Coming to terms: Renowned journalist and Beaman native writes her most personal piece yet

Andy Kopsa knew it was coming for five months, but that didn’t make the reality that her father Leo had passed last September as she sat by his side any easier to swallow.
           
Kopsa, a rural Beaman native and BCLUW alum who has made a name for herself as a freelance journalist reporting from places like Uganda, Cameroon and Cambodia, did what writers do in the aftermath: she wrote about it.
           
The resulting essay, titled “There Are No Five Stages of Grief,” was published in The New York Times on February 28, and it challenges conventional notions of the grieving process while recounting Kopsa’s journey back to Iowa and the wreckage she witnessed in Marshalltown just a few months after the infamous EF-3 tornado ripped through the downtown area. Even today, she concedes that she hasn’t fully accepted her father’s death or made peace with it.
           
“I’m not far enough out from my dad’s death. I’m not, so I can’t really speak to any sort of catharsis or coping mechanism,” she said. “There’s no one thing that’s ever going to be cathartic. There’s no one thing that’s ever going to be therapeutic. There’s no one thing that’s ever going to be a coping mechanism. There just isn’t.”
           
Leo, a stoic and reserved Grundy County farmer to his core, was a beloved figure in the area: a devoted father, grandfather, husband, veteran and a man of God, and his wife Helen, owned the Conrad Record and served on the county board of supervisors.In Andy’s words, she’s “a very strange combination” of her parents. 
 
For the full story, see this week's Grundy Register. Subscribe by calling (319) 824-6958 or clicking here.