We all live with the regret of missed opportunities.
Who, for example, hasn’t wished that they knew a friend, or a parent, or grandparent - or even a sibling - better, after the chance was snatched away by death?
But not everyone decides to try and fill in those holes in their understanding.
Ken Gagne did.
The 54-year-old Chicopee native spent six years piecing together the backstory of his parent’s lives and marriage after their deaths in the early 2000s. The result was his first book, “You’re Gonna Miss Me Someday” – a memoir that’s part family research, part storytelling and at heart, an ode to two people he wished he’d known better.
“I tell people I started writing [the book] for my parents, to sort of honor them,” Gagne told Prime when we reached him at his home in New Jersey late this summer. “Then it became [something] for my kids as a way for them to get to know their grandparents better, as they were very young when my parents died. And then it became for myself – it became like a six-year therapy session and very cathartic – and then it became something else.
“It became a story for everybody and I felt I had to share it with everybody because everybody can relate to something like that,” Gagne continued. “Either it’s wishing you knew your parents better or wishing they knew you better, or just appreciating each other more.
“I figure something in this story about regret and forgiveness would resonate with everyone,” he shared.
Gagne is Western Mass. born and raised. He grew up in Chicopee. His sister – and several of the family friends and relatives who were instrumental to his story research – still live in the area. UMass Amherst is his alma mater. A part-time position at Springfield’s Basketball Hall of Fame was his first job out of college. A co-worker [at the Hall] subsequently connected Gagne with a woman he knew who worked at NBA entertainment
“Sports is my passion, I wanted a job in the field,” Gagne shared. “I was lucky enough to meet someone from NBA entertainment and at 24 I got an interview.”
He got the job with the entertainment arm of the National Basketball Association, and moved to New Jersey, spending nearly three decades as a T.V. producer and editor for the brand.
“That was 1991, it’s been 30 years [that] I’ve been away from home,” he noted.
At first Gagne said he came back to Western Mass. to visit his parents “a couple of times a month,” a pattern that slowed once he married, and he and his wife started a family of their own. Gagne said his mother died in 2005. His father passed away about a year and a half later.
“I joke that my father … that he died of a broken heart just before his liver failed him,” Gagne said of his dad, who Gagne said struggled with alcohol throughout his marriage. “I think they didn’t realize how much they leaned on each other,” he continued. “They weren’t warm and fuzzy like we are, but deep down they stuck together through some pretty hard times and that means something.”
Gagne said after both his parents were gone he realized “how much I didn’t know about them, and how much was left unsaid,” about their lives, their marriage and the time before his birth, when his parents made the decision to put twin older brothers - both affected by a rare condition - in the care of the state hospital.
“So, I think I dug into this book, and the research into the family history, just as a way to spend more time with them,” he said.
Gagne started working on “You’re Gonna Miss Me Someday” in 2014, when the NBA offered anyone who had worked for them for 20 years or more the opportunity to take a two- month sabbatical.
“I jumped at the opportunity,” Gagne said. “I said, ‘If I was ever going to write a book about my parents, this was the time.’”
He started with research, coming back to Western Mass. to begin piecing together what he could of his parent’s story.
“I spoke to the few who were left and knew my parents – my father’s sister and one of my mother’s sisters, the people who were still around and knew them best – and also close family friends who knew them in a different way later – giving my brothers away and my father’s financial troubles.”
He’d always known about his older brothers, and his parents giving them up to the care of the state, he said. But he wanted to write about it “as a way to appreciate what my parents went through with my brothers and how they handled that – all the pain, all the trauma and, as a parent myself, I think it amazes me even more how they stuck together through all of that,” he said.
“Obviously, I couldn’t get the complete story of their lives,” Gagne explained, “So there was a lot to make up and a lot to imagine.
“I just wanted to put myself in my parent’s shoes – and my grandparents and great grandparents – because I didn’t have any of this,” he continued. “I just imagined what it was like; I threw myself back in time and saw a movie in my head and wrote down what I saw.”
However, other than some poetry for a college girlfriend and keeping a journal, Gagne said he didn’t have a real background in creative writing when he dove into the book project.
“I listened to endless podcasts teaching myself how to write – story structure, character development – I kind of took a five-year master’s course in creative writing by reading websites and listening to podcasts,” he confessed. He also shoehorned the writing around his life.
“Writing around the job was hard,” Gagne confessed. “I would steal an hour in the daytime, or at night.” Very quickly, however, he “became consumed by the whole process and spent more and more time [on the book].”
Then in July of 2020, the NBA terminated his job.
“After 29 years with the NBA, I was let go during the whole COVID [-19] situation,” Gagne said. “When I got the call, it hurt. I cherished every day I worked there; it was an occupational fantasy to work for the NBA.”
He said his next thought was “Thank God, now I can finish the book.”
At that point Gagne said “You’re Gonna Miss Me Someday” had “become something I knew I needed to finish. It felt like a race against time at that point.
“”It was a happy accident,” Gagne conceded. “If I was still working I doubt this book would be in anybody’s hands right now. I was fortunate to have the time to finish [it] – not everybody has that luxury and I feel very fortunate to be able to put so much time into a passion project.”
And, Gage admitted, he had some great help and encouragement from other writers along the way.
“I have a great friend who lives in my town, Will Allison, he’s an author and a professional editor. He’s on my softball team; I went to him for some advice when I told him I wanted to write this book about my parents.” Allison ultimately went through his “third or fourth draft,” Gagne said. “It was pretty cool – he was a huge help.”
Another friend, Dan Barry, is “a writer for the New York Times and an author himself … I leaned on him for advice and he was more than instrumental in encouraging me to keep going and get my story out there,” Gagne said.
But when it came to publishing the book earlier this year, Gagne said it was on him.
“I had to learn about the self-publishing industry,” he shared. “To get my book up on Amazon I hired a proofer through a writing website, and she helped polish the book even more.” He also hired a cover design company called Damoza, which also formatted the finished manuscript.
“And then, I just had to teach myself how to get this out there in the world,” he said.
“When I put it out there I told myself ‘I don’t have a lot of expectations in my life … if it sold 100 copies or 100,000 [copies], it would be super,” Gagne shared.
The book sold 350 copies in the first three weeks.
“I’m pretty sure that’s everybody we know, so it will start leveling off,” Gagne joked.
But as the book sold, he said some extraordinary things started occurring.
“The most amazing thing has happened in the past month since it’s been out,” Gagne said of the sales at the time we spoke. “The responses, the text messages, the facebook posts, the phone calls, the emails from literally hundreds of people… most I haven’t spoken to in a long time – sometimes 30 years – old friends, relatives, just telling me thank you for being vulnerable and sharing my story… how much it helped them to think about their own stories, their own families.
“That’s been the most satisfying part of all of this,” he continued. “It means so much to me to hear from all of them and to know I put some good out in the world.
“We’re all going through the same thing at this time,” Gagne observed. “Our parents are dying, our kids are getting older, we’re thinking about our own lives. We’re reflecting on our own lives and that of the people we love.”
“You’re Gonna Miss Me Someday” is available on Amazon and through Gagne’s website, https://theunboundopenbook.com/
