By Mary O’KEEFE

“What if” fills the nightmares of all parents. What if my child is hurt? What if my child makes the wrong choices? And worse – What if I lost my child?

For one local parent that horrible nightmare became a reality: her daughter succumbed to drugs. Hannah Spring Sheklow worked through the unimaginable pain after her daughter’s death by creating a blog.

“My Little Lost Girl – The story of how I lost my daughter, and how I’m learning to survive it” has been a cathartic journey that documents this mother’s emotions from the death of her daughter Elannah Rose in 2012 to the present.

“I was trying to explain to someone why New Year’s is a hard time for me. The best I can say is that it is another end and another beginning that doesn’t have my daughter in it. It’s bittersweet at best, which doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate all that I have – I certainly do. But during such a celebrated occasion it’s hard not to miss what is not there,” she wrote on New Years’ Day 2014.

On Monday she will step outside her blog and speak to an audience at the La Crescenta Library. She has been invited by the Crescenta Valley Youth Council to talk to others about drug use and the loss that can be left behind.

“… I cannot sit by and allow what happened with my daughter to happen again to another child. I have to find a way to use my daughter’s experience to help build a brighter future for my community because one more addict grown in our schools is not acceptable. Another overdose, another family losing their child, another child buried … these are the things that we have to come together to fight against. I hope to use my experience to help open the eyes of my neighbors and to build a tighter and stronger community,” Sheklow wrote.

All are invited to this powerful warning told from a mother’s point of view. The La Crescenta Library is located at 2809 Foothill Blvd. It will be held in the library’s Community Room from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.  To read Sheklow’s blog visit http://mylittlelostgirl.blogspot.com/.

  Mary Okeefe