Deck: A new book just came out. But the story behind it is what will really stop you.

Irene Tunanidas is seventy-six years old, and she has just published her first book. That sentence alone might make you think you know the shape of the story. Retired woman writes memoir. Heartwarming. Moving on.

Then you learn what actually happened between the beginning and the book, and you realize this is a different kind of story entirely.

She lost her hearing at three and a half. She was told at seventeen she could never be a nurse. She became a teacher instead, spent forty years in Ohio classrooms, became her mother’s full-time nurse anyway after a freak accident left her mother a quadriplegic overnight, drove a secondhand ambulance to take her mother to church in the spring, buried her, fell apart, started writing, set it aside for over a decade, and finished the book in her seventies through arthritic hands and unexpected flashbacks.

That is the biography. And it is, by any measure, more than enough to fill a book.

The Accident Nobody Saw Coming

On the morning of October 7, 2003, Irene’s mother, Zenovia, drove alone to a local monument shop in Youngstown, Ohio. She was eighty-one years old and going to pay for a new family gravestone. She parked, went inside, stepped back to check her purse for her checkbook, and fell backward through a gap hidden behind long burlap drapes. Behind the drapes was a stairwell leading to the basement. She hit her head on the concrete wall below.

By the time Irene reached the hospital, her mother was on a gurney wearing a neck brace, badly bruised, and unable to move. Zenovia Tunanidas had become a quadriplegic in the space of a morning. She would never walk again.

Irene was fifty-one years old. She had no medical background. What she had was a lifetime of showing up for people who needed her, and a mother who now needed everything.

The Things She Learned to Do in Her Fifties

Over the next three years, Irene did things she had never been trained to do.

She learned to operate a Hoyer lift to move her mother from the hospital bed to her wheelchair every morning and back again every night. She managed catheter care, learned to change ostomy bags, and monitored her mother’s electrolyte levels. She gave her mother bed baths, dressed her, fed her, and sat with her. She checked on her after midnight most nights before going to bed.

When her mother was well enough to go out, Irene drove a secondhand ambulance they had bought because no ordinary vehicle could accommodate everything Zenovia needed. On good spring days, she took her mother to church. They went to the park when the flowers were out.

She was also working a part-time tutoring job at the same time. She did all of this largely on her own.

The Student She Still Thinks About

Years before her mother’s accident, there was a student named Freddie.

Irene was working at Poland Local Schools when she was assigned to tutor a profoundly deaf ten-year-old in all subjects. She tutored him the same way she had always taught, seriously, with real expectations and genuine attention. She held him to a standard. He met it.

Freddie graduated with a 3.9 GPA. He went on to earn his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Akron.

Irene has been teaching deaf children for decades. She will tell you that outcome is not a surprise to her. What surprises her is how consistently people underestimate what deaf children are capable of when someone takes the time to teach them properly. Freddie is one of the clearest answers she has to that underestimation.

The Part That Came After

When Zenovia died on January 2, 2007, Irene went home and walked from room to room in her house. She was checking to see if her mother had come back.

She knew she had not. But the house was so quiet and so empty that some part of her could not stop checking. Then she screamed. Then she cried, almost every day, for months.

The phone barely rang. Her sister had moved to Florida. Her brother was not nearby. A neighbor offered help, but Irene was too far inside the grief to know what to do with it. It took two years before she pushed herself to go to a community event just to be around other people. That was the start of finding her way back.

In 2011, she sat down and started writing about what those three years of caregiving had looked like from the inside. The manuscript was good enough that she kept going. Then her Ohio Association of the Deaf leadership took over, and the pages went into a drawer. She came back to them in 2024, when her term as president ended. She finished the book through arthritic joints and writing sessions that sometimes had to stop because the memories came back harder than she expected. The book took fourteen years. She finished it anyway.

Why Her Story Is Worth Knowing

There is no single theme that packages Irene Tunanidas neatly. She is not just the deaf educator or the devoted caregiver or the grief memoir author. She is all of those things across one continuous life, and the variety of it is the point.

She was told at seventeen that her deafness ruled out nursing. She spent forty years in classrooms instead, and then spent three years doing everything a nurse does for her mother at home. She built a career that colleagues predicted would not last and stayed in it for four decades. She led a statewide organization for the deaf community and then, when that chapter ended, sat down to write a book about the most personal years of her life.

Rising From the Abyss of Grief is what came out of all of that. It is part memoir and part 30-day devotional, written for anyone who has been through a loss that did not resolve on a schedule. The book is honest in the way Irene has always been honest. It does not clean anything up. It does not promise a tidy ending. It just tells the truth about what grief looks like and what it takes to come out the other side.

For a debut book, it carries a remarkable amount of life behind it. That tends to happen when the author has actually lived one.

The Moment a Wider World Found Her

This year, WDTN-TV’s Living Dayton featured Irene Tunanidas on their regional television segment. She sat with a sign language interpreter and talked about her life and her book with the same directness she has brought to everything else she has ever done.

Viewers who did not know her name before the segment felt, by the end of it, that they should have known it a long time ago. That is the thing about a life lived this fully and this quietly. When it finally gets a room big enough to hold it, people recognize immediately that it deserved the room all along.

Rising From the Abyss of Grief is available now, the latest chapter in a life that has refused to be told quickly.