In February 2015, Ivan Maisel received a call that would alter his life forever: his son Max's car had been found abandoned in a parking next to Lake Ontario. Two months later, Max's body would be found in the lake. There'd been no note or obvious indication that Max wanted to harm himself; he'd signed up for a year-long subscription to a dating service; he'd spent the day he disappeared doing photography work for school. And this uncertainty became part of his father's grief. I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye explores with grace, depth, and refinement the tragically transformative reality of losing a child. But it also tells the deeply human and deeply empathetic story of a father's relationship with his son, of its complications, and of Max and Ivan's struggle-as is the case for so many parents and their children-to connect. I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye is a stunning, poignant exploration of the father and son relationship, of how our tendency to overlook men's mental health can have devastating consequences, and how ultimately letting those who grieve do so openly and freely can lead to greater healing.

In "Four Funerals and a Wedding," Smolowe jostles preconceptions about caregiving, defies cliches about losing loved ones, and reveals a stunning bottom line: far from being uncommon, resilience like hers is the norm among the recently bereaved. With humor and quiet wisdom, and with a lens firmly trained on what helped her tolerate and rebound from so much sorrow, she offers answers to questions we all confront in the face of loss, and reminds us that grief is not only about endings--it's about new beginnings.

2015-2016 Sarton Story Circle: Memoir Winner 2016-2017 Readers Views Award: Memoir/Autobiography/Biography Winner, West Pacific Regional Winner 2017 Independent Press Award: Relationships Winner 2017 Northern California Publishers and Authors Second Place in Book Cover 2017 Northern California Publishers and Authors Second Place in Memoir 2017 Readers' Favorite Book Award Bronze Winner 2017 International Book Awards: Autobiography/Memoir Finalist 2016 National Indie Excellence Awards: Memoir Finalist Everyone has or had a mother. Dr. Virginia A. Simpson did too. She thought they had a wonderful relationship and had worked out all of their issues when a life-threatening illness necessitated her mother, Ruth, come live with her. When her mother moved in, she brought with her all their old issues and during the six years they lived together, they added more. Although an expert in the field of death, dying, and bereavement, Virginia often found herself overwhelmed by her caregiving role as her mother's health continued to decline. She also felt herself on a race against time to heal their relationship before her mother died. Described as "stunning, beautiful, and honest," The Space Between: A Memoir of Mother-Daughter Love at the End of Life offers an intimate window into the challenges of being a caregiving while also providing important information about the realities of end of life care. The Space Between gives us hope that even the most contentious relationship can be healed. By the end of Ruth's life, the only space between Virginia and her mother was filled with love.

No other book entangles romance and grief in such an urgent and beautiful way. Tre Miller Rodriguez writes as she lives: with breathless poise, unmatched style, and fierce bravery. (Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance) Splitting the Difference is a story of love and loss told with flair, ballsy bravado and unflinching honesty. Susan Shapiro, author of 5 Men Who Broke My Heart At 18, Tre gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. At 19, her only sibling was killed in a car crash. At 34, her husband died of a sudden heart attack. But at 36, her teenage daughter found her on Facebook and began to reshape the course of Tre s life. The sum of these milestones is Splitting the Difference: A Heart-Shaped Memoir, the nonfiction book that is equal parts inspiring, irreverent, and heart-rending. Through sharply immediate prose, Tre unpacks her experience as a young widow in New York City: the dumb sh*% people say; the brave face she wears to work and social events; and the lack of solace in one-night stands. Her perspective only begins shifting when she spontaneously brings Alberto s ashes on a trip, which sets into motion her ritual of spreading him in bodies of water. By traveling to Bucket List destinations like Brazil and Cuba, Tre discovers a grief strategy for facing her roughest days. Alberto s death ultimately becomes a portal through which Tre views her past and embraces her future: she quits her corporate job, explores Alberto s homeland of Cuba, and joyfully reunites with her biological daughter in North Carolina. A deeply moving narrative, Splitting the Difference is written with the raw-thenticity of a woman transformed by heartbreak and inspired by love s legacy.

Kelly Kittel never questioned her Mayflower Society mantra--"Family is the most important thing"--until the day her fifteen-month-old son was run over by her sixteen-year-old niece. Nine months later, Kittel's doctor made a terrible mistake during her subsequent pregnancy and she found herself burying yet another baby. Caught up in the maelstrom of a malpractice lawsuit, Kittel and her husband battle not only the medical system, but their own relatives, in the courtroom. As their family tree begins to topple, the Kittels struggle to nourish the roots of their young family and find healing. Achingly raw and beautifully narrated, "Breathe "is a story of motherhood, death, and family in the face of unspeakable tragedy and, ultimately, how she learns to breathe again.

Have you loved and lost before, yet struggled with how to recover and move forward? Are you looking for inspiration to give you strength to persevere? Have you faced the inevitable eternal rest of a parent, struggled with how to say good-bye? Have you questioned your faith and let fear take over in times of loss? In The Gift of Goodbye, Rebecca Whitehead Munn relates how she drew strength from her faith and optimism as everything she knew to be constant in her life was changing. She inspires readers through her natural writing style to believe that they too can persevere and build resilience through the seasons of loss in life. Rebecca opens her heart on each page as she walks us through her story of living through two major life transitions within a three-year span, and the resulting shift she made in the process-due to the lasting gift of love from her now-deceased mother, her courage, and the choice she made to expand into more of who she was at her core.

Nearly a million parents suffer a miscarriage or infant death each year. This collection of meditations interweaves the very real feelings of bereaved parents with Scripture passages that provide comfort, direction, and hope.

After Homicide describes the collective responses of bereaved people to the aftermath of violent death, a subject not dealt with in any detail in the literature that is currently available. The book concentrates particularly on the birth, development and organization of the self help and campaigning groups that emerged in the last decade. The author examines these as attempts to give institutional expression to interpretations of grief.

In addition, the author had special access to a number of groups and uses the infomation that he gathered through this access to discuss the practical and political importance of the work of these groups, and their affects on policing, the media and the law.

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Loss and Bereavement: Managing Change "explores situations and topics which can affect any one of us at any time. This a practical guide to help provide support for those experiencing bereavement, loss, transition and change. It provides a framework for understanding specific conflicts and their effects on health. This book encourages the use of range of skills while bringing a critical yet reflective dimension to this caring work. The text considers the work, school, family and social environments. Themes and issues of experiencing loss are considered including bullying, unemployment, violence, sexual crime and anger, the death of a child, mass disaster, and suicide. The final section considers coping mechanisms, such as assertiveness, grieving and posttraumatic stress syndrome.

Key features:
Details practical applications within a theoretical framework
Encourages a range of skill with a reflective dimension
Includes contributes from a range of viewpoints

This book is written for students who are developing their skill for supporting those who are experiencing grief or transition. It is essential reading for students and practitioners in nursing, teaching, medicine, therapies, the police, the ambulance and the first aid organizations, as well as the clergy and voluntary agencies. Course leaders and lecturers will also find a wealth of information to simulate discussion groups.

A taboo subject in today's society, death is something that we do not like to talk about and especially do not like young people talking about. Yet, without opportunities to talk, young people's anxieties about death can manifest themselves in all sorts of self-destructive and socially-destructive ways. In this book, Nick Luxmoore explores the problems that arise when death is not openly discussed with young people and offers invaluable advice about how best to allay concerns without having to pretend that there are easy answers. He covers all of the key issues from the physicality of death to the fear of not existing to the way young people's morality develops and he provides expert insight into the impact these subjects have on young people's behaviour. This book presents a wealth of information for professionals, parents and others working with young people, providing the skills needed to ask young people the difficult question, Do you think much about death? and to support them as they begin to find their answer.

Your End of Life Matters is offered at a time when people are starting to talk more about end-of-life matters. Based on the author's own experiences and those of others she's worked with, the book conveys the value of talking about last wishes long before the end is imminent. With the primary emphasis on how to create a successful end-of-life communication of your own, this book weaves stories, text, writing prompts, humor, and exercises into 12 chapters that include answers to key questions including the who? why?, what?, how?, where?, and when? of a potential conversation. She covers Legacy Documents and other issues that might arise when planning for those final days. Ziff has written a "how-to" communication book for readers of all ages, addressing the need, and recommending methods, to do what her parents did, and what she eventually did as well: To communicate, with someone you know you can trust, what the end-of-life matters are that you will want known both before, and when the time (of your death) comes. Ziff has been on both sides of this vital conversation, first as a Listener, and, more recently, as its Initiator, and she advocates the value of both roles. "Let me tell you," she admits candidly, "the planning ahead is pretty challenging and time-consuming-cataloging my office data, tax and medical information, photos and writings, to say nothing of books, and of clothing I had saved but not used in decades. But the relief-being able to know the talk was accomplished successfully-that's remarkable! I'm free now to actively get on exploring my bucket list and living my life!"

Contents:
Part 1 The Child's Perspective of Death: Children's Understandings of Death - Striving to Understand Death; Grieving Children: Can We Answer Their Questions. Part 2 The Child's Response to Life-Threatening Illness: Talking to Children About Illness; The Child and Life-Threatening Illness; Children and HIV: Orphans and Victims. Part 3 Children Mourning, Mourning Children: Grief of Children and Parents; Children and Traumatic Loss; How Can We Help; The Role of School. Part 4 Innovative Research: World of Dying Children and Their Well Siblings; The Empty Space Phenomenon: The Process of Grief in the Bereaved Family; A Sampler of Literature for Young Readers: Death, Dying and Bereavement.

Silver Butterfly Wings is my story. It's a story of transformation, of the many paths and decisions I faced while going through the process of grief. My husband had died and I was utterly shattered; could not imagine a life without him. Then signs from the other side appeared, filling me with hope: flickering lights, hawks flying overhead, our song on the radio, a butterfly's silvery wings, a hot spot on his side of the bed. At first I was sceptical. How could my dearly departed be sending signs and messages from across the veil? Over time I learned to trust these signs, these gifts from Spirit. There was a reason I was still here. I was meant to go on, to live my life with passion. I was to figure out who I was becoming in this totally different world and trust that life was taking me where I was meant to be. In short, I was to transform - like a butterfly.

**As featured on BBC2's Between the Covers** 'Glamorous. Heart-breaking. Hilarious. Feminist. Life-changing' Katherine Ryan 'I loved this book so much. It's hard to overpraise. So funny and so sad and so hopeful' Neil Gaiman 'A wonderful and very special book' Adam Kay, author of This is Going to Hurt 'Funny, sparklingly honest and heart-breaking' Bel Mooney, Daily Mail 'Heartwarming and heartbreaking all at the same time! Genuinely couldn't put it down' Alan Carr 'Incredibly moving, always funny and brilliantly written. I urge everyone to read it' Frank Skinner 'LOVELY. Sad and funny and warm and DOGS' Marian Keyes 'Very beautiful and poignant . . . it'll make you laugh and cry in equal measure' Giles Paley-Phillips 'I read it in one sitting - it's so blinking good' Lorraine Kelly 'A book that will leave you smiling but with a lump in your throat' Mail on Sunday, '100 Hottest Summer Books 2019' * * * The funny, heart-breaking, wonderfully told story of love, family and overwhelming loss which led Emily Dean to find hope and healing in the dog she always wanted. Growing up with the Deans was a fabulous training ground for many things: ignoring unpaid bills, being the most entertaining guest at dinner, deconstructing poetry. It was never home for the dog Emily craved. Emily shared the lively chaos with her beloved older sister Rachael, her rock. Over the years the sisters bond grew ever closer. As Rachael went on to have the cosy family and treasured dog, Giggle, Emily threw herself into unsettled adventure - dog ownership remaining a distant dream. Then, tragically, Rachael is diagnosed with cancer. In just three devastating years Emily loses not only her sister but both her parents as well. This is the funny heart-breaking, wonderfully told story of how Emily discovers that it is possible to overcome the worst that life can throw at you, that it's never too late to make peace with your past, and that the right time is only ever now, as she finally starts again with her very own dog - the adorable Shih-tzu named Raymond.

For readers of Richard Paul Evans and Greg Kincaid comes "The 13th Gift," a heartwarming Christmas story about how a random act of kindness transformed one of the bleakest moments in a family's history into a time of strength and love.
After the unexpected death of her husband, Joanne Huist Smith had no idea how she would keep herself together and be strong for her three children--especially with the holiday season approaching. But 12 days before Christmas, presents begin appearing on her doorstep with notes from their "True Friends." As the Smiths came together to solve the mystery of who the gifts were from, they began to thaw out from their grief and come together again as a family. This true story about the power of random acts of kindness will warm the heart, a beautiful reminder of the miracles of Christmas and the gift of family during the holiday season.

Kim Fairley was twenty-four when she fell in love with and married a man who was fifty-seven. Something about Vern-his quirkiness, his humor, his devilish smile-made her feel an immediate connection with him. She quickly became pregnant, but instead of the idyllic interlude she'd imagined as she settled into married life and planned for their family, their love was soon tested by the ghosts of Vern's past-a town, a house, a family, a memory. Shooting Out the Lights is a real-life mystery that explores the challenges faced in a loving marriage, the ongoing, wrenching aftermath of gun violence and the healing that comes with confronting the past.

Attempting to demythologize the process of dying, Nuland explores how we shall die, each of us in a way that will be unique. Through particular stories of dying--of patients, and of his own family--he examines the seven most common roads to death: old age, cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, accidents, heart disease, and strokes, revealing the facets of death's multiplicity.

"It's impossible to read How We Die without realizing how earnestly we have avoided this most unavoidable of subjects, how we have protected ourselves by building a cultural wall of myths and lies. I don't know of any writer or scientist who has shown us the face of death as clearly, honestly and compassionately as Sherwin Nuland does here."--James Gleick

Made in response to the death of the artist's sister shortly before the birth of his first child, Jason Reimer's work ponders the meaning of life, death, suffering, and human nature. It does so in the form of a fragmented, apocalyptic narrative embodied within a book that utilizes multiple textures, substrates, and complex image sequencing.

In the midst of the busiest years of our lives and careers, just as many of us are beginning to confront our own aging, we are likely to lose a parent--and as commonplace, even expected, as any such event may be, the reperscussions can be dramatic. This book sets out in clear and comprehensive terms what the death of a parent means to most adults--how it in fact functions as a turning point in our emotional, social, and personal lives. Drawing on her own groundbreaking research, in-depth interviews, and data collected nationwide, Debra Umberson explores the social and psychological factors that determine how this important loss will affect us--as a personal crisis or an opportunity for healthy change. Her book shows how adults, far from the "finished" beings we are often assumed to be, can be profoundly transformed by the death of a parent--in beliefs, behavior, goals, sense of self--transformed in ways that will continue to affect us, for better or worse, for the rest of our lives. Debra Umberson is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the only scholar to have published on the topic of parental death in adulthood using national data, and her resume includes 36 published articles and chapters in leading academic journals and books on family and health topics. Dr. Umberson has received many awards. She won an award for her research for Death of a Parent from FIRST Award from the National Institute on Aging. Umberson's newest research, which is also sponsored by the National Institute of Aging, focuses on how marital quality changes over the life course. Umberson is currently serving as an elected officer of both the Mental Health Section and the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association (the national professional association of sociologists in the United States). She has served as deputy editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior and associate editor of the Journal of Family Issues. She is currently associate editor of Journal of Marriage and the Family.

What is the place of discontent and unhappiness in human experience and how best can we be with it? There is something about everything that makes it not quite satisfactory. Even things we really love are spoilt by not being quite enough or by going on too long. People entering psychotherapy want to feel better - more authoritative, less anxious or depressed, more whole - and although it can help, an enormous amount of difficult and painful emotions continue to arise. Even after years and years of therapy many of us feel that there is no 'happy ever after'. Bearing this reality in mind and drawing upon both psychotherapeutic and Buddhist sources, Present with Suffering, explores bereavement and our pervasive experience of emptiness. With a foreword from Henry Shukman, the authors show how through being mindfully present, kind and accepting, we may enfold what hurts us in a more spacious and meaningful way.