"A heartbreaking and true cautionary tale that demands answers to complicated questions." — Kirkus Reviews
If you are a parent watching your child suffer, or carrying the weight of a child you've lost — this space is for you.
Your love was and is real.
Your grief is real.
You are not alone.
If you have a child in crisis — fighting depression, battling addiction, slipping away no matter how close you hold them — you know a particular kind of helplessness that has no name. You have sat in waiting rooms. You have made the calls. You have loved as hard as any person can love.
And if you have lost a child — Jeff and Kathy know that place too. They want you to know that the guilt so many parents carry is not a verdict on your love. It is the weight of loving someone you could not save, no matter what you gave.
Jeff is not a therapist. He is a father. He writes not with tidy answers but with honesty and with the hard-won knowledge that joy, even after the unthinkable, is still possible.
the Book
The question that nearly broke us wasn't “what do we do next?” It was “did we do enough?”
This book is my honest answer to that.
~Jeff
From adolescence on, Alex struggled with major depressive disorder and addiction. Over the course of years, his parents fought alongside him — navigating treatments, crises, and a mental health system that was too often insufficient for the weight of what he was carrying. They loved him completely and without reservation.
They lost him a few years ago.
"I want people who read this to feel our deep devotion to our son — and the excruciating pain of losing him. And then I want them to see the light that Kathy and I found on our path forward. Because it is there."
This memoir* is the full account: who Alex was, what those years looked like from the inside, what the grief of losing him felt like, and how two people who loved each other and loved their son found their way — slowly, imperfectly — back to joy. It is also a frank account of the mental health system and what it asks of families, and what it too often fails to give them.
Comparable titles: Beautiful Boy, The Year of Magical Thinking
"A heartbreaking and true cautionary tale that demands answers to complicated questions." ~Kirkus Reviews
*All after-tax profits will be donated to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Jeff hopes that Alex's story continues to help people long after the last page.
About Jeff
Raised in rural northwest Ohio, Jeff Ewing spent his boyhood exploring wooded creek beds and reading comic books by flashlight in a pup tent with his childhood friend Dave Bruns.
He and his wife Kathy, a retired RN, have been married 48 years. It was their son Alex who introduced Jeff to manual typewriters — a gift that became a lifeline. Jeff drafted this memoir on a 1966 Olympia, the same machine he now uses for personal correspondence. Alex is also the heart of this book. After a struggle that began in adolescence with major depressive disorder and addiction, Jeff and Kathy lost him a few years ago. They had tried everything — every treatment, every intervention, every form of love they knew how to give. This memoir is the story of that journey, and of what it takes to find your way back to joy when the unthinkable happens.
When he isn't writing, Jeff can be found fly fishing or somewhere on the open road — he and Kathy take an annual month-long RV trip to visit loved ones and discover new corners of the US and Canada.
Why This Site and Book Exist
To Honor Alex
01
Alex deserves to be known — not only through his illness, but as a son, a brother, a friend, and the person who handed his father a 1966 typewriter and quietly changed everything.
02
To Reach Families in Pain
For every parent still asking "did we do enough?" — Jeff offers not an argument, but a companion. Someone who has been inside the same darkness and found his way back toward light.
03
To give an honest account
Jeff and Kathy navigated a mental health system that too often fails the families it’s meant to serve. This memoir bears witness to that — because silence doesn't help anyone still fighting.