Bald Eagle

What do you do when the people who are supposed to protect you can't?

As a child, Zach McConahay had a code word.

Bald eagle.

If he called his grandparents and spoke those words, they knew he was scared. They knew he needed out. They would ask where he was, and they would come get him.

Bald Eagle is an honest and deeply personal memoir about growing up surrounded by addiction, instability, violence, and loss while searching for safety in the homes of friends, the quiet routines of grandparents, and eventually in a family of his own.

Through anger, anxiety, foster parenting, grief, marriage, fatherhood, and his wife's battle with stage IV colon cancer, Zach shares what it was like to spend a lifetime trying to stay ready for the next crisis, only to discover that some valleys cannot be escaped.

This is not a story about having all the answers.

It is a story about learning that faith is not certainty. Love is not always rescuing someone. And courage is not always overcoming impossible odds.

Sometimes courage is sitting beside the person you love most in the world, holding their hand while medicine drips through a tube, and deciding you're not leaving.

For anyone who has experienced childhood trauma, addiction in the family, foster care, loss, caregiving, or serious illness, Bald Eagle is a reminder that even in the valley of the shadow of death, we do not walk alone.