Serving My Country While Grieving for Our Son Confronts a Parent’s Deepest Loss

James Long shares how the death of his 12-year-old son Maurice transformed his family, challenged his faith, and affected a military career devoted to service.

NEW YORK CITY, NY, UNITED STATES, September 16, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Author and Army veteran James Long shares an intensely personal account of military service, fatherhood, devastating loss, and the difficult search for healing in Serving My Country While Grieving for Our Son. Beginning with his decision to join the Army immediately after high school, Long traces a life that took him from a small town and a family of six children to his first airplane journey overseas and a military career that would take him around the world. That promising path changed profoundly after the death of his 12-year-old son, Maurice.

The events of October 19, 2005, became a dividing line in Long’s personal and professional life. Although he had previously experienced the deaths of loved ones, losing a child brought a depth of grief unlike anything he had known. Serving My Country While Grieving for Our Son examines how Maurice’s death affected not only Long as a father, but his entire family and his responsibilities as a soldier. The book considers what it means to continue serving a country while privately carrying a loss that changes nearly every aspect of daily life.

Long wrote the book to document how Maurice’s death affected his family and his Army career, while giving readers an intimate view of grief from a parent’s perspective. His account does not separate mourning from the difficult spiritual questions that can accompany tragedy. Long describes questioning God while continuing to draw upon his faith as he searched for a way to heal and build a life in which his son was no longer physically present. Maurice’s own words also form a meaningful part of this documented family story.

While deeply personal, Serving My Country While Grieving for Our Son is written with other grieving families in mind, particularly parents who have experienced the death of a child. Long explores how loss can affect marriages, family relationships, careers, faith, identity, and the ability to imagine a future. Rather than suggesting that profound grief simply disappears, the story offers a glimmer of hope by examining how a family can begin finding its way forward while continuing to carry the memory and significance of the person it lost.

James Long brings together his experiences as a soldier, husband, father, and grieving parent to tell a story shaped by both duty and love. Through Serving My Country While Grieving for Our Son, he preserves Maurice’s place within his family’s story while documenting the unexpected ways bereavement influenced his military and personal life. At its heart, the book speaks to parents confronting an unimaginable absence and offers one family’s experience of questioning, remembering, enduring, and searching for hope while learning how to live after the loss of a beloved child.

The book is now available—secure your copy here: https://a.co/d/04VzW1YM

For review copies, interview requests, or additional information, please contact:

James Long
BrightKey PR
jam35a@yahoo.com

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