Earlier this year, Alan Austin released his first book on the 40th anniversary of his father’s murder in Austin, which occurred when he was 5 years old.
Now 45, Austin wrote his memoir, “The Long Echo: Re-grieving a Parent Lost in Childhood,” to tell the story of how, throughout his life, he’s navigated the grief of losing his father. He hopes his memoir will educate adults on how grief affects children who don’t have the words to describe what they’re feeling — and how they can help kids navigate that heartache.
Austin was inspired to start writing his memoir last year after watching “The Perfect Neighbor” documentary on Netflix. One scene showed children’s reactions when they found out their mother was dead, and Austin said, “I know exactly what those kids are going through.”
It was 1986 when Austin’s father, then 26 years old, was murdered in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, “killed by a so-called friend,” he said. Austin’s family lived in North Lawndale at the time, and he remembers the moment his aunt knocked on their door and “all the adults in the room just crumbled.” Though he said he didn’t understand what was going on, “I started crying because everybody else was.”
While Austin said he didn’t see it as grieving at the time, he remembers associating fear with his father’s death.
“When I saw him in a casket, I remember immediately becoming afraid of somebody that I loved,” he said. And after seeing his father’s obituary picture, Austin refused to be in family photos for several years. “In my little young mind, I was like, ‘Maybe if I don’t take pictures, this won’t happen to me.’”
As a child, Austin remembers falling asleep to the sound of sitcoms on TV, “constantly wanting to hear laughter to cope,” he said. And in the following years, Austin grieved his father in different ways.
Around age 8, Austin said he understood the finality of death and that his father wasn’t coming back. While Austin had three half-siblings at the time of his father’s death, he said he didn’t talk in-depth with them about the murder, largely dealing with his thoughts and emotions by himself. Though, he remembers having morbid conversations around age 10 with his brother about how “we’ll both be dead by the time we’re 18,” he said.
Past age 13, Austin started grieving experiences he would never have and knowledge he would never receive from his father.
“My father is not going to be here telling me about girls or how to drive,” Austin said. “I felt like my manhood had been stripped away from me.” While he had a loose road map from his father about what not to do when it came to street life, Austin was never directed with a course of action when it came to big moments in life.
“I grieved milestones. I grieved when my daughter was born, that she’d never meet her grandfather,” Austin said.
For much of his life, Austin said he felt like he was on autopilot, “thinking I was owed something because my father was murdered,” he said. Only later in life did he realize “grief is not a vending machine. It’s not ‘This is what happened to me, so I get this in return.’”
In adulthood, Austin began feeling he needed to be super successful in order to make his family’s sacrifices surrounding his father’s death worth it, especially those of his mother, who worked two jobs seven days a week until he was 29.
“I didn’t want to come around. I didn’t want to be seen because I didn’t feel like I had gotten enough for the loss,” Austin said. “I didn’t feel like I had done enough with what people had poured into me.”
He added, “There’s very much a sense of urgency for me to make an impact, something worthwhile, so I can make the people I love happy.”
Nearly 20 years older than his father when he died, Austin is still learning to deal with the pain of losing his dad. He describes moments when he’s laughing or joking around before his grief creeps in.
“It’s almost like sabotaging your joy,” he said. “You never get over it. You learn how to carry it.”
How to help a grieving child
Writing his memoir has helped give Austin purpose. He hopes his book will help fathers living with questionable lifestyles — “If you’re not going to raise your kids, grief will” — and surviving relatives to understand childhood grief, giving kids who have lost loved ones the voice to describe what they’re going through.
“I can’t stress how delayed I feel because of grief. I didn’t live. There was a lot of hyper-vigilance,” Austin said. Growing up, he was invited to many get-togethers he didn’t attend because he felt like “If something bad was going to happen, it would happen to me.”
Austin said he was a good, quiet kid, and knows there are a lot of children like him who are hurting, and no one knows it.
“It feels like shackles. Grief makes a child think that there might not be much in the future,” Austin said.
As a kid, Austin said he didn’t have the language to tell people how he felt but also didn’t want to share his feelings so as to not cause his family additional pain.
“I don’t know if I grieved or I was just controlled by everybody else’s grieving,” Austin said. To not bring up pain associated with grief, Austin didn’t ask too many questions of his mother or grandmother in the years following his father’s death. “So much of my experience was wrapped up in silence — not because nobody told me not to talk about him, but what stuck out so much in my mind was pain. I didn’t want to say anything to trigger that again.”
But Austin said one of his biggest regrets is not asking his grandmother more questions before she passed — in order to keep both her and his father’s memories alive.
He also emphasized the importance of asking questions to children who are dealing with trauma.
That, Austin said, is how West Side residents can navigate the perception of resiliency that’s so ingrained in their neighborhoods.
“The culture has branded significant loss as normal,” Austin said. “That’s how my story connects to the West Side — the people who are just regular people dealing with problems the best way we know how.” Many, though, he said don’t have the language to process their problems. And though there’s increasing access to therapy on the West Side, “We just feel like we don’t need it,” Austin said.
As he better understands his own childhood grief, Austin is starting to have more conversations with other adults who experienced something similar in their childhood, or with parents of children who have experienced trauma.
To young people who have experienced childhood grief from losing a loved one, Austin advises them to live their life to the fullest, dream big and ask questions of your family members.
“You have to work to be happy,” he said. “Make smart decisions and try to live the best life you can.”
Buy a copy of “The Long Echo: Re-grieving a Parent Lost in Childhood” on Amazon and visit https://the-long-echo.com/ to learn more.