Anna Whiston-Donaldson, whose son Jack died when he was swept away by a flash flood three years ago, has written a memoir titled 'Rare Bird.' (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post) The beginning of the school year can be emotional for any parent, but it is particularly wrenching for Anna Whiston-Donaldson. In 2011, on his second day of 7th grade, her 12-year-old son, Jack, near their home in Vienna, Va. Whiston-Donaldson worked out her feelings in real time on her blog, a place where she had previously posted, her and, of course, pictures of her. Now, nearly three years after Jack died, she is about to publish a book: “,” a memoir about his death and her slow emergence from a cloud of shock and grief. “I’d much rather have Jack than a book,” says Whiston-Donaldson in an interview at her home. “But if I’m going to have a book, I want something good to come out of it.” Perhaps, she says, her story will offer help and hope to those in mourning and “soften the hearts” of those who cross their paths.
Her message, she says, is universal: “Everyone grieves. Everyone in life is going to experience profound disappointment.
We all have the opportunity to walk beside someone in crisis.” Sitting at the table in her sunny kitchen, Whiston-Donaldson is candid and self-deprecating. “I try to be real and honest,” she says of herself and her book, “But I’m not an expert on grief. It’s just my experience.” She turns more tender, her voice softens, when asked about Jack. “He would have been awesome in high school,” she says.
In recent months she has found it especially difficult to watch his friends grow older while Jack stays locked at age 12. In their house, reminders of her son are everywhere. A dresser with his clothes sits in her bedroom; his baseball bat and helmet are in the garage. Her home office offers a snapshot of a creative, nature-loving child — on a table stands a Taj Mahal Lego set he built, on a shelf is a spaghetti jar filled with the cicada shells he collected in 2004. The next time the Brood X cicadas return, Whiston-Donaldson says, “I’m going to leave the country.” Her book is filled with anecdotes about Jack, but she did not intend it to be a tribute to him. “That wouldn’t be helpful,” she says — to herself, or to her readers. She also understands that some people will be afraid to read her memoir.
“Once I had kids, I stopped reading Oprah books, because I just didn’t want to be sad.” Her book is sad. But it is also eloquent and affecting in its self-awareness.
This is a “story of a woman who has suffered profound, crushing disappointment, whose plan didn’t pan out, whose heart has been broken by life, and who is wondering if she’s alone in her pain,” Whiston-Donaldson writes in the introduction. Anna Whiston-Donaldson writes her blog in her home office, decorated with some of her son Jack's possessions and photographs with her dog, Shadow, nearby. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post) The portrait Whiston-Donaldson, 44, draws of her life before the event is one of suburban idyll — a happy marriage to Tim, a patent lawyer; two healthy children who said their prayers before bed; a fulfilling part-time job at her church bookstore.
The day her son died, with the power out from a storm, her children were happily doing their homework by candlelight — a scene so “Little House on the Prairie” that she felt compelled to share it on Facebook. Then came a knock on the door. Did Jack and his sister, Margaret, then 10, want to come out in the rain and play? They got a “quick ‘Go for it!’ from me,” Whiston-Donaldson writes, and ran outside. “I don’t know how many times I’d told them of the crazy fun my sister and I had tromping through the flooded dips and valleys of our own yard as kids, but I do know I had told them,” she writes. “I wish I had never told them.” The last time she saw them together, her children were walking down their driveway, Jack “still in his school uniform of navy polo and long khaki shorts, arms raised to the sky.” Margaret returned less than an hour later, alone.
Whiston-Donaldson says she still doesn’t know exactly what happened. Some of the book’s most harrowing scenes describe her frantic efforts to find her son, racing along the side of the creek in her car with Margaret crying in the back seat, and the immediate aftermath of his death. Even more brutal is her chronicle of the two years following the accident, as she tries to accept her loss.
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She is unsparing, not least on herself. “I feel a loss of credibility as a mother,” she writes, “a sense of shame and despair hangs over me. The Whiston-Donaldson family: left to right Jack Donaldson, Anna Whiston-Donaldson, Margaret Donaldson and Tim Donaldson at the beach in North Carolina in 2008.
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(Family Photo/Family Photo) After the accident, people began putting together the news reports with the photos and stories on her blog, and Whiston-Donaldson’s two lives — online and off — merged. The comments and condolences poured in from around the world; page views on her blog spiked to nearly half a million during the month of the accident. The online community “gave me a lot of support” and connected her with others who had experienced similar losses; some have since come to her seeking empathy and counsel. There has even been some unexpected joy.
When readers saw Margaret’s request to meet Justin Bieber, they began an online campaign to make it happen and, amazingly,. Whiston-Donaldson was content to limit her writing to the Internet, even when she was approached by book agents and publishers several months after the accident. Before her son’s death, she didn’t imagine herself as a memoirist; if anything, she said, she always thought her first book would be about restoring furniture, a hobby she wrote about on her blog. But about a year after Jack died, the encouragement began to take root. She hired an agent, and without a proposal, got a contract with Convergent, a religion imprint at Crown. The choice of publisher reflects the book’s spiritual content. “I play with the idea that our son’s death is not a random accident, not just the result of free will and bad judgment and freak weather,” she writes, “but somehow part of a larger plan.
And a loving God, who holds all the pieces in his hands, can see the plan that we cannot.”. Whiston-Donaldson wrote much of the book at a Panera in a strip mall on Route 7 in Tysons Corner. She finished in November 2013, a few months after the family moved into a new house about two miles from the spot where Jack’s body was found.
“I feel lighter here,” she says, away from Jack’s old friends and the house he grew up in. With the book’s publication comes the realization, she says, tearfully, that “I’m one year farther from being with Jack.” She’s still grieving, she says, but “I feel increasingly less stricken.” For his part, Tim recognizes how valuable writing — both the blog and the book — has been for his wife. “I can be there for her as a husband,” he says, “but I can’t fulfill the role of 1,000 anonymous supporters being there for her on a daily basis.” He has been reading her blog from the start and says it has helped him understand what his wife is going through, even before the accident. As for the book, he says, he has read it once, alone. “Is it hard?” he asks. “Yes.” But, he adds, “the more I go back there, it becomes less hard to talk about.” His wife draws comfort not only from her writing, her faith and her community — online and off — but also from her experience and that of her family.
“I was raised as a free-range kid and I survived,” she writes in her book, and she is trying to instill that sense of adventure in her daughter, who has gone whitewater rafting with the Girl Scouts. And despite it all, Whiston-Donaldson says, “I still like rain.”.
Dying Alexander, copy of the 2nd century BC sculpture, National Art Museum of Azerbaijan. The death of and subsequent related events have been the subjects of debates.
According to a, Alexander died between the evening of June 10 and the evening of June 11, 323 BC, at the age of thirty-two. This happened in the palace of in. And local residents wept at the news of the death, while subjects shaved their heads. The mother of, having learned of Alexander's death, refused sustenance and died a few days later. Historians vary in their assessments of primary sources about Alexander's death, which results in different views. Contents. Background In February 323 BC, Alexander ordered his armies to prepare for the march to.
According to, after crossing the Alexander was met by, who advised him not to enter the city because their deity had warned them that to do so at that time would be fatal for Alexander. The Chaldeans also warned Alexander against marching westwards as he would then look to the setting sun, a symbol of decline. It was suggested that he enter Babylon via the Royal Gate, in the western wall, where he would face to the east.
Alexander followed this advice, but the route turned to be unfavorable because of swampy terrain. According to, 'it seems that in May 323' the Babylonian tried to avert the misfortune by substituting Alexander with an ordinary person on the Babylonian throne, who would take the brunt of the omen. The Greeks, however, did not understand that ritual. Prophecy of Calanus was likely to be a, whom Greeks called. He had accompanied the Greek army back from, upon request by Alexander. He was seventy-three years of age at that time.
However, when Persian weather and travel fatigue weakened him, he informed Alexander that he would rather die than live disabled. He decided to take away his life. Although Alexander tried to desist him from doing so but upon the insistence of Calanus, Alexander relented and the job of building a was entrusted to. The place where this incident took place was in the year 323 B.C.
Calanus is mentioned also by Alexander's admiral, and. He did not flinch as he burnt to the astonishment of those who watched. Before immolating himself alive on the pyre, his last words to Alexander were 'We shall meet in Babylon'. Thus he is said to have prophesied the death of Alexander in Babylon. At the time of the death of Calanus, Alexander, however, did not have any plan to go to Babylon. No one understood the meaning of his words 'We shall meet in Babylon'.
It was only after Alexander fell sick and died in Babylon, that the Greeks came to realize what Calanus intended to convey. The poisoning of Alexander depicted in the 15th century romance The History of Alexander’s Battles, J1 version. NLW MS Pen.481D Proposed causes of Alexander's death included alcoholic liver disease, fever, and poisoning, but little data support those versions. According to the University of Maryland School of Medicine report of 1998, Alexander probably died of (which, along with, was common in ancient Babylon ).
In the week before Alexander's death, historical accounts mention chills, sweats, exhaustion and high fever, typical of infectious diseases, including typhoid fever. According to David W.
Oldach from the, Alexander also had 'severe, causing him to cry out in agony'. The associated account, however, comes from the unreliable. According to Andrew N.
Williams and Robert Arnott, in Alexander the Great's last days he became mute. He became mute because of a previous injury to his neck from the Siege of Cyropolis. Other popular theories hold that Alexander either died of malaria or was poisoned. Other include noninfectious diseases as well. According to author Andrew Chugg, there is evidence Alexander died of malaria, having contracted it two weeks before his death while sailing in the marshes to inspect flood defences. Chugg based his argument on Ephemerides by otherwise unknown Diodotus of Erythrae, although the authenticity of this source has been questioned. It was also noted that the absence of the signature fever curve of (the expected parasite, given Alexander's travel history) diminishes the possibility of malaria.
The malaria version was nonetheless supported. Throughout the centuries suspicions of possible poisoning have fallen on a number of alleged perpetrators, including one of Alexander's wives, his generals, his illegitimate half-brother or the royal cup-bearer.
In, Machiavelli suggests Alexander was killed by his own army. The poisoning version is featured particularly in politically motivated Liber de Morte Testamentoque Alexandri ( The Book On the Death and Testament of Alexander), which tries to discredit the family of. It was argued that the book was compiled in 's circle, not before ca. In Alexander the Great: The Death of a God, claimed that Alexander was poisoned with by his possibly illegitimate half-brother. However, this was disputed by New Zealand National Poisons Centre toxicologist Dr Leo Schep who discounted arsenic poisoning and instead suggested that he could have been poisoned by a wine made from the plant, known as white hellebore. This plant was known to the Ancient Greeks and it can produce prolonged poisoning symptoms that match the course of events as described in the Alexander Romance.
The article was published in the peer-reviewed medical journal and suggested that if Alexander was poisoned, Veratrum album offers the most plausible cause. Epidemiologist John Marr and Charles Calisher put forward the as possible cause of Alexander's death. This version was deemed as 'fairly compelling' by the epidemiologist Thomas Mather, who nonetheless noted that the West Nile virus tends to kill the elders or those with weakened. The version of Marr and Calisher was also criticized by Burke A.
According to analysis of other authors in response to Marr and Calisher, the West Nile virus could not have infected humans before the 8th century AD. Other causes that have been put forward include provoked by 'heavy alcohol consumption and a very rich meal', brought on by, and. Proposed and malaria. When Alexander's symptoms were entered to the, gained the highest probability (41.2%) on the list of. However, according to Cunha, the symptoms and time course of Alexander's disease are inconsistent with influenza, as well as with malaria, schistosomiasis and poisoning in particular. Another theory moves away from disease and hypothesizes that Alexander's death was related to a congenital scoliotic syndrome. It has been discussed that Alexander had structural neck deformities and oculomotor deficits, and this could be associated with Klippel-Feil Syndrome, a rare congenital scoliotic disorder.
His physical deformities and symptoms leading up to his death are what lead experts to believe this. Some believe that as Alexander fell ill in his final days, he suffered from progressive epidural spinal cord compression, which left him quadriplegic. However this hypothesis cannot be proven without a full analysis of Alexander's body. Body preservation. Funeral of Iskander (Alexander): pallbearers carry his coffin draped with brocaded silk and his turban at one end.
In 's version Iskandar fell ill and died near Babylon. Because it was believed he had been poisoned, no antidotes could revive him. One ancient account reports that the planning and construction of an appropriate funerary cart to convey the body out from Babylon took two years from the time of Alexander's death. It is not known exactly how the body was preserved for about two years before it was moved from Babylon. In 1889 suggested that the body was submerged in a vat of honey, while reported treatment. Egyptian and embalmers who arrived on June 16 are said to have attested to Alexander's lifelike appearance. This was interpreted as a complication of, known as, which causes a person to appear dead prior to death.
Resting place. Main article: On its way back to Macedonia, the funerary cart with Alexander's body was met in by one of Alexander's generals, the future ruler. In late 322 or early 321 BC Ptolemy diverted the body to Egypt where it was interred in. In the late 4th or early 3rd century BC Alexander's body was transferred from the Memphis tomb to for reburial (by in c. 280 BC, according to ).
Later placed Alexander's body in Alexandria's communal mausoleum. Shortly after the death of, Alexander's resting place was visited by, who is said to have placed flowers on the tomb and a golden upon Alexander's head. By the 4th century CE the resting place of Alexander was no longer known; later authors, such as, and, report having seen Alexander's tomb. Leo the African in 1491 and in 1611 reportedly saw the tomb in.
According to one legend, the body lies in a beneath an early Christian church. See also. Notes.
Retrieved Aug 21, 2011. Freeman, Philip (2011). Alexander the Great. Simon and Schuster. ^ Chugg, Andrew (2007). The Quest for the Tomb of Alexander the Great.
Retrieved Aug 22, 2011. Retrieved Aug 22, 2011. Robin Lane Fox.
Ministry of Culture and Arts, Iran. Vizārat-i Farhang va Hunar. Prometheus Books. Cunha BA (March 2004). 'The death of Alexander the Great: malaria or typhoid fever'. Infectious Disease Clinics of North America 2004 Mar;18(1):53-63. 18 (1): 53–63.
Retrieved Aug 21, 2011. ^ Carlos G. Humane Medicine Health Care. Retrieved Aug 21, 2011.
Marr; Charles H. Retrieved Aug 21, 2011. Retrieved Aug 21, 2011. Machiavelli, Niccolo. Retrieved 6 April 2016.
John Atkinson; Elsie Truter; Etienne Truter (Jan 1, 2009). Retrieved Aug 21, 2011.
^ Schep LJ, Slaughter RJ, Vale JA, Wheatley P (January 2014). 'Was the death of Alexander the Great due to poisoning? Was it Veratrum album?' 52 (1): 72–7. Bennett-Smith, Meredith (14 January 2014). The Huffington Post. Retrieved 15 January 2014.
Retrieved Aug 21, 2011. Retrieved Aug 21, 2011. Sbarounis CN (June 1997). 'Did Alexander the Great die of acute pancreatitis?' Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology 1997 Jun;24(4):294-6.
24 (4): 294–6. Hutan Ashrafian, 'The Death of Alexander the Great - A Spinal Twist of Fate', Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Vol. 13, 2004, pg.
138. Hutan Ashrafian, 'The Death of Alexander the Great - A Spinal Twist of Fate', Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Vol. 13, 2004, pg.139. ^ Hutan Ashrafian, 'The Death of Alexander the Great - A Spinal Twist of Fate', Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Vol. 13, 2004, pg.
140. George K. Dopdf printer free download.
York, David A. Steinberg, 'Commentary. The Diseases of Alexander the Great', Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Vol. 13, 2004, pg.
154. ^ Robert S. Retrieved Aug 21, 2011.
Obituary Cause Of Death 320 Rar
Aufderheide, Arthur (2003). The scientific study of mummies. Cambridge University Press. Madden, Richard (1851). The Shrines and Sepulchres of the Old and New World. June 11, 1998.
Retrieved Aug 21, 2011.
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