Local mother’s book details grieving process following 2016 tragedy

Friends and admirers filled a room at the Winnetka Community House on Friday evening to congratulate Sally McQuillen on the launch of her book, “Reaching For Beautiful: a Memoir of Loving and Losing a Wild Child.”

The book, published this year by She Writes Press, takes readers through McQuillen’s experience with grief following the accidental death of her oldest son, Christopher, in 2016.

Despite the somber subject, the atmosphere in the room was celebratory, with friends reuniting and showering McQuillen with smiles, tears and congratulations. McQuillen herself seemed overjoyed.

McQuillen decided to write the book, she said, in order to connect to her son.

“I wanted my love for him to have a place to land,” she said, adding that she also wished to offer a sense of Christopher’s spirit, and an inside look at the grief experienced by losing a child. She hopes insights she wrote about will be helpful for others.

“Unfortunately, there are too many of us,” who have lost a child, she said.

Her book journey began within 18 months of Christopher’s accident, which happened when he and other former New Trier High School students took a canoe out on a Wisconsin lake at night in January 2016. She started by writing journal entries to Christopher. Before long, she decided she wanted her reflections to help other people.

The book, which she said gave her purpose, took her seven years to write.

“I wanted to write it well,” McQuillen said, explaining why the process required this time.

She went through multiple drafts and different editors to achieve it. “My writing grew” in the process, she noted.

The writing process revealed new insights into her own challenging childhood in Wilmette and how that influenced her parenting. She also discovered what her son taught her, which, she told her audience on Friday, was the importance of moving from fear to love.

“Be as present as you can. Feel joy and live again,” she said. “He taught me that.”

Sally’s mother, Mary Kuppenheimer of Glenview, said that Sally “poured her heart and soul into writing this book.”

Sally’s husband, Joe McQuillen, expressed his pride in Sally and was jovial on Friday, greeting guests and presenting them to Sally.

The event did not involve a reading from the book. Instead, McQuillen answered questions put to her by fellow North Shore author Jennifer Weigel and then by audience members.

McQuillen is a therapist by profession, which she said did help her during her grieving.

“It’s practice what you preach, right?” she said to the audience. She did “see a way to care for myself. I did give myself permission to treat myself differently.

“Grief,” she noted, “takes all your bandwidth.”

She told her audience that she hopes her book will also teach those who have not lost a child to feel empathy for those who have.

“When you lose a child, it’s ongoing,” she said.

Often, she sees people who have not experienced this loss instinctively shrink away from it. She wants her book to invite a willingness by others to acknowledge a parent’s loss and ask the person about their child.

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