Kathy Sprinkle turns daughter’s death into book, grief discussion in Waimea

At the Thelma Parker Memorial Public and School Library in Waimea, Kathy Sprinkle turned a private loss into a conversation many Big Island families know they need. Her reading of a forthcoming book, followed by a short discussion on grief in everyday life, came nearly two years after her only daughter, Jessica Ann Sprinkle, died in a Waikoloa crash that also seriously injured three other teens.

Sprinkle’s manuscript, titled The Woman Called Grief, grew out of the same tragedy that changed her family. In the book, grief takes the form of a woman called Aunty G, a plainspoken character who refuses to let pain stay buried. Sprinkle said the idea began with a question that has shaped her writing: what would it mean to become friends with grief instead of only trying to endure it?

The crash happened at 7:59 a.m. on Oct. 17, 2024, at the intersection of Māmalahoa Highway and Waikoloa Road. Hawaii Island police identified the victim as 17-year-old Jessica Ann Sprinkle of Waikoloa and said a white 2018 Peterbilt tractor trailer transporting 5,000 gallons of water broadsided a sedan. Police said three teens were seriously injured in the same collision. Sprinkle has said she learned what happened through a notification on her daughter’s Apple Watch, a detail that underscores how quickly an ordinary school morning turned fatal.

In the months since, Sprinkle has blogged about Jessica and kept returning to the silence that often follows a death. She said that over time fewer people talk about Jessica and that some stop asking questions because they fear upsetting her. That silence, she believes, reflects a wider discomfort around mourning, one that leaves grieving families to carry loss without much public language for it.

The Waimea reading mattered because it pushed that private grief into a public place where people could talk honestly about bereavement, memory and support. The Thelma Parker Memorial Public and School Library opened in October 1978 and sits on the campus of Waimea Elementary and Intermediate School, a familiar community setting for a conversation that rarely gets enough room.

Sprinkle is also the founder of the Grief Heart Project, which says its mission is to help people talk more openly about grief and the people they love. That broader work fits the arc of her book, which is still being finished and appears less like a standard memoir than a way to make grief speak plainly.

Her family’s loss also lands in a wider traffic-safety crisis on Hawaii Island. Statewide traffic deaths reached 102 in 2024, and Hawaii Island recorded 29 fatalities, a reminder that the anguish behind one Waikoloa family’s story is part of a larger pattern that keeps shaping island life.