More about life with Ben

This book has many layers. I've been asked why it has taken me so long to write about my life with Ben.

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I waited 14 years to write Being Ben because I needed time to untangle the grief, the love, and the impossible questions his life left behind—only now do I feel ready to tell his story with the honesty and depth it deserves.

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I've also been asked whether there is fantasy mixed in with the reality. I assure you, this is all true—an honest and raw depiction of our life with this extraordinary child.

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Ben was not just any child. He was brilliant, intense, and deeply intuitive in ways that were both awe-inspiring and, at times, unsettling. With a genius IQ and intellect, he grasped complex concepts before most adults had finished processing the question.

He was wickedly funny, sometimes brutally so, with a wit that could slice through any pretense. He also had an ability—one that defies logical explanation—to see and know things he shouldn’t have been able to. He spoke of past lives with unnerving detail. He predicted events. He sensed things before they happened.

And yet, for all his intellect and insight, Ben was still a child—one shaped by early trauma, one who struggled against forces far beyond his control, both within himself and in the world around him.

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Raising him was both a privilege and a storm I could never quite step out of. The highs were incredible—his curiosity, his humor, his capacity for love. The lows were harrowing—rage that simmered beneath the surface, his struggle to belong in a world that didn’t know what to do with him, and the heartbreaking reality that love alone wasn’t enough to fix the wounds he carried from the first year and a half of his life.

The story of Being Ben is not just about him; it’s about our entire family and the way we all tried, failed, and tried again to hold together under the weight of something both remarkable and overwhelming.

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If this book has a structure, it’s less a straight line and more a weaving of moments—memories of adoption, glimpses into his sharp and often hilarious mind, the dark spaces where we wondered if we could keep going, and the deep, undeniable love that made us fight for him again and again. The central question of the book isn’t just who was Ben? but what does it mean to love someone you can’t always save?

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The plot unfolds in layers, much like grief itself. The first part of the book explores Ben’s beginnings—his time in a Russian orphanage, the desperate journey to bring him home, and the immense learning curve of parenting a child who had already experienced abandonment, hunger, and deprivation before his second birthday. The middle of the book is where things become more complicated—his astonishing mind, his humor, his love for those around him, but also the battles he fought within himself. And then, the final part—his passing, the strange and undeniable ways he remained present even after death, and the years it took me to make peace with telling this story.

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There is no traditional resolution here, no neatly tied-up ending where all questions are answered and all wounds are healed. Instead, there is truth—sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful, but always real. There is the ongoing process of understanding Ben’s life, his impact, and what it means to carry on when someone you love is no longer physically here but still lingers in a thousand unexplainable ways.

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I wrote Being Ben because I had to—because his story demanded to be told. And maybe, just maybe, there’s someone out there who needs to read it, to know they’re not alone in the complexities of love, loss, and the mysteries that bind us to those we can never truly lose.

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