Living with Grief

📖 The Scoop

Additional Authors: Stacey Bailey, Annie Frogley, Polly Giantonio, Dale Hird, Daniel Levine, Cheryl Olczak, Nancy Peet, Judy Pierce, Victor Robinson, Hazel Rose, Jan Warner

The authors in Living with Grief: 36 Lessons from Life share with us their experiences of profound grief. They do not offer comfortable platitudes; they do not recommend simplistic methods of cleaning the mind of sorrow or the heart of pain. Instead, they chronicle their own ongoing struggles with grief. They tell us that they have learned, above all, not to try to banish grief, but to live with it and learn from it. They tell us that grief is real. And they tell us that our lives can still be meaningful, even though we have suffered the deepest loss.

The anthology is one example of a bereavement sanctuary. In this literary environment, the authors explore grief on their own terms. Readers may do the same. Here, you may immerse yourself in a variety of grieving experiences, as well as comforting and nurturing ones, and emerge intact, with an enhanced ability to consider life and death.

Some are accounts of the death of children, young, teenaged, grown, or not yet born. There are stories of suicide triggered by bullying, and for reasons unclear. There are deaths of spouses and parents and heroic siblings. Family and friends murdered. Addiction and overdose. Near-death experiences. Death from accidents and disease and negligence. Death of a beloved dog. Rape/incest and beatings over a period of years. Intense shame. The experience of many friends and family dying as time goes by. Children leaving home and never returning.

There are also stories of comfort and inspiration-including some of the above, because grief and life are not mutually exclusive. A divorcee finds, after the deaths of a former wife and a parent, the dawning awareness of grief, and the resulting ability to be present for the dying. A widow provides a beautiful explanation of how, after being broken in grief, to be reassembled-albeit in a different form. One mother finds that after the death of her baby, a new marriage and other children bring great joy. (This is not always the case and many bereaved parents have no interest in bringing more children into the world, or adopting.)

Six contributors have, after the deaths of their children, found reasons for continuing by starting organizations to help others, or by seeking to have laws passed that prevent situations such as those which destroyed their own family members. One contributor discusses hindsight in connection with grieving. Another developed the ability to know when someone will die. A student of the Spiritualists National Union of Stanstead, UK, explains how contact with loved ones in the Afterlife can make a positive difference.

A few authors have presented poems rather than prose accounts. Some are blazingly beautiful. Some are intensely sad or wistful.

You will learn from this book that it is possible to live with grief, should you care to do so. Inspiration exists here in case you ever require it to make your own journeys of discovery into grief and mourning.

Genre: Self-Help / Death, Grief, Bereavement (fancy, right?)