Wherever love and death meet there is grief. It affects us all regardless of ethnicity, age, class, or sexual orientation. Grief is universal - it has endured across time, societies and cultures from the earliest human communities to the present day. But the way we deal with grief is changing. Increasingly, we are diagnosing grief as a medical condition to be treated rather than embracing it as a natural part of being human. In this book, Svend Brinkmann gets to the heart of what it is to grieve, arguing that the sorrow we experience after the death of a loved one is a necessary and meaningful dimension of human existence. However painful, it unites us all. As humans we are uniquely privileged to feel grief. Rather than trying to escape or smother grief, we must allow ourselves to feel and accept it as the price we pay for love.

NAVIGATING GRIEF AND LOSS is designed to support all of us through difficult and upsetting times. It's a relatable and useful guide with practical applications to help navigate the profound experience of loss, be it an elderly parent, succumbing to a lingering illness, the shock of an accidental death, a small business shuttered, a divorce after years of conflict, or euthanasia of a beloved pet. Each short chapter honestly describes a personal experience dealing with death or grief-staying at a hospice facility at my mother's bedside, feeling frustrated by the options for a terminally ill friend, navigating changed relationships after someone dies, the shock and shame of an unwanted divorce, managing the overwhelming pain of bereavement-and is followed by a brief practice-a meditation, exercise, or contemplation that readers can use to discover insights and truths and find some solace for their own struggles and sorrow.

What to Expect When You're No Longer Expecting When your baby dies, you find yourself in a life you never expected. And even though pregnancy and infant loss are common, they're not common to you. Instead, you feel like a stranger in your own body, surrounded by well-meaning people who often don't know how to support you. What you need during this time is not a book offering easy answers. You need a safe place to help you navigate what comes next, such as: * Coping with a postpartum body without a baby in your arms. * Facing social isolation and grief invalidation. * Wrestling with faith when you feel let down by God. * Dealing with the overwhelming process of making everyday decisions. * Learning to move forward after loss. * Creating a legacy for your child. In Unexpecting, bereaved mom Rachel Lewis is the friend you never knew you'd need, walking you through the unique grief of baby loss. When nothing about life after loss makes sense . . . this book will. "The guide that all parents experiencing pregnancy loss need when leaving the hospital grief-stricken, without a baby in their arms."--LINDSEY M. HENKE, founder of Pregnancy After Loss Support

"Grandparents Cry Twice: Help for Bereaved Grandparents" is a book about grandparents' dual sorrow when a grandchild dies. They cry for their lost grandchild and they also cry for the terrible grief they see their own child having to bear. The author, Mary Lou Reed, writes of her experiences when her beloved grandson, Alex, died. Through her personal story she touches the universal in all grandparents' grief.

With a foreword by Judy Woodruff, The Unexpected Journey of Caring is a practical guide to finding personal meaning in the 21st century care experience. Personal transformation is usually an experience we actively seek out-not one that hunts us down. Becoming a caregiver is one transformation that comes at us, requiring us to rethink everything we once knew. Everything changes-responsibilities, beliefs, hopes, expectations, and relationships. Caregiving is not just a role reserved for "saints"-eventually, everyone is drafted into the caregiver role. It's not a role people medically train for; it's a new type of relationship initiated by a loved one's need for care. And it's a role that cannot be quarantined to home because it infuses all aspects of our lives. Caregivers today find themselves in need of a crash course in new and unfamiliar skills. They must not only care for a loved one, but also access hidden community resources, collaborate with medical professionals, craft new narratives consistent with the changing nature of their care role, coordinate care with family, seek information and peer support using a variety of digital platforms, and negotiate social support-all while attempting to manage conflicts between work, life, and relationship roles. The moments that mark us in the transition from loved one to caregiver matter because if we don't make sense of how we are being transformed, we risk undervaluing our care experiences, denying our evolving beliefs, becoming trapped by other's misunderstandings, and feeling underappreciated, burned out, and overwhelmed. Informed by original caregiver research and proven advocacy strategies, this book speaks to caregiving as it unfolds, in all of its confusion, chaos, and messiness. Readers won't find well-intentioned cliches or care stereotypes in this book. There are no promises to help caregivers return to a life they knew before caregiving. No, this book greets caregivers where they are in their journey-new or chronic-not where others expect (or want) them to be.

A Columbia University physician comes across a popular medieval text on dying well written after the horror of the Black Plague and discovers ancient wisdom for rethinking death and gaining insight today on how we can learn the lost art of dying well in this wise, clear-eyed book that is as compelling and soulful as Being Mortal, When Breath Becomes Air, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. As a specialist in both medical ethics and the treatment of older patients, Dr. L. S. Dugdale knows a great deal about the end of life. Far too many of us die poorly, she argues. Our culture has overly medicalized death: dying is often institutional and sterile, prolonged by unnecessary resuscitations and other intrusive interventions. We are not going gently into that good night-our reliance on modern medicine can actually prolong suffering and strip us of our dignity. Yet our lives do not have to end this way. Centuries ago, in the wake of the Black Plague, a text was published offering advice to help the living prepare for a good death. Written during the late Middle Ages, ars moriendi-The Art of Dying-made clear that to die well, one first had to live well and described what practices best help us prepare. When Dugdale discovered this Medieval book, it was a revelation. Inspired by its holistic approach to the final stage we must all one day face, she draws from this forgotten work, combining its wisdom with the knowledge she has gleaned from her long medical career. The Lost Art of Dying is a twenty-first century ars moriendi, filled with much-needed insight and thoughtful guidance that will change our perceptions. By recovering our sense of finitude, confronting our fears, accepting how our bodies age, developing meaningful rituals, and involving our communities in end-of-life care, we can discover what it means to both live and die well. And like the original ars moriendi, The Lost Art of Dying includes nine black-and-white drawings from artist Michael W. Dugger. Dr. Dugdale offers a hopeful perspective on death and dying as she shows us how to adapt the wisdom from the past to our lives today. The Lost Art of Dying is a vital, affecting book that reconsiders death, death culture, and how we can transform how we live each day, including our last.

Coming at a time of renewed interest in the developmental changes of the life cycle, Psychotherapy and the Widowed Patient is a rich resource that examines the impact of a spouse's death on an individual's mental health. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts address a wide range of issues concerning loss, grief, and bereavement, and provide practical and creative approaches for both widowed persons and the helping professionals charged with treating their grief. Chapters in this compassionate volume discuss the characteristics of individuals who are more likely to seek professional help in coping with grief, widowhood as a time of growth and development, the value of openness instead of denial in dealing with death, the grieving process in young widowed spouses, the similarities of widowhood to separation and divorce, the role of dependency in how well widowed patients develop emotionally, and the role of loyalty in the process of grief. The more clinical chapters examine strategies for carrying out experiential psychotherapy with widowed patients, rational-emotive therapy, grief therapy, the effects of new perspectives on spousal bereavement on clinical practice, and aspects of bereavement response to loss, with a timeframe for viewing psychotherapeutic intervention. A review of the psychological literature regarding widowhood completes this comprehensive new book.

Many books on grief lay out a model to be followed, either for bereaved persons to live through or for professionals to practice, and usually follow some familiar prescriptions for what people should do to reach an accommodation with loss. The Crafting of Grief is different: it focuses on conversations that help people chart their own path through grief. Authors Hedtke and Winslade argue convincingly that therapists and counselors can support people more by helping them craft their own responses to bereavement rather than trying to squeeze experiences into a model. In the pages of this book, readers will learn how to develop lines of inquiry based on the concept of continuing bonds, and they'll discover ways to use these ideas to help the bereaved craft stories that remember loved ones' lives.

A renowned grief expert and neuroscientist shares groundbreaking discoveries about what happens in our brain when we grieve, providing a new paradigm for understanding love, loss, and learning.

In The Grieving Brain, neuroscientist and psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, gives us a fascinating new window into one of the hallmark experiences of being human. O’Connor has devoted decades to researching the effects of grief on the brain, and in this book, she makes cutting-edge neuroscience accessible through her contagious enthusiasm, and guides us through how we encode love and grief. With love, our neurons help us form attachments to others; but, with loss, our brain must come to terms with where our loved ones went, or how to imagine a future without them.

The Grieving Brain addresses:

• Why it’s so hard to understand that a loved one has died and is gone forever
• Why grief causes so many emotions—sadness, anger, blame, guilt, and yearning
• Why grieving takes so long
• The distinction between grief and prolonged grief
• Why we ruminate so much after we lose a loved one
• How we go about restoring a meaningful life while grieving

Based on O’Connor’s own trailblazing neuroimaging work, research in the field, and her real-life stories, The Grieving Brain combines storytelling, accessible science, and practical knowledge that will help us better understand what happens when we grieve and how to navigate loss with more ease and grace.

List of Tables. List of Figures. Series Editor's Foreword. Preface. Prologue. Acknowledgements. What It Means to Be a Parent After a Child Had Died. The "Mothers Now Childless" Study: Research Design and Findings. When a Child Dies, Does Grieving Ever End? One Death - A Thousand Strands of Pain: Finding the Meaning of Suffering. Bereaved Parents' Search for Understanding: The Paradox of Healing. Confronting a Spiritual Crisis: Where is God When Bad Things Happen? Confronting an Existential Crisis: Can Life Have Purpose Again? Deciding to Survive: Reaching Bottom - Climbing Up. Remembering With Love: Bereaved Parents as Biographer. Reaching Out to Help Others: Wounded Healers. Reinventing the Self: Parents Ask, "Who Are We Now?". The Legacy of Loss. References. Resources. Appendices. Index.

DEEP DOWN is a moving, witty, unexpected novel of family secrets, perfect for fans of Naoise Dolan, Katherine Heiny and Megan Nolan Billie and Tom have just found out their father has died. Dislocated from each other and unable to talk about the trauma in their family's past, Billie decides the best thing to do is get on a plane to her brother in Paris. Maybe there they can find a way to heal? As their story veers between present bereavement and flashbacks to growing up, we see the siblings search for common ground and attempt to repair old wounds. Following the tracks of their grief, Billie and Tom find themselves - unexpectedly - lost in the catacombs of Paris, confronting both each other and their own demons. Funny, moving and unexpected, DEEP DOWN is a novel from a huge new talent who readers are going to love.

The story of the end-of-life experience of a palliative care physician who helped thousands of patients to die well. We all die. Most of us spend the majority of our lives ignoring this uncomfortable truth, but Dr. Larry Librach dedicated his life and his career to helping his patients navigate their final journey. Then, in April 2013, Larry was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Unlike the majority of us, Larry knew the death he wanted. He wanted to die at home, surrounded by his family: his wife of forty years, his children, and his grandchildren. He did. He was peaceful and calm at the end. Larry proved that the "good death" isn't a myth. It can be done, and he showed us how. Ever the teacher, Larry made his last journey a teachable moment on how to die the best death possible, even with a pernicious disease. As hard as it is to guide patients toward dying well, it is far harder to live those precepts day by day as the clock ticks down to one's own death, but Larry, together with author Phil Dwyer, chronicled his final journey with courage and humour.

BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SPECTATOR AND THE TIMES 'Fascinating.... Deeply disturbing... Brilliant' Sunday Times 'Powerful and moving.' Louis Theroux Meet Adam. He's twenty-seven years old, articulate and attractive. He also wants to die. Should he be helped? And by whom? In The Inevitable, award-winning journalist Katie Engelhart explores one of our most abiding taboos: assisted dying. From Avril, the 80-year-old British woman illegally importing pentobarbital, to the Australian doctor dispensing suicide manuals online, Engelhart travels the world to hear the stories of those on the quest for a 'good death'. At once intensely troubling and profoundly moving, The Inevitable interrogates our most uncomfortable moral questions. Should a young woman facing imminent paralysis be allowed to end her life with a doctor's help? Should we be free to die painlessly before dementia takes our mind? Or to choose death over old age? A deeply reported portrait of everyday people struggling to make impossible decisions, The Inevitable sheds crucial light on what it means to flourish, live and die.

The second edition of this bestselling book is designed for mental health professionals, educators, and the parent/caregiver, this book provides specific ideas and techniques to work with children in various areas of complicated grief. It presents words and methods to help initiate discussions of these delicate topics, as well as tools to help children understand and separate complicated grief into parts. These parts in turn can be grieved for and released one at a time. A new chapter is included, called "Communities Grieve: Involvement with Children and Trauma." It includes information on The Taiwan Earthquake and how the community worked with children, a school bus accident in which 36 elementary school children witnessed the death of the bus driver that was driving and how the school system worked with these children and their families; a boy who was running on a cross country team and got hit by a car, which was witnessed by teammates; and how a non-profit community grief agency worked with family, school, and community. The last study is from the Oklahoma bombing and the outgrowth of a place for the traumatized children and how they still work with kids and family today. This chapter then contains new activities to work with traumatized grieving children. The new edition also includes updated resources, books, curriculums, websites, hotlines and another new chapter on bullying and victimization issues. The chapter for educators has been expanded, including the coverage of topics such as at-risk students, gay and lesbian issues, and self-injurious behaviors.

A renowned grief expert and neuroscientist shares groundbreaking discoveries about what happens in our brain when we grieve, providing a new paradigm for understanding love, loss, and learning. For as long as humans have existed, we have struggled when a loved one dies. Poets and playwrights have written about the dark cloak of grief, the deep yearning, how devastating heartache feels. But until now, we have had little scientific perspective on this universal experience. In The Grieving Brain, neuroscientist and psychologist Mary-Frances O'Connor, PhD, gives us a fascinating new window into one of the hallmark experiences of being human. O'Connor has devoted decades to researching the effects of grief on the brain, and in this book, she makes cutting-edge neuroscience accessible through her contagious enthusiasm, and guides us through how we encode love and grief. With love, our neurons help us form attachments to others; but, with loss, our brain must come to terms with where our loved ones went, or how to imagine a future that encompasses their absence. Based on O'Connor's own trailblazing neuroimaging work, research in the field, and her real-life stories, The Grieving Brain does what the best popular science books do, combining storytelling, accessible science, and practical knowledge that will help us better understand what happens when we grieve and how to navigate loss with more ease and grace.

An Unforgettable Story of Life After Death "The cold voice of the anesthesiologist recited the typical 'count backward from 10' cadence. Darkness closed around me before he got to 7. That's when I found out what it's like to die--and to come back from the dead." It was a beautiful winter's day, showing no signs of what was to come. Steve Sjogren, pastor of one of America's fastest growing churches, went into the hospital for routine gall bladder surgery and died--twice. What began as a tragic medical accident led to Steve's encounter with death, an experience of unimaginable peace and some surprises, with comforting words from God, a meeting with an angel, and seeing those who had died before him. If you, or someone you know, are fearful of dying, curious about heaven, or simply desiring to live life to its fullest, this encouraging book could change how you view life and death.

'I asked Jai what she has learned since my diagnosis,' Randy Pausch wrote about his wife in THE LAST LECTURE. 'Turns out, she could write a book titled Forget the Last Lecture; Here's the Real Story.' DREAM ON traces Jai's experiences since Randy's diagnosis, from the constant struggle she faced as a mother of three small children, to the burdens and dilemmas that accompany the role of caregiver: navigating the steep medical learning curve; managing finances; often neglecting one's own needs; making gut-wrenching decisions; and dealing with emotions ranging from guilt and resentment, to our greatest human qualities of compassion and love. With concrete advice woven artfully into a personal narrative, DREAM ON will resonate and appeal not only to the legions of readers who made THE LAST LECTURE a phenomenal bestseller, but also to all those who have lost -- or are in the process of losing -- a loved one.

This book is the Winner of the OSCLG Outstanding Book Award The loss of a desired pregnancy or the inability to experience pregnancy are intensely personal phenomena; these losses are also, in our culture at least, extremely private. Communicating Pregnancy Loss is a collection of first-person narratives about the experience of pregnancy loss. Although there is no shortage of books that help prospective parents cope with an unintended pregnancy loss or 'survive' infertility, most of these books are authored by physicians or therapists and address pregnancy loss through the language of guidance. This book is different. It is the first of its kind because the contributors (primarily communication scholars but also healthcare personnel and other scholars from the social sciences) tell their story of loss in their own words, offering a diverse collection of narratives that span experience and identity. The authors employ various feminist theories, narrative theories, and performance theories as well as other well-known communication theories and concepts. The book's narrative approach to writing about and thereby understanding pregnancy loss offers readers a method for changing the way pregnancy loss is understood personally, culturally, and politically.

This book is the Winner of the OSCLG Outstanding Book Award The loss of a desired pregnancy or the inability to experience pregnancy are intensely personal phenomena; these losses are also, in our culture at least, extremely private. Communicating Pregnancy Loss is a collection of first-person narratives about the experience of pregnancy loss. Although there is no shortage of books that help prospective parents cope with an unintended pregnancy loss or 'survive' infertility, most of these books are authored by physicians or therapists and address pregnancy loss through the language of guidance. This book is different. It is the first of its kind because the contributors (primarily communication scholars but also healthcare personnel and other scholars from the social sciences) tell their story of loss in their own words, offering a diverse collection of narratives that span experience and identity. The authors employ various feminist theories, narrative theories, and performance theories as well as other well-known communication theories and concepts. The book's narrative approach to writing about and thereby understanding pregnancy loss offers readers a method for changing the way pregnancy loss is understood personally, culturally, and politically.

Grief isn't always the result of something finite, marking a death or complete end. Soul-shattering grief can also be activated by a dramatic shift in an important relationship, such as a divorce or significant breakup, a life-changing medical diagnosis, or a broken connection with an addicted child. How do we grieve people who are still alive, but no longer who they once were to us? Most people will experience this type of traumatic event over the course of their lifetime, yet the complications of these situations often leave grievers feeling alienated or ashamed. Soulbroken is a guidebook that recognizes this often-misunderstood grief, validates the unique challenges posed by its ambiguity, and champions tools for healing. In it, Stephanie Sarazin presents the ambiguous grief process, offering insights to help readers better understand the nuances of their grief experience when a loved one is not lost to death. With intimate stories of others' path to recovery using Sarazin's advice, this book will help anyone ready to find a way through their own grief, regardless of where they are on their journey.

From the award-winning author of Crossing Ocean Parkway, a personal memoir about adjusting to loss through books, meditation, and the process of memory itself Marianna De Marco Torgovnick experienced the rupture of two of her life's most intimate relations when her mother and brother died in close proximity. Mourning rocked her life, but it also led to the solace and insight offered by classic books and the practice of meditation. Her resulting journey into the past imagines a viable future and raises questions acute for Italian Americans but pertinent to everyone, about the nature of memory and the meanings of home at a time, like ours, marked by cultural disruption and wartime. Crossing Back: Books, Family, and Memory without Pain presents a personal perspective on death, mourning, loss, and renewal. A sequel to her award-winning and much-anthologized Crossing Ocean Parkway, Crossing Back is about close familial ties and personal loss, written after the death of her remaining birth family, who had always been there, and now were not. After their loss, she entered a spiritual and psychological state of "transcendental homelessness": the feeling of being truly at home nowhere, of being spiritually adrift. In a grand act of symbolic reenactment, she found herself moving apartments repeatedly, not realizing she did so subconsciously to keep busy, to stave off grief. By reading and studying great books, she opened up to mourning, a process she constitutionally resisted as somehow shameful. Over time, she discovered that a third death colored and prolonged her feelings of grief: her first child's death in infancy, which, in the course of a happier lifetime, had never been adequately acknowledged. Her new losses led her finally to take stock of her son's death too. Reading and meditating, followed by writing, became daily her healing rituals. A warm and intimate user's guide to books, family, and memory in the mourning process, the end-point being memory without pain, Crossing Back is a wide-ranging memoir about growing older and learning to ride the waves of change. Lively and conversational, Torgovnick is masterful at tracking the moment-to moment, day-to-day challenges of sudden or protracted grief and the ways in which the mind and the body seem to search for-and sometimes find-solutions.

Every 85 minutes someone in the UK takes their own life and the suicide rate is currently the highest since 2004. Society often reacts with unease, fear and even disapproval but what happens to those bereaved by a self-inflicted death? The reasons leading someone to take their own life are complex, and the bereavement reactions of survivors of suicide can also be complex, including shame, guilt, sadness and the effects of trauma, stigma and social isolation. It can be difficult for those personally affected by a suicide death to come to terms with their loss and seek help and support. A Special Scar looks in detail at the impact of suicide and offers practical help for survivors, relatives and friends of people who have taken their own life. Fifty bereaved people tell their stories, showing us that, by not hiding the truth from themselves and others they have been able to learn to live with the suicide, offering hope to others facing this traumatic loss. This Classic Edition includes a brand-new introduction to the work and will be an invaluable resource for survivors of suicide as well as for all those who are in contact with them, including police and coroner's officers, bereavement services, self-help organisations for survivors, mental health professionals, social workers, GPs, counsellors and therapists.

The death of a parent marks an emotional and psychological watershed in a person's life. For children and teenagers, the loss of a parent if not handled sensitively can be a lasting trauma, and for adults too, a parent's death can be a tremendous blow.

When Parents Die speaks to bereaved children of all ages. Rebecca Abrams draws on her personal and professional understandings of parental loss, as well as the experiences of many other adults, teenagers and children, to provide the reader with an honest, compassionate and insightful exploration of the experience of losing a parent. The book covers the entire course of grieving, from the immediate aftermath of a parent's death through to the point of recovery, paying particular attention to the many circumstances that can prolong and complicate mourning, including sudden death.

An indispensible aid to the bereaved and the many professionals who work with them, this book is written in a clear and sympathetic style. It has been fully revised for this third edition to take recent research and theoretical developments into account.