By: Elowen Gray
On a crisp, cool fall afternoon in November of 2023, an unknown number scrolled across Amy King’s phone.
“Ma’am, I’m following behind an ambulance that has your husband in the back.”
Amy could hear the shakiness in the voice of her army reservist husband’s commanding officer. Andy King was en route to a weekend of training exercises when the Humvee he was riding in flipped over. It turned out he was killed instantly.
“There has been an accident,” the voice continued, “and I need you to drive to Richmond VCU Trauma Center.”
Amy knew in that moment that Andy was dead, and at the age of 27, she had become the widowed mother of their sixteen-month-old daughter Adalyn. She ended up sitting outside on her Woodstock, Virginia, home’s porch, trying to come to grips with the fact that she had lost the love of her life, her high school sweetheart and best friend. Over the ensuing days, her shock gave way to grief as she searched for a way to process what we all live in terror of, but few ever actually experience.
Amy King had become one of those few. Amid the months of emotionally wrenching tumult that followed, she struggled to keep her head above water to avoid drowning in the morass that had swallowed her life. Absolutely nothing was the same. So much Amy, like all of us, had taken for granted had been stripped away. Even simple day-to-day tasks, like making coffee, stirred the pot, because now she found herself using a Keurig to brew one cup at a time.
Photo Courtesy: Amy King
[Mother and daughter]
By saying it out loud, she was expressing everything she was feeling in real time in words. Having followed other young widows on Facebook, some of whom boasted a prominent social media presence and even their own podcasts, Amy decided to pen the book that became SAYING IT OUT LOUD: A Young Widow’s Triumph Over Tragedy (Post Hill Press, April 2026), a stunningly effective, inspirational masterpiece of soul-bearing truth and unflinching courage, as much about healing as heartbreak.
The subtitle is especially relevant in this respect because it conveys the message she wants readers to take away from her book. But why did Amy, the author of nothing longer than a college paper, decide to write it?
“It was for my daughter Adalyn. I wanted to write down everything we went through for that whole year after Andy’s passing because I knew she would forget as time went on. I wrote the book as a kind of memorial with a message about the power of community and faith. I wanted to capture on paper who Andy was in stories about him, Addie will now have forever.”
In the course of the writing, Amy realized she was penning the book for herself as well, for the therapy and catharsis, saying the quiet parts out loud ended up spawning.
“I was hyper-focused on making something positive out of something so horrible, and I didn’t want to forget all of the good wrapped up in the bad. The book helped me process what happened and how I got through it, where I was at various times through those first twelve months, a real-time version of getting through the hardest year of my life.”
In laying out how she did that, Amy has fashioned a how-to book for others whose lives have been similarly roiled by grief or trauma. Her primary message: say it out loud, just like she did.
“Find people in your life you can trust to spill everything out to. Find an outlet, whether it be therapy, listening to podcasts, or any outlet that brings you a sense of relief. I also think it’s important to compartmentalize a bit. You need times when you’re thinking about something else, anything else, to balance the grief. And as the months pass, those experiences slowly grow longer. You won’t go a day without thinking about your loss, but you can go an hour for starters. I realized I had turned a corner when I woke up one morning and went two hours without picturing the accident in my head.”
In Amy’s mind, those whose lives have been changed by a single phone call need to figure out their new identity and not cling to the old. She doesn’t believe you can ask yourself When am I going to feel better about this? Because the timetable isn’t fixed and impatience can lead to a debilitating sense of frustration, which serves only to lengthen the recovery process.
“How do I make this heavy feeling a part of my day, so I can learn how to make the burden lighter, while understanding it’s never going to go away entirely? The realization you will never be the same person exactly you were before is something you need to integrate into your life.”
Photo Courtesy: Amy King
[Amy, Adalyn, and Andy in August of 2023, just two months before the accident]
“Halloween night, just before Andy left for his training. She wasn’t even two yet, but he wanted her to experience everything all the other kids were, which meant going up to every door on our trick-or-treating route. And when he saw police officers giving all the kids glow sticks, he got one for Addie to hold too. Like he wanted her to have it all.”
“You could see those glow sticks all the way down the street,” Amy writes in SAYING IT OUT LOUD, “bobbing in the grasp of kids older than Addie, seeming to light a path into the future. But the light they shed stretched only so far, just a handful of houses or maybe a block. Thinking back, the memory is metaphoric for life extending only so far, just like the light from those glow sticks. And they can flicker and fade at any time, their brightness surrendering to the darkness.”
Amy King, though, refused to surrender to that darkness and, as a result, SAYING IT OUT LOUD is a powerful testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit and resilience forged from love and loss. In addition to the book, she has established a scholarship and organized what has now become an annual 5K run in Andy’s honor.
In November of 2024, on the first anniversary of the accident, the runners, including Amy herself, followed spray-painted arrows with “AKK” for Anderson Keaton King along the course, as if Andy was pointing them in the right direction. Just like Amy hopes her book may do for those looking for a hand to lift them out of the hole into which they’ve sunk.
“If I hadn’t written it all down, I think it would have been harder for me to grasp how much had changed and how much I had overcome. I know what writing it did for me. The thought of what reading it might do for somebody else is the icing on the cake.”
Or another glow stick lighting the way.
