Standing in line for an herbal peppermint tea, I listened as the woman ahead of me told the brief and fascinating story of her book ‘The Message Catcher‘ and how it was a fictionalized journey of her life journey. She turned to me and smiled, inviting me to stop by her table, where several copies of ‘The Message Catcher’ were on display, right beneath a framed rendering of a crow.
Too shy to approach (and by the time I was leaving she was already engaged with someone else), I instead looked her up online and discovered her intriguing body of written work and a tragic and inspiring personal trajectory. Her name is Darryl McGrath, and she lost her husband a number of years ago while on vacation in Cape Cod. He saved her life and lost his – the kind of tragedy that transforms a person irrevocably, and to the benefit of her readers McGrath turned her experience into meaningful artistic expression while navigating her own arc of loss and healing.
The most dazzling people I’ve featured here aren’t usually the superhuman Olympians, the sports stars, the perfect models or the sparkling celebrities – they are the humans who have gone through the adversity of life, rising from tragedy and finding other ways to triumph, ways to find grace in the often-awful hand that life deals out. To that beautiful end, Darryl McGrath is our Dazzler of the Day.
