Ken Matthies

For over 40 years of his life Ken Matthies has been a writer and chronicler of life expressed in poetic form, following the family tradition laid down by his grandfather before him.

Faced with the dramatically life altering experience of his helicopter pilot daughter’s sudden death in 2002 he has grown to also become a literary author of true events based on his own life.

His full length book about that experience ‘How to Survive the Death of a Child: A Father’s Story of Healing Light’ was written in the aftermath years of her death. A graphically told and soul-wrenching true story, it is a father's honestly written and detailed first-hand account of the devastating experience of losing his child, as well as a revealing chronicle of the bitterly painful yet successful road he traveled to find healing from the immeasurable grief of that loss.

The truths of these events have been poured out whole and undiluted in their entirety, emanating from his rediscovered and renewed wellspring of unconditional Love and Memories of his daughter which have supplied and empowered him in the telling of it. It is this same wellspring which has also been instrumental in this story becoming what the subtitle calls 'A Father's Story of Healing Light'.

It tells of a grieving journey into deeply shadowed and repressed valleys of denial, anger, depression, confusion, and torment from which there didn't seem to be any escape at the time, or end to the pain brought about by death's close passage through his life.

But of even greater impact is that it also tells the detailed truths of how this father emerged whole and healed from a grief-stricken journey of his soul; a soul which along its way was once again able to find that richly healing 'LIGHT OF LOVE AND MEMORIES' that had long been seared into it with the tenderest of touches from a loving daughter's heart. It was in the radiance of this Light that he was also to discover a peace of heart and mind which passes beyond normal human understanding, and the simple yet profoundly healing truth that there is hope, there is consolation, and there is life again after a child's death.

He is also the author of a ten-part progressive grief and healing article series, as well as of numerous other articles, poems, and personalized stories written for the express purpose of helping others remember their lost loved ones, and find their own healing through identification with someone else who has walked a similar journey through the effects of grief and bereavement.

In 2005 Ken was for a brief time a contributor to and resident grief and healing expert on Keyboard Culture, a new blog community of the day comprised of experts in various fields of human experience.

He lives in the northern solitude and grandeur of a tiny southern Yukon village, an area which he says is a good place to tell his stories from.