By: Elowen Gray

A Childhood Between Worlds

Deana Elaine Dils was born between borders, not just geographic ones, but emotional, cultural, and spiritual divides that would go on to shape every chapter of her life. With a Palestinian father and a Kentucky-born American mother, her earliest memories were etched into the walls of two vastly different worlds. 

One was a house built on unspoken pain, emotional disarray, and longing. The other was a homeland marred by war, displacement, and generational trauma. In Tragic Whispers: Secrets from the Heart of a Broken Palestinian Woman, Deana Elaine steps forward not just as a survivor but as a truth-teller, lifting the veil on a life shaped by silence and defined by resilience.

Her story begins with contrast: the tender smell of olive trees in Palestine, juxtaposed with the scent of fried chicken in small-town America. She grew up shuttling between two wildly different realities, one grounded in the cultural depth and conflict of Palestine, the other in the quiet but emotionally chaotic rhythms of rural America. 

She was just a kid when the six day, 1967 war started in Palestine. She was living with her aunt in Palestine and everything was new to her. She didn’t get what was going on, not really. She didn’t know the politics or why there was fighting. But she could feel it, this heavy, quiet fear that seemed to be everywhere. 

“My father was Palestinian, my mother from Kentucky,” Deana says. “I grew up caught between two completely different worlds. There was always tension between cultures, between people, and inside our home. It was a childhood full of confusion, instability, and silence.”

It took her decades to understand that she had spent most of her life chasing a mother’s love and a father’s strength she rarely, if ever, received.

Marriage, Motherhood, and Survival at Fifteen

At the age when most girls are just beginning to explore who they might become, Deana Elaine was married off. Fifteen years old. That one detail, she says, carries the full weight of everything that followed. “I didn’t even understand what it was like being married,” she recalls. “I just knew I was being given away.”

That marriage did not bring stability or love; it ushered in decades of survival. By her twenties, she was already a mother of multiple children, holding together her fractured world with bare hands while her soul screamed for safety and connection. From restaurants to hair salons, she built a life that looked, from the outside, like success. But beneath the surface was a different truth.

Deana became a functional addict but capable, responsible, and broken. Substance use was never about partying. It was about forgetting, it was about quieting the child in her who still craved a mother’s hug, a father’s steady presence.

Addiction in the Shadows

For years, addiction was the silent companion Deana carried through business meetings and bedtime stories. She wasn’t the stereotype; she wasn’t spiraling in public. She was just surviving in secret while running businesses, packing school lunches, and managing appearances.

“I thought if I kept moving, kept building, no one would notice how much I was crumbling inside,” she says. That kind of silence is its own kind of death. But even silence, she would come to learn, has a breaking point.

The Reckoning and the Pen

Deana’s reckoning came in her fifties, not as a dramatic breakdown but as an undeniable truth: the substances no longer worked. The past, once locked away, began to flood in, “I had two choices: let my past consume me or finally face it.”

It was her oldest son who offered the first spark. She has two sons, and it was her eldest who recognized that her story needed to be told. ‘You should write it down,’ he said.

“The idea of Tragic Whispers came to me after years of living with unspoken pain and hidden trauma. I hit rock bottom and realized I had to confront everything I had spent a lifetime trying to escape,” Deana wrote. “This book is the voice of the little girl inside me who had been silenced for too long.”

What began as an act of survival transformed into a calling. Tragic Whispers became her lifeline, a memoir that would not only excavate her past but illuminate it, heal it, and ultimately set it free.

Writing Through Pain

The process of writing was not cathartic in the way people often imagined; it was agonizing. It meant revisiting memories she had buried so deeply even her body resisted them. There were times, she says, when she would physically purge, nauseated and shaken by the truths clawing their way to the surface.

“It felt like blackouts,” she explains. “Not from drugs or alcohol, but from trauma. There were things my family told me that I had absolutely no memory of. That’s how deeply I had buried them.”

But she wrote anyway, through the pain, through the nausea. Through the fear of how people would perceive her. “Every time I wrote through the shame, I freed another part of myself.”

Breaking the Silence for the Next Generation

Deana didn’t finish the book just for herself. What truly pushed her through the hardest parts, the reliving, the remembering, was the deep hope that her story might give her children a different path. She’d seen how unspoken pain quietly slips from one generation to the next, how silence can become its own kind of inheritance. She was determined to stop that cycle. “I knew if I didn’t face it, they’d end up carrying it,” she says. “And they deserve better than that.” 

“Thankfully, through openness and honesty, my children have been spared from carrying the kind of hidden pain I lived with for so long,” she says. “That knowledge and the chance to break generational patterns and give my family something better was the most powerful influence behind writing this book.”

Legacy, Love, and What Comes Next

Today, Deana lives in Missouri. Her youngest daughter, now 23, also lives nearby, just down the street. Her other children are thriving as entrepreneurs across Texas, California, and Arizona. She also dreams of turning her memoir into a screenplay, not for fame, but to reach more hearts.

“There are so many women like me. So many people who think they’re alone. I want them to know they’re not.” Deana is planning a trip back to Kentucky to walk in the footsteps of her mother’s early life. And, perhaps more daunting, a trip to Palestine to retrace her own. “I want to honor the girl I was and finally embrace the woman I’ve become.”

What Tragic Whispers Really Means

The name Tragic Whispers isn’t just some poetic phrase; it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s the pain we tuck away, the things we were told never to talk about, the parts of our past that sit heavy in the quiet moments. “It was never just about my trauma,” Deana says. “It’s about everything we’re too scared to say out loud.

Deana Elaine doesn’t write like someone chasing praise; she writes like someone fighting for air. Her story isn’t polished for comfort; it’s told with the kind of honesty that aches. The healing she shows us isn’t something you cross off a list. It’s something you choose, over and over, one truth at a time. 

Third Book Disclosure: 

In her upcoming third book, Deana shares a deeply personal chapter about the 30 days she spent in jail, not for drugs, but for an attempted assault charge. The incident stemmed from a heated argument with her husband during which she picked up a knife and stabbed a bedroom door after he had locked himself inside. 

Her daughter Madison Rae, worried the fight had turned physical, called the police. By the time they arrived, Deana had already left the house. Though her husband never pressed charges, the state moved forward with the case. After 30 days, her attorney presented home security footage showing her husband coming after her and Deana walking away. The video did not show the door incident. Still, that chapter became a turning point, a hard truth she’s no longer afraid to tell.

The Man Beside Her

Through it all, Deana’s husband stood by her. He has seen every part of her story, the brokenness, the rebuilding, and the becoming. His love was never passive; it was steady, patient, and often tested. He endured more than most would out of love for the woman Deana was and the woman she was becoming. Today, Deana credits much of her healing to his quiet strength and belief in her.

To Sum It Up

Deana’s story isn’t perfect, and that’s exactly what makes it powerful; it’s messy, painful, complicated, and real. What she’s shared in Tragic Whispers goes beyond a memoir. It’s her way of finally saying what no one else would, of putting words to things most people keep buried. 

And maybe that’s the point. That even after everything, war, addiction, silence, there’s still room to speak, to heal, to start again. She didn’t write this book to be a writer; she wrote it because she had to. Because the truth, once she started telling it, refused to stay quiet any longer.

To the Reader:

If you open Tragic Whispers, you’re stepping into more than a memoir. You’re stepping into a life cracked wide open, and maybe, if you’re willing, into your own. This isn’t just one woman’s story; it’s a story of every other person.

Connect with Deana Elaine Dils: Website | Facebook | Instagram | X [formerly Twitter]

Published by Jeremy S.