The Val Vista Lakes community is home to many remarkable people, including one of our neighbors, Katie Rizzo, author of The Trimester of Grief: or Are You Gonna Listen to What Is Going on in Here? 

How does someone survive the unsurvivable?

In 2024, 80,000 people in the US lost their lives to overdose. It is estimated that 48.5 million people in the US are currently struggling with addiction. Many families of those with addiction hide in the shadows.

But they don’t have to.

When Katie Rizzo’s life was turned upside down by the death of her oldest son from opioid addiction, as a scientist and writer, she fell back on what she knew: documenting, looking for patterns, and poetry. In The Trimesters of Grief, Rizzo shows how grief mirrors pregnancy, from whole-body fatigue to brain fog to the need to tell everyone about this precious life, a life that is now gone. And then it is time to “deliver” grief and let it sit beside us.

Part memoir and part self-help book, The Trimesters of Grief suggests ways to communicate and nurture grief. Other cultures embrace grief as a natural part of life; perhaps it’s time for us to also learn to hold life in one hand and grief in the other.

KATIE RIZZO taught AP Biology and Anatomy to high schoolers for many years while writing in her free time. Rizzo’s short stories have been published in literary journals such as Prosthetics (Jan 2026)

and in anthologies such as the HG Wells Short Story Competition’s Motion (2023).

She has earned spots in the juried Aspen Words Conferences (2023 and 2025). Her training is in biology and psychology, and she has two master's degrees, one from Yale and another from the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Rizzo lives in Val Vista Lakes with two dogs and her husband. Please check out her poems on Instagram at @KatieRizzo007.

To buy Katie's book, search for The Trimesters of Grief on Amazon.com