How do you to it? How do you keep it together after both of your children die traumatically? The truth is, you can’t at first.   Don’t expect that you will. Allow yourself to fall apart. Let friends and family be with you to listen without judgment as all of your emotions surface. Let out all that craziness you feel. Cry, scream, hug, talk (if you can). There will be time later to knit yourself together again. No one can say how you’ll manage it. Your solutions will be unique to you.

In the first month after the fire killed our sons I was unable to mentally escape the horror. I relived the early morning sights, sounds and smells over and over. Every part of me screamed for relief, wanting desperately to travel back in time and do over the events that put us in that location at that moment. Of course, rewinding time was impossible.

I’ve never been so scared — scared beyond anything imaginable by the sudden disappearance of my children, utterly confused about how to go on living. I was a lost soul, downright zombie-like in my day-to-day movements because my brain was elsewhere. It was elsewhere for a long while.

Yet somehow, five years later I am better. Much better. ‘How’d that happen?’ I ask myself. I didn’t know what I was doing then, because I was elsewhere, of course, but I do know now, looking back: I listened. That’s how I got through my grief. I listened to my body and soul, following the internal cues that directed me to what worked.

If some activity helped me feel the tiniest bit better I chose to do more of it. If another activity made me feel worse, I avoided it whenever I could. Today I’m stronger, healthier and more at peace largely because I listened to my inner voice – I listened hard to hear my soul through the noise of my pain.

Four months after the boys died, I began a written healing exercise, as task to be completed in one sitting. Its purpose: to get the boys out of the fire in my mind and create for them a safe place. I had no idea that this little healing exercise prescribed by my trauma therapist would grow into this book, Crossing the Horizon.

Yet, because I was intent on following my inner voice, I did what felt good and I just kept writing, one day from Liam’s perspective and the next day from Solon’s. Now, when I read Crossing the Horizon, I see buried beneath the story’s action and adventure the trajectory of my early grief and the seeds of my most trusted survival strategy: Listen to your inner voice. That will get you through.

In Crossing the Horizon, Solon and Liam struggle to adjust to their new surroundings. Over and over again, without knowing where it would lead them, at the advice of their Guiding Spirit, the boys learn to trust their intuition to navigate in their new world and travel to and from earth again. Each time, their intuition brings them one step closer to the goal of helping their parents heal.

Intuition helps the boys solve the riddles of their afterlife just as following my intuition helped me heal. Yours can help you too. Listen.