his work, now a full-time job, has helped him in his own grief. But, he said, he’s also taking a cue from Jon.
“All those years, as Jon was going through interventional trips to the doctors (for his heart condition), he also voluntarily put himself up for research,” Kelly said. “And in his own words, he said, ‘I am helping out other children who were born after me with the same condition.’ He was serving.”
And now Kelly, the Marine and cop, is serving once again.
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.
