Newsletters

Newsletter – Fall 2022

Newsletter – Fall 2022

For the last 11 months, it has been a privilege to receive positive feedback from many people who have viewed “www.messagefromariana.com” documentary film. Based on
the support and your encouraging words, we have embarked on our sequel film which will focus mainly on HEALING from domestic violence.

Newsletter – Spring 2022

Newsletter – Spring 2022

After receiving a Measure K grant award and other generous contributions from First Republic Bank and Silicon Valley Community Foundation in 2020, the Ariana Mae Hatami Foundation successfully produced and distributed an
educational documentary film designed to inform and coach our local young adults and first-time victims of the signs and dangers of domestic violence.

Newsletter – Fall 2021

Newsletter – Fall 2021

It has been a long three years since we first planted the seed to develop a
documentary film about domestic violence (DV) .

Newsletter – Spring 2021

Newsletter – Spring 2021

It is our pleasure to announce that we have selected our third scholarship award recipient
from the Ariana Mae Hatami Scholarship

Newsletter – Fall 2020

Newsletter – Fall 2020

On this final day of October, I would like to wish everyone a happy and healthy Halloween.

Newsletter – Spring 2020

Newsletter – Spring 2020

Our world as we knew it 4 months ago has so changed the communities we live in and slowed us to a complete stop in many parts of America and around the globe.

Newsletter – Fall 2019

Newsletter – Fall 2019

The educational outreach video/documentary that was described in our Summer 2019
newsletter is now in pre-production!

Newsletter – Summer 2019

Newsletter – Summer 2019

We are excited to report our first scholarship recipient from the Ariana Mae Hatami Scholarship
Endowment at San Francisco State University.

Newsletter – Spring 2019

Newsletter – Spring 2019

This month marks the second anniversary of AMHF! As we step into the third year, our goals keep multiplying in our efforts to wipe out domestic violence. It is very exciting to share our progress with you all!

Newsletter – Winter 2019

Newsletter – Winter 2019

Greetings and Happy New Year to all. We at AMHF are steadily moving forward into 2019 with high hopes in meeting our goals for this year. In the last quarter of 2018, we were excited to announce a new board member, Mr. Joe Goethals, deputy district attorney of San Mateo county and now we are equally excited to welcome Ms. Charissa McManis.

Essay on Child Loss

“Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.”   Iris Mudoch

“The gap between those who have lost children and those who have not is profoundly difficult to bridge. No one whose children are well and intact can be expected to understand what parents who have lost children have absorbed, what they bear.

Our children now come to us through every blade of grass, every crack in the sidewalk, every bowl of breakfast cereal, every kid on a scooter. We seek contact with their atoms – their hairbrushes, toothbrushes, their clothing.

We reach out for what was integrally woven into the fabric of our lives, now torn and shredded. A black hole has been blown through our souls and, indeed, it often does not allow the light to escape. It is a difficult place. For us to enter there is to be cut deeply and torn anew, each time we go there, by the jagged edges of our loss. Yet we return, again and again, for that is where our children now reside. This will be so for years to come and it will change us, profoundly. At some point, in the distant future, the edges of that hole will have tempered and softened, but the empty space will remain–a life sentence.

Our friends will change through this. There is no avoiding it. We grieve for our children in part, through talking about them, and our feelings for having lost them. Some go there with us; others cannot and, through their denial, add a further measure, however unwitting, to an already heavy burden.

Assuming that we may be feeling “better” 6 months later is simply “to not get it.” The excruciating and isolating reality that bereaved parents feel is hermetically sealed from the nature of any other human experience. Thus it is a trap–those whose compassion and insight we most need are those for whom we abhor the experience that would allow them that sensitivity and capacity. And yet, somehow, there are those, each in their own fashion, who have found a way to reach us and stay, to our immeasurable comfort. They have understood, again each in their own way, that our children remain our children through our memory of them. Their memory is sustained through speaking about them and our feelings about their death. Deny this and you deny their life. Deny their life and you have no place in ours.

We recognize that we have moved to an emotional place where it is often very difficult to reach us. Our attempts to be normal are painful, and the day to day carries a silent, screaming anguish that accompanies us, sometimes from moment to moment. Were we to give it its own voice, we fear we would become truly unreachable and so we remain “strong” for a host of reasons even as the strength saps our energy and drains our will. Were we to act out our true feelings, we would be impossible to be with. We resent having to act normal, yet we dare not do otherwise.

People who understand this dynamic are our gold standard. Working our way through this over the years will change us as does every experience– and extreme experience changes one extremely. We know we will have actually managed to survive when, as we have read, it is no longer so painful to be normal. We do not know who we will be at that point nor who will still be with us.

We have read that the gap is so difficult that, often, bereaved parents must attempt to reach out to friends and relatives or risk losing them. This is our attempt. For those untarnished by such events, who wish to know in some way what they, thankfully, do not know, read this. It may provide a window that is helpful for both sides of the gap.”

– Michael Crenlinsten