About
About Alan Austin
Alan Austin is a writer, father, husband, and childhood grief advocate whose work is rooted in lived experience. After losing his father to violence as a young child, Alan spent much of his life carrying grief he did not yet know how to name.
His writing now gives language to the long emotional echo that follows children after parent loss, especially when death arrives through violence, silence, and unanswered questions.
Origin
The morning that changed everything
Alan was a young child when his father was murdered on Easter Sunday morning in Chicago. He woke to the sound and sight of his family reacting to devastating news. He did not fully understand the words being spoken around him, but he understood the rupture. Something irreversible had entered the house.
He saw adults shaken in ways he had never witnessed before. He heard grief arrive, not as a whisper, but as a force that changed the temperature of every room. He felt the world become unsafe before he had language for trauma, before he knew the word "loss," before anyone thought to explain to him what had happened and why everything was now different.
That Easter morning became one of the earliest memories of how death does not only take a person. It changes the emotional weather of everyone left behind. It rearranges what safety feels like. It creates questions a child may carry for decades before they know they are allowed to ask them.
That morning did not end when the sun went down. It echoed. Through boyhood. Through adolescence. Through fatherhood. Through faith. Through fear. Through decades of silence before the writing began.
The Man Behind the Echo
Alan Maurice Ticey
"My father was more than the way he died. He was loved, remembered, and his absence became the beginning of a long echo I have spent my life learning to name."
Credibility
Why lived experience matters
Alan does not present himself as a clinician. His authority comes from having lived inside childhood grief, survived its long echo, studied its patterns through memory and reflection, and committed his voice to helping others see what grieving children often hide. His work can bring clarity, language, and perspective, while always respecting the role of licensed mental health professionals.
Writer & Author
Translating decades of grief into language that helps families understand what children carry after loss.
Father & Husband
Living proof that the long echo of childhood grief can be redirected, not by erasing loss, but by naming it.
Advocate
Working to shift cultural understanding of childhood grief from private burden to community responsibility.
The Story Behind The Long Echo
A real morning. A real loss. A child trying to understand.
The Long Echo did not begin as a book idea. It began as a morning in 1986, when a child woke to a world that had changed overnight and no one thought to explain why.
The story is not told here to shock or to dwell on violence. It is told because the truth of what happened is part of why this work exists — and because silence around loss is what creates the echo in the first place.
Chicago Tribune
Couple Slain In Car In West Side Alley
March 31, 1986
"A man and a woman were found shot to death early Sunday morning in a car parked in a West Side alley, police said. The car was parked near the 400 block of South Lotus Avenue..."
The Long Echo began with a real morning, a real loss, and a child trying to understand what violence had taken from his family.
Where Memory Lives
"Some losses do not stay in the past. They become part of the questions, fears, love, and purpose we carry forward."
"Giving language to the childhood grief that follows us into adulthood."