Where Elio Was Born

(Becoming Peter)

The Wonderful World of Elio & Solace.

Elio didn’t begin as a character. He began as a small boy, a real one, sitting at a kitchen table in Ireland, trying to understand why his mother was gone.

I was seven. Too young to name grief, but old enough to feel its shape. Old enough to know something had broken open inside me. Old enough to reach for anything that might help me hold it.

So I wrote.

Not stories, not poems,  just little letters. Simple words from a child trying to make sense of a world that suddenly felt too big. I didn’t know it then, but those letters were my first attempt at emotional literacy. My first way of saying, “I’m hurting, and I need someone to sit with me.”

No one around me had the language for that. People did their best, but adults in those days didn’t pause, didn’t sit close, didn’t help children name their storms. They kept moving, hoping we would too.

So I wrote to survive. And then, as many children do, I grew up and tucked those letters away, not physically, but somewhere inside myself. I didn’t return to them until I was a man in my fifties, finally brave enough to open the door to that seven‑year‑old boy again.

When I began writing Elio’s Letters, something unexpected happened. I realized that the child I had been, quiet, hurting, searching,  still lived in me. And I realized something else:

Sometimes all a child needs is for an adult to pause. To sit. To be present. To let the moment breathe. To let the feelings exist.

Not fix. Not explain. Not rush. Just be there.

That understanding changed everything.

Elio became the child I once was. Solace became the gentle presence I needed. And the stories became my way of offering children what I didn’t have: a safe place to feel, to ask, to wonder, to heal.

Writing the other books wasn’t just creativity. It was presence. It was my way of sitting beside the children who need it, the ones who are carrying storms they can’t name yet. It was my way of saying, “I see you. I hear you. You’re not alone.”

Elio & Solace were born from grief, yes, but more importantly, they were born from love. From the belief that children deserve gentle companions during the hardest moments of their lives.

And maybe, in some quiet way, I’m still writing to that seven‑year‑old boy in Ireland. Still telling him that his letters mattered. Still telling him that he wasn’t wrong to feel deeply. Still telling him that he survived,  and that he grew into someone who helps others survive too.

This is where Elio began. This is where I began. And this is one of the many ways I am still becoming.

Peter W. Banahan, Founder, Ann‑Wafer Not‑for‑Profit Foundation. 

Holding All Hearts. 

Neuropsychology & Trauma Recovery Coach.