Grieving mother finds book healing

This story appeared in The Tennessean on Aug. 8, 2002.

By Margaret Bailey
Diversity Institute Fellow

08.14.02

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It was news no mother would want to hear.

Barbara Vaughn remembers folding towels for the daycare she operates in her north Nashville home. Her husband answered the door and learned their 17-year-old son, Sterling, had been in an automobile accident. They drove to the site and learned he had died.

Confronted with what she described as a pain like no other, Vaughn said she began writing about her agony, sometimes late into the night. Nine years after the 1987 tragedy, she published No Turning Back: A Journey Through Grief to Healing. The book is one she describes as a “source of healing” both for herself and others that she continues to share it with.

Vaughn said she has spent more than $2,000 to purchase copies of the book, which is for sale at Books a Million for $10.95, and gives them to people she thinks can benefit from reading what she learned from her experience. She has mailed copies of her book to people as far away as California.

"When I hear of someone who has lost a child, I empathize with them,” Vaughn said. “I look for their address in the obituary columns, the phone book, the funeral homes, churches and on the streets.”

Vaughn said she has never received negative responses from recipients of the book. In it, she shares lessons she learned on the road to recovery. One of the most difficult tasks that one has to perform when dealing with the loss of a child, she said, is learning to live all over again.

"No one should ever judge the actions of a grieving parent, or say what he would do if it were him, because the truth is that no one knows how he would act or feel unless it actually happens to him,” Vaughn writes in her book.

Those kinds of sentiments from someone speaking out of personal experience resonated with Doris Sanderfer, a retired Nashville educator, who received a copy of the book from Vaughn after losing a child in 1998.

"I went through deep depression when my son was shot and killed at a service station,” Sanderfer said. “I’d read a lot of inspirational books and had plenty of people around me, but no one or nobody has helped me as much as reading Barbara’s book. I could identify with everything she’s gone through.”

Vaughn has a history of helping others. She recalls a story dating back to 1975 of a boy, who was about 12 and fished regularly in a lake not far from her home. One day the owner of the lake shot and killed the little boy because as he explained he “thought the boy was a cougar,” Vaughn said.

After hearing that the boy’s family needed money to bury him, Vaughn, who was pregnant at the time, went door to door with her other three children and solicited funds on the family’s behalf. She raised $500, about twice as much as a local radio station, she said.

The loss of her own son taught Vaughn that people often say that recovery is a process, but they do little to help the grieving get through it, she said. After her son’s funeral, when everyone returned to their normal lives, Vaughn said she still needed healing. Writing her thoughts on sheets of paper began that process and has since helped her to remember with fondness the son she lost suddenly and tragically.

Sterling was a fairly normal child, whose father, George, kept a watchful eye on him and had a lot to say about the company he kept, Vaughn said.

"I remember a day that Sterling was agitated at his father because of his father’s reminders about drugs, and he let him know it,” Vaughn said. “I had to laugh when George told him, 'If I ever go in your room and see anything that looks like white powder, it better be flour and you better have a damn good biscuit recipe to go with it.'"

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