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Through It All: A Memoir Of Love And Loss
This is a story about how post-traumatic stress disorder affected one woman’s life. Through It All resonates with anyone who has found love and lost it.
A healing memoir of love and loss. HEDDY finds true love as a young girl, but suddenly and unexpectedly loses it. Thirty-seven years later, inspired by her daughter’s questioning, her heart attack, and heart bypass surgery, the divorced school teacher sets out to find out what happened to her lost love. Driven by her undying love for LEON SMITH, she searches for answers to long-standing questions. She yearns to be in his arms again.
Heddy kept Leon in her heart throughout the years and various relationships including her marriage. She thinks, maybe he was killed in the Vietnam War, but secretly hopes he is alive and that they can be together again. She searches online for information on Vietnam causalities, veterans, missing in action, and prisoners of war but never finds him listed anywhere. Consumed by her desire to find out what happened to her lost love, she stops at nothing to reveal the truth.
“There’s magic in writing. I began by journaling my memories and feelings. Through this process, I found that expressive writing is a great healer. There were times when the emotional pain was so intense that I stopped writing, but eventually returned.
A healing memoir of love and loss. HEDDY finds true love as a young girl, but suddenly and unexpectedly loses it. Thirty-seven years later, inspired by her daughter’s questioning, her heart attack, and heart bypass surgery, the divorced school teacher sets out to find out what happened to her lost love. Driven by her undying love for LEON SMITH, she searches for answers to long-standing questions. She yearns to be in his arms again.
Heddy kept Leon in her heart throughout the years and various relationships including her marriage. She thinks, maybe he was killed in the Vietnam War, but secretly hopes he is alive and that they can be together again. She searches online for information on Vietnam causalities, veterans, missing in action, and prisoners of war but never finds him listed anywhere. Consumed by her desire to find out what happened to her lost love, she stops at nothing to reveal the truth.
“There’s magic in writing. I began by journaling my memories and feelings. Through this process, I found that expressive writing is a great healer. There were times when the emotional pain was so intense that I stopped writing, but eventually returned.
202 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 7, 2017
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November 11, 2017
I have a habit that drives my wife crazy. When we travel, I insist on finding off-road, back-alley dives to eat in, to find local flavor. Enough Applebees. Fie on Perkins and Olive Garden. You can get that anywhere. Risk. Try something unique. You will undoubtedly stumble into some awful experiences, but you will also discover a richness that changes your life, and satisfies beyond every expectation.
Heddy Keith’s memoir, “Through It All: A memoir of love and loss; the Men I Chose To Love And The Lessons Learned” is like one of those miracle discoveries in a restaurant.
If you can only eat in five star joints, with pressed linen table-cloths and ingratiatingly sweet, robotic wait-staff, then perhaps you’ll pass on this book. But if you’re the type who likes a little risk; likes the sweet discovery of a cuisine you’ve never tasted, served in a room that exudes love and commitment to people who eat there daily, you should read “Through It All.”
Keith’s book contains a gripping story, dozens of gut-busting laugh out loud turns of phrase, and a pure authentic voice. As a self-published memoir, it is not “perfect.” But if you hold out for the perfect, you miss out on the exquisite, and new, and surprising, the emotionally real, the tear-jerking truth. I highly recommend you travel the life of Heddy Keith through his memoir.
===
I’m reading Heddy Keith’s memoir “Through It All” in the wake of seeing “Hidden Figures,” the block-buster movie about NASA scientist Katherine Johnson’s contributions to the success of John Glenn’s first orbital flight. Did I mention Katherine is an African-American woman? This last year has also exposed me to “13th,” “I Am Not Your Negro” (fascinating documentary on James Baldwin), “What Happened, Miss Simone,” (fascinating documentary on piano virtuoso and jazz chanteuse Nina Simone). So many stories and history I was simply not exposed to.
Keith’s story fits here.
It’s a matter of representation. I lived to age 51 before learning of “Hidden Figures,” and Keith’s authentic, matter-of-fact retelling of her life was as much a revelation as that movie. I’ve lived in Milwaukee for nigh on 32 years, and she revealed nuances to its shape and character that I have never seen through my white-colored lenses, bought in suburban isolation.
Chuckling at one passage, I asked my wife, who has lived all her life in Milwaukee, “Did you know that there’s an area on Roosevelt Avenue that the Black community refers to as “Blackfish Bay” in mocking comparison to the well-known suburb of “Whitefish Bay” (which of course, we also refer to as “white-folks bay.”) She had never heard that.
In another, she straightforwardly reveals the plight (and love) of a working single-mother, in a combination of an insistent first person/present tense delivery, and a natural vernacular that rolls from her throughout the book:
“When I was a child, I wanted to play the piano and dance. But Mama couldn’t afford it, so I jump at the opportunity for my children to play musical instruments. LeAnn wants to take clarinet. It only costs a one-time rental fee of ten dollars for the instrument, and Milwaukee Public Schools offers the classes free. Joyce, a friend from home looks puzzled when I tell her. She say, “Girl, you gonna spend your last few dollars on music lessons?”
“Yep, I sure am. I can’t pass up this opportunity because this is my last ten until payday. I have gas in the car, food in the fridge, and the rent is paid. We’ll be okay until Friday.”
White and Black, we live in separate spaces in a well of common humanity. Some may not want to acknowledge that, but as Keith writes in her epilogue, “Revelation of truth, heals.”
As much as exposing oneself to another’s truth heals, too. We simply must read the lives of the unfamiliar -- give up an hour of mass media attempting to demonize, and read to empathize. Skip another trip to Chili’s and go have a meal at Speed-Queen Ribs on 12th and Walnut.
Of course I feel voyeuristic, reading as a white man, feeling like I’m sneaking a peep through a hole in the fence to a world of mystery and isolation… but that projection of “exotic” is on me. It’s a fence I aim to begin dismantling, one book, one movie at a time.
“Through It All” is not perfect, but there are immediately two problems in my saying that:
First, “Perfect by whose standards? Hollywood? Some Ivy League MFA program? Literary Journals?” These are the gatekeepers who say which voices should or should not be elevated. These are the gatekeepers who kept “Hidden Figures” from me for 51 years, and they probably had wonderful reasons for doing so, wrapped up in lit-crit jargon, and claims that the authors presenting just didn't quite have enough references to Shakespeare or Chaucer.
And in the new media environment, those gatekeepers insist that the author bring a finished product to them, along with a well-established social media following and some kind of demonstrable audience clout that guarantees the Publishing House will be taking no risks.
Keith’s is a self-published memoir which might not have garnered a sniff from a major gatekeeper, looking more to prop up their profits than expose interesting stories. But that is precisely why we should read these stories. They are like the “Diners and Dives”… hidden gems off the beaten path, filled with flavor, wonder and heart. Sure, if you confine yourself to only eating at backstreet dive joints, you’re bound to have a hit or miss experience, but the thrill of encountering a life altering cuisine is worth the small risk of suffering through a few average meals.
Second, let’s admit that we expose ourselves to all manner of pabulum; entertainment that is not perfect, but which has the redeeming quality of “looking like us” or being approved by critics and gatekeepers. What would it take you to substitute one small portion of your discretionary reading time to read and absorb alternative lives, alternative stories from those you don’t already “know”? perhaps you may learn to empathize with the common humanity and emotions so rivetingly on display in Keith’s memoir.
I rank “Through It All” four stars for authenticity, pluck and heart that brought me to tears.
One star deduction for minor technical roughness.
Heddy Keith’s memoir, “Through It All: A memoir of love and loss; the Men I Chose To Love And The Lessons Learned” is like one of those miracle discoveries in a restaurant.
If you can only eat in five star joints, with pressed linen table-cloths and ingratiatingly sweet, robotic wait-staff, then perhaps you’ll pass on this book. But if you’re the type who likes a little risk; likes the sweet discovery of a cuisine you’ve never tasted, served in a room that exudes love and commitment to people who eat there daily, you should read “Through It All.”
Keith’s book contains a gripping story, dozens of gut-busting laugh out loud turns of phrase, and a pure authentic voice. As a self-published memoir, it is not “perfect.” But if you hold out for the perfect, you miss out on the exquisite, and new, and surprising, the emotionally real, the tear-jerking truth. I highly recommend you travel the life of Heddy Keith through his memoir.
===
I’m reading Heddy Keith’s memoir “Through It All” in the wake of seeing “Hidden Figures,” the block-buster movie about NASA scientist Katherine Johnson’s contributions to the success of John Glenn’s first orbital flight. Did I mention Katherine is an African-American woman? This last year has also exposed me to “13th,” “I Am Not Your Negro” (fascinating documentary on James Baldwin), “What Happened, Miss Simone,” (fascinating documentary on piano virtuoso and jazz chanteuse Nina Simone). So many stories and history I was simply not exposed to.
Keith’s story fits here.
It’s a matter of representation. I lived to age 51 before learning of “Hidden Figures,” and Keith’s authentic, matter-of-fact retelling of her life was as much a revelation as that movie. I’ve lived in Milwaukee for nigh on 32 years, and she revealed nuances to its shape and character that I have never seen through my white-colored lenses, bought in suburban isolation.
Chuckling at one passage, I asked my wife, who has lived all her life in Milwaukee, “Did you know that there’s an area on Roosevelt Avenue that the Black community refers to as “Blackfish Bay” in mocking comparison to the well-known suburb of “Whitefish Bay” (which of course, we also refer to as “white-folks bay.”) She had never heard that.
In another, she straightforwardly reveals the plight (and love) of a working single-mother, in a combination of an insistent first person/present tense delivery, and a natural vernacular that rolls from her throughout the book:
“When I was a child, I wanted to play the piano and dance. But Mama couldn’t afford it, so I jump at the opportunity for my children to play musical instruments. LeAnn wants to take clarinet. It only costs a one-time rental fee of ten dollars for the instrument, and Milwaukee Public Schools offers the classes free. Joyce, a friend from home looks puzzled when I tell her. She say, “Girl, you gonna spend your last few dollars on music lessons?”
“Yep, I sure am. I can’t pass up this opportunity because this is my last ten until payday. I have gas in the car, food in the fridge, and the rent is paid. We’ll be okay until Friday.”
White and Black, we live in separate spaces in a well of common humanity. Some may not want to acknowledge that, but as Keith writes in her epilogue, “Revelation of truth, heals.”
As much as exposing oneself to another’s truth heals, too. We simply must read the lives of the unfamiliar -- give up an hour of mass media attempting to demonize, and read to empathize. Skip another trip to Chili’s and go have a meal at Speed-Queen Ribs on 12th and Walnut.
Of course I feel voyeuristic, reading as a white man, feeling like I’m sneaking a peep through a hole in the fence to a world of mystery and isolation… but that projection of “exotic” is on me. It’s a fence I aim to begin dismantling, one book, one movie at a time.
“Through It All” is not perfect, but there are immediately two problems in my saying that:
First, “Perfect by whose standards? Hollywood? Some Ivy League MFA program? Literary Journals?” These are the gatekeepers who say which voices should or should not be elevated. These are the gatekeepers who kept “Hidden Figures” from me for 51 years, and they probably had wonderful reasons for doing so, wrapped up in lit-crit jargon, and claims that the authors presenting just didn't quite have enough references to Shakespeare or Chaucer.
And in the new media environment, those gatekeepers insist that the author bring a finished product to them, along with a well-established social media following and some kind of demonstrable audience clout that guarantees the Publishing House will be taking no risks.
Keith’s is a self-published memoir which might not have garnered a sniff from a major gatekeeper, looking more to prop up their profits than expose interesting stories. But that is precisely why we should read these stories. They are like the “Diners and Dives”… hidden gems off the beaten path, filled with flavor, wonder and heart. Sure, if you confine yourself to only eating at backstreet dive joints, you’re bound to have a hit or miss experience, but the thrill of encountering a life altering cuisine is worth the small risk of suffering through a few average meals.
Second, let’s admit that we expose ourselves to all manner of pabulum; entertainment that is not perfect, but which has the redeeming quality of “looking like us” or being approved by critics and gatekeepers. What would it take you to substitute one small portion of your discretionary reading time to read and absorb alternative lives, alternative stories from those you don’t already “know”? perhaps you may learn to empathize with the common humanity and emotions so rivetingly on display in Keith’s memoir.
I rank “Through It All” four stars for authenticity, pluck and heart that brought me to tears.
One star deduction for minor technical roughness.
Displaying 1 of 1 review