Partly a counselling model and partly an explanation of true empathy, this handbook explores the ways companionship eases grief. For caretakers who work with grieving people or for friends and family just hoping to stay close, 11 tenets are outlined for mourner-led care. These simple rules call for understanding another person's pain, listening with the heart rather than the head, not filling up every minute with words, respecting confusion and disorder, and relying on curiosity rather than expertise.

A death occurs about every twelve seconds in the United States, according to the US Census Bureau. What happens in the hours and days following a death is something most of us have no knowledge of. In Getting Smart about Death, author Jane Filetic changes that by sharing basic information that can make a world of difference. Using an efficient, need-to-know manner, she covers such topics as: the four things needed immediately after a death occurs; ten helpful suggestions to consider when a death is imminent; answers to frequently asked questions following a death; the times in life when it is essential to express our own final wishes. Getting Smart about Death is a simple, straightforward guide that will help you be prepared when a parent, spouse, partner, sibling, child, or best friend is nearing the end of life or has reached the end of life. Information is not just power; in the case of death, it is peace of mind.

Having already lost his mother and only brother, twenty-four-year-old Will Boast finds himself absolutely alone when his father dies of alcoholism. Numbly settling the matters of his father's estate, Boast is deep inside his grief when he stumbles upon documents revealing a secret his father had intended to keep: He d had another family before Will's a wife and two sons in England.

This revelation leads to a flood of new questions. Did his father abandon this first family, or was he pushed away? Still reeling from loss, Boast is forced to reconsider the fundamental truths of his childhood and to look for traces of the man his father might truly have been. Setting out in search of his half brothers, he attempts to reconcile their family history with his own, testing each childhood memory under the weight of his father's secret. Moving between the Midwest and England, from scenes of his youth to the tentative discovery of his new family, Boast writes with visceral beauty about grief, memory, and his slow and tender journey to a new kind of love.

With the piercing gaze of a novelist, Boast transforms the pain and confusion of his family history into an achingly poignant portrait of resilience, revising the stories he's inherited to refashion both his past and his present. Heartbreaking and luminous, Epilogue is the stunning account of a young man s struggle to understand all that he has lost and found, and to forge a new life for himself along the way."