Imagine you are on the opposite coast of the country, San Diego—a five hour plane ride from your home—it’s Mother Day and your family back East is settled in for the night. You’ve traveled this far to confront your mother’s shocking lie about a gay brother, but the consequences catch up and the impact is life-altering. The ringing phone in the night will bring the news that your life has changed utterly.

Meet John Stephens, the quintessential “everyman,” he is no hero of visions, but his modest quest to keep home together, to keep faith beyond hope and to find peace beyond consolation, leading him and his family, once again, to the waters healing edge.

“This book made me want to weep and sing. The former because of the occasion around which this book turns, and the latter because of its courage, its huge, unstoppable heart’s truths.”

—Thomas Lux, Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne, Jr. Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology

“This is a deeply honest and touching story of a father’s deep love for his family. John’s primary dream was to create a family bond and be the father he felt was denied him. It is a reminder that even though we devote so much of ourselves into envisioning and planning our dreams, we cannot always protect ourselves and those we love from devastating tragedy. This poetic prose relays how a family can be shattered by the violence of drunk driving which killed his son, Adam. John gripped my heart as he took me on a journey of passionate family devotion.”

—Jan Withers, National President Mothers Against Drunk Driving

“Nothing is more important than family. In Return to the Water, author John Stephens shares an unforgettable yet tragic narrative of unrepentant love and unfathomable death. Written with gut-wrenching honesty, this story of adoration and redemption, revulsion and reconciliation will not only break your heart, it also will test the limits of your own compassion.”

—Jedwin Smith, nationally acclaimed author of Fatal Treasure and Our Brother’s Keeper

Written with love and faith, Return to the Water probes what Stephens believed about life and death, family, and even God before the tragic death of his son. The account of the Stephens’ family vacations was first written in longhand as a journal, but it found new meaning as the family mourned the loss of Adam a week before his high school graduation. The journal explored John’s childhood and his mother’s addictions and the reason for them, the suicide of her brother, as well as her denial of his sexuality. Stephens writes, “You would think I’d have run out of tears by now. But no, grief is a process, it does not matter if our memories are imperfect, what our faults were to each other, I can only recall our happiness together, while asking over and over, where do the dead go, where is God in this, can Adam see us now? I get no answers, foolish to even ask. What matters is how I remember him.”

John Stephens

Books