Showing titles in Grief & Loss

Throughout his life, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke addressed letters to individuals who were close to him, who had contacted him after reading his works, or who he had met briefly – anyone with whom he felt an inner connection. Within his vast correspondence, there are about two dozen letters of condolence. In these direct, personal and practical letters, Rilke writes about loss and mortality, assuming the role of a sensitive, serious and uplifting guide through life’s difficulties.

Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated. At the same time, we are denied the means of mourning the futures that are being so brutally curtailed. At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a radical act. Through in-depth reporting intertwined with memoir, Sarah Jaffe shows how public memorialization has become more than a refusal or a protest: it is a path to imagining a better world.

How do we reckon with our losses? In Animal Bodies Suzanne Roberts explores the link between death and desire and what it means to accept our own animal natures, the parts we most often hide, deny, or consider only with shame-our taboo desires and our grief.

From an acclaimed grief educator and the author of Second Firsts and Where Did You Go? comes a road map to recognize and heal the often misunderstood and unspoken experience of everyday loss, so you can finally reenter and live your life in full.

When Tony Stewart’s wife, Lynn, receives a sudden and devastating diagnosis, they scramble to find effective treatment, navigate life threatening setbacks, learn to live fully in the shadow of death, and share the intimate grace of her departure from this world. Then Tony slowly climbs out of shattering grief and, surprisingly, eases toward new love.

When Kelsy’s husband, Heath, dies tragically in a sudden accident, she is left grappling with overwhelming grief. But through the pain, she discovers that love transcends even death. Navigating life without the one she thought she’d spend forever with, Kelsy confronts profound loneliness, heartbreak, and the weight of unanswered questions. She struggles to find a way to heal, often feeling lost in the darkness of her sorrow. Through resilience, family and community support, and signs from Heath, Kelsy embarks on a journey of healing–finding hope and connection in the most unexpected places.

Humans are undeniably creatures of habit. So when sudden, unexpected plot twists pull the metaphorical rug from beneath our feet, it can sometimes feel impossible to regain our footing. Therapist and podcaster Jana Firestone knows this better than most, after losing her mum suddenly at the age of 21 and spending many years providing professional counselling to her clients during their darkest days. But in bearing witness to outpourings of grief, loss and pain on a daily basis, Firestone also experienced and observed remarkable resilience, transformation and hope.

The heartache of miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant death affects thousands of United States families every year. Empty Cradle, Broken Heart, Third Edition offers reassurance to parents who struggle with anger, guilt, and despair during and after such a tragedy. In this new and updated edition, Deborah Davis encourages grieving and strives to cover many different kinds of loss, including information on issues such as the death of one or more babies from a multiple birth, pregnancy interruption, and the questioning of aggressive medical intervention.

When Laraine Herring receives an unexpected colon cancer diagnosis, her father, thirty years dead, returns to her as a raven, setting off a magical journey into complicated grief, inherited trauma, and ancestral healing. As she struggles with redefining her expectations for her life, she slips farther and farther underground into the ancestral realm, where she finds herself writing a play directed by her father-as-raven.

When his beloved brother Peter committed suicide, psychotherapist Dr. Joe Gallenberger met his overwhelming grief with courage, and open-minded curiosity. Using tools learned at The Monroe Institute, and affirming that “love can pierce any veil”, he was soon able to contact Peter on the other side.

With refreshing honesty, candor, grace, and ease, Johnny Sirpilla—a master storyteller—serves as our guide through a life story that seems too traumatic to be true, yet true it is. Johnny and Susan Sirpilla were a happily married couple. Like so many couples, they wanted to be parents. This is their astonishing story that included 13 different scenarios to build a family.

Already Here tells of the death of Leo Galland's son, Christopher, at age 22; the direct visual evidence Christopher showed Leo that our souls do go on; and the communications from Christopher's spirit that changed Leo's understanding of life and its meaning. In life, Christopher was a brain-damaged special-needs child who challenged everyone he knew with unpredictable behavior and uncanny insights. After his death, he revealed to Leo the real purpose of his life, as a spiritual guide who taught others by confounding their assumptions and expectations.

We plan, as the old proverb says, and God laughs. But most of us don't find it all that funny when things go wrong. Most of us want love, a nice home, good work and happy children. Many of us grew up with parents who made these things look relatively easy and assumed we would get them, too. So what do you do if you don't? What do you do when you feel you've messed it all up and your friends seem to be doing just fine? For Christina Patterson, it was her job as a journalist that kept her going through the ups and downs of life. And then she lost that, too.

The death of a child is an unimaginable pain no parent should have to endure. Yet here you are, facing a grief unlike any other. It's a unique sorrow that not everyone can understand, no matter your child's age when it happened.

We all know what it’s like to experience the disappointments and sorrows of life. Unexpected circumstances like layoffs, divorce, illness, and death can leave us hurting and isolated. Add to that the unending anxiety we feel at the state of the world—political strife and global upheavals—and we end up with a recipe for . . . joy? Yes, says journalist Steven Petrow, who has lived through all of those things, and arrived at a surprising conclusion: Joy is always present—in our everyday routines, in ties to those we care about, even in our grief.

Shetland is a place bound together by community, history and culture. But when a huge windfarm is greenlit to export energy to mainland Scotland, it creates rifts between neighbours, friends and even families. One side supports the benefit to a planet spiralling into climate disaster; the other challenges the impact on an environment with an already struggling wildlife population. As an environmental journalist, Marianne is drawn to investigate this story of sustainable energy that is irrevocably tied to her grief. But nothing is ever straightforward.

So begins this book’s honest, direct yet caring approach to our loved one’s stuff and the memories attached to it. We will all lose loved ones throughout our lives and dealing with the possessions they leave behind is no easy task. If you have trouble letting go of keepsake items that are attached to memories, this book will help you gain a new perspective on life, love, memories, and how none of it is tied to stuff.

Fifteen years ago, Richard Boothby received a fateful call from his ex-wife that their 23-year-old son, Oliver, was dead. Although he had been dreading this news, given Oliver’s prolonged struggle with drug dependency, nothing could have prepared him for the devastating shock. He became obsessed with uncovering the truth of why Oliver shot himself—had he been self-medicating an undiagnosed mental illness?—and what they could have done to prevent it. In an attempt to stem the pain, Boothby turned to psychoanalysis.

Rabbi Gershon Schusterman knew all the textbook answers when comforting bereaved community members who asked him, “Where is God? If God is loving, how could this happen?” But when the rabbi’s young wife died suddenly, leaving him a 38-year-old widower with eleven children to raise, he found himself reeling.

On October 9, 2010, at the age of 86, Teddy Key passed away at her Florida home, her family by her side. Nineteen days later, her beautiful voice began to communicate with her eldest daughter, Frances, about the scope and wonder of her new perspective from the afterlife state. Through a variety of experiences including automatic writing, direct contact, and sudden downloads of information, this remarkable collection of insights was handwritten in less than a year.