If you spend time in content strategy or SEO, you’re probably already tired of the same conversations about artificial intelligence. AI is everywhere: streamlining email campaigns, optimizing ad spend, and generating headlines at scale. The chatter usually revolves around how to make it faster, smarter, and more efficient for your bottom line. It’s a conversation rooted in productivity, KPIs, and digital growth.
But what we talk about far less, and maybe what feels harder to wrap words around, is how AI can show up not just in the service of marketing but in the service of memory. Of healing. Of small, intensely human moments.
Recently, AI helped me solve a mystery I’d been carrying for over 30 years. It’s not a mystery that would matter to anyone else. There was no Pulitzer at the end of this search. No conversion funnel. No client wins. Just a memory from when I was seven years old, a memory tethered to the worst moment of my life.
And thanks to AI, I found something I never thought I’d see again. This is a story about grief. About memory. And about the strange, beautiful way technology can bring us closer to what we thought was lost forever.
A Memory Etched in Grief
I was seven when my mother died. It was sudden. She had an aneurysm that led to a stroke. She was gone in the blink of an eye.
Even writing that sentence still feels surreal, like I’m naming someone else’s loss. But it was mine. It was sudden, life-altering, the kind of thing that cleaves your childhood in two: before and after.
There are fragments of that time I can still access clearly. The silence in our house. The way adults talked in hushed tones, their words not meant for me. The blur of casseroles and sympathy cards. But the part that stayed with me most, quietly, almost invisibly, was something my former kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Thomas, gave me: a workbook.
It wasn’t big or showy. I don’t remember the title or the author. But I remember that it helped. I remember sitting with a pencil or crayons, drawing in the wide-open spaces of its pages. It asked me how I felt, what I missed, what memories I wanted to keep. It was a space just for me when everything else in my world felt like it had been turned upside down.
I remember the shape of the book: long and rectangular. I remember it was mostly white, with greens on the cover and black text. I remember how quiet it felt. Not in a sad way, exactly. In a way that made room for the sadness.
And then, like so many things from childhood, it vanished. Packed away, recycled, lost in a move. I honestly don’t know. But for years, even decades, I would think about that book. It was the first time someone had acknowledged that I was grieving. That I was a child in mourning. And that mattered more than I ever fully realized until I became an adult.
My Lifelong Search
For two decades, I tried to find it. I’d search on Amazon, Google, and old book databases. I’d type phrases like “grief workbook for kids” or “drawing activities for grieving children,” hoping something would spark recognition. But without a title, it was like chasing smoke.
Then, every few years, I’d try again. It always started the same way: a quiet itch, a moment of stillness, sometimes a random memory surfacing while folding laundry or watching a movie. I’d sit at my computer, open a search engine, and start typing:
- “Grief workbook for kids.”
- “Children’s book about death drawing activities.”
- “Workbook white green cover loss of parent.”
And always, the same results. A mix of modern grief guides, therapy resources, or books that leaned heavily on religious frameworks. None of them was what I remembered. None of them looked or felt right.
I scrolled through Amazon listings, scoured Goodreads, and even searched old-school library catalogs when I felt determined. At every bookstore I visited during my travels, I’d look for it. I tried at times to convince myself I’d made it up. Maybe it wasn’t real, just something my memory had stitched together to comfort itself. Grief does strange things to a developing brain.
But every time I let myself fall into that spiral of doubt, I would remember the feeling: sitting with that workbook, quietly creating. Having space to be sad, to feel something no one could explain, and to put it on paper in a way that didn’t need to make sense to anyone but me. That memory never left.
I wasn’t just looking for a book. I was looking for proof. That someone had tried to help me. That what I felt then mattered. That I didn’t dream it.
So, I didn’t expect much when I opened up a conversation with ChatGPT one day, mostly out of curiosity. I figured it would be like every other search, only with more polite phrasing. Still, I typed out my question, trying to be as detailed as possible without rambling:
“When I was 7, my mom died, and my kindergarten teacher gave me a workbook to deal with children going through grief. I don’t remember much other than there were activities in the book and the cover of the book was mostly white with greens and black text. It was paperback, long, like a rectangle. Can you help me figure out this book?”
I hit enter.
What It Found
What came back wasn’t a guess. It was a list: calm, matter-of-fact, and shockingly well-informed. Three book titles, each with details that stopped me cold. I read the first one and felt something in my chest unlock.
“When Someone Very Special Dies” by Marge Eaton Heegaard
A secular grief workbook for children, first published in the late 1980s. A landscape-oriented paperback. Thirty-two pages of simple text and drawing prompts designed to help kids express feelings after the death of someone close. The cover is mostly white, with green accents and black lettering.
I stared at the screen.
There it was.
My breath caught, not because I remembered the title (it still didn’t sound familiar) but because everything else fit. The format, the tone, the intention. The more I read, the more certain I became: this was it. This was the book that had held space for seven-year-old me. The book that didn’t tell me not to cry or to be brave or to move on. It simply asked me to draw. To remember. To feel.
It’s hard to describe what it feels like to recognize something you haven’t seen in decades. There’s no lightning bolt, no dramatic music cue. Just a quiet yes inside your body. A stillness. A knowing.
I didn’t find a holy grail. I found a paperback from 1988. But to me, it felt sacred. Because for the first time since I was seven, I had the name. I had the book. And more than that, I had proof that someone, all those years ago, saw my grief and tried to help. And now, AI has helped me complete that circle all these years.
The Real Power of AI
This experience changed how I think about artificial intelligence, not just as a content strategist or digital marketer but as a human being.
Because this wasn’t about productivity. It wasn’t about scaling outputs or better targeting or increasing engagement. This wasn’t transactional. It was personal. Deeply so.
AI didn’t just help me retrieve a piece of information. It helped me recover a part of myself. A breadcrumb from childhood that had always felt just out of reach. It helped me make meaning. It affirmed a memory I’d long carried but never could name. And in doing so, it validated the child I once was, the one who had lost her mother and still found small places to put her sadness.
When discussing AI, we often focus on what it can do for business. We obsess over tools, prompts, and efficiencies. We worry, rightly, about bias, privacy and misuse. What we talk about less are the moments when AI becomes something more than machinery. Something more than algorithmic intelligence. Something a little closer to connection.
I’m not saying a chatbot gave me therapy. It helped me remember something I’d been grieving the loss of on top of all the other losses. And it did it not with magic but with pattern recognition. With context. With an ability to piece together enough of the shape of something that had once mattered to me.
That could be what technology can be at its best. Not a replacement for human memory but a collaborator in preserving it. Not a surrogate for emotional understanding but a bridge that helps us walk toward it.
And yes, there is something almost poetic about that.
For Anyone Searching
If you’re still holding on to a half-memory like I was, something small but significant that mattered deeply once and still echoes through you, I want to say this: don’t give up on finding it.
Your search is valid, whether it’s a book, a toy, a song, a photograph, a voice, a place, or whatever you’re trying to remember. Your longing is real. And the past you’re reaching toward isn’t just nostalgia. Sometimes, it’s part of your healing. And sometimes, the thread ties who you were to who you’ve become.
I didn’t expect AI to give me that. But it did.
So try the search again. But this time, try asking differently. Try a different LLM, try Deep Research, and try telling the story, not just the keywords. Try giving the details that live in your body: the color of the cover, the way it made you feel, the shape of the loss wrapped inside it.
You might be surprised at what answers back.
I don’t know what happened to my original workbook. Maybe it’s sitting in a dusty bin somewhere or disintegrated in a landfill long ago. But I have something better now: the name. The pages. The context. I found what I thought was lost, not just because I looked but because I asked in a new way.
And that’s what I take with me, beyond the nostalgia, curiosity, and even grief: That AI didn’t just help me find a book. It helped me remember something that I thought I’d forgotten.
