DYING: A Book of Comfort
Companion website about dying, bereavement, loss, grief — and aging with spirit
|
Bereavement, grief, and recovery• Links to help on bereavement, grief and recovery • Selections from DYING about Grief and Recovery Compassionate Friends (national self-help organization for help grieving the loss of a child of any age). Resources include a Chapter Locator and online brochures on topics ranging from Understanding Grief, Sudden Death, Surviving Your Child's Suicide or Homicide, The Death of an Adult Child, Death of a Special-Needs Child, Adults Grieving the Death of a Sibling, Suggestions for Various Professionals Dealing with Someone's Loss of a Child.
Good Grief (Meghan O'Rourke, New Yorker, 2-1-2010. Is there a better way to be bereaved? Grief is more complicated than Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages. The new science of bereavement.
Good Grief: Coping After Loss (Lybi Ma, Psychology Today, 5-1-03, 7-16-09). Coping styles vary.
Grief and Bereavement, audio and transcript of roundtable discussion with gerontologist Ken Doka, social scientist Phyllis Silverman, and Rabbi Earl Grollman of the Center of Death Education, hosted by Linda Wertheimer, for All Things Considered, as part of its wonderful series The End of Life: Exploring Death in America.
The Grief Recovery Handbook: The Action Program for Moving Beyond Death, Divorce, and Other Losses including Health, Career, and Faith by John W. James and Russell Friedman. James, Friedman, and Leslie Mathews also wrote When Children Grieve: For Adults to Help Children Deal with Death, Divorce, Pet Loss, Moving, and Other Losses
How to Conduct Compassionate Interviews at the Scene of a Tragedy & Dealing with Our Own Responses to What We See and Hear: A Guide for Journalists by Russell Friedman and John W. James (The Grief Recovery Institute Educational Foundation--a 28-page PDF file well worth downloading, whether you're a journalists or not).
Meghan O'Rourke, on a new website by and about women (and men) called Double X (in beta testing), has a series about grief and grieving:
• The Long Goodbye • The Long Goodbye:Finding a Metaphor for Your Loss • The Long Goodbye: “Normal” vs. “Complicated” Grief • The Long Goodbye: Hamlet’s Not Depressed. He’s Grieving. • The Long Goodbye: Dreaming of the Dead • The Long Goodbye: Can Nature Help Assuage Your Grief? • The Long Goodbye: Watching Someone You Love Accept Death • The Long Goodbye: What Is It Like To Recover From Grief? • The Long Goodbye: The Moment I Heard My Mother's Diagnosis 'Making Toast': Simple Gestures for Moving On , National Public Radio story and review of Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt, which E.L. Doctorow describes thus: "A painfully beautiful memoir telling how grandparents are made over into parents, how people die out of order, how time goes backwards. Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and instructive."
Through a Glass Darkly, Miriam Greenspan On Moving from Grief to Gratitude (Barbara Platek, The Sun)
What Comes After by Liza Mundy ("Losing Leslie" on the cover, Washington Post Magazine, 11-11-07). They lost their daughter in the deadliest campus massacre in U.S. history. Now one parent thinks a lawsuit might be the only way to hold someone accountable for her death, while the other believes it would only prolong their pain. Click here to read the online discussion of the article and the issues involved. Holly Adams and Tony Sherman suffered an inconceivable tragedy when their daughter, Leslie Sherman, was among 32 people killed by a gunman in April 2007 on the Virginia Tech campus. Now they are divided on how to move on with their lives, as Holly struggles to decide whether to join other grieving families to push for accountability with a lawsuit or to focus on her husband and their other daughter, a student at Tech.Click here for the Report of the Virginia Tech Review Panel.
[Go Top] Selections from DYING about Grief and Recovery There are many, many more in the book, of course. "For two years . . . I was just as crazy as you can be and still be at large. I didn't have any really normal minutes during those two years. It wasn't just grief. It was total confusion. I was nutty, and that's the truth. How did I come out of it? I don't know, because I didn't know when I was in it that I was in it." ~ Helen Hayes, the actress, on the death of her husband Charles MacArthur And time remembered is grief forgotten, And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and cover Blossom by blossom the spring begins. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne You can't prevent birds of sorrow fling over your head--but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair. ~ Chinese proverb I measure every Grief I meet With narrow, probing Eyes-- I wonder if it weighs like Mine-- Or has an easier size. ~ Emily Dickinson Grief can be the garden of compassion. ~ Jelaluddin Rumi |
"To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever."
~ Amy Bloom, The Rap on Happiness (review of books on happiness, NY Times, 1-29-10) "I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong."
~ from W. H. Auden, "Funeral Blues" (a wonderful poem) "But there is nothing linear or predictable about grief. A soul does not heal the way a femur does. Sometimes the biggest victories -- the promotion at work, the honor-roll report card -- ring the most hollow because he is not there to share them. And sometimes the smallest victories become the ones that matter most."
Tracy Grant's essay, In Grief, Life As Series of Slow Repairs: Flickering Light Bulbs Mark Widow's Healing (Washington Post, Style section 9-4-09) "Until now I have been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day."
~Joan Didion, in the beautiful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 143 “The central task of dying is letting go, which is also a core task of parenthood. . . . Children look to parents to show them how to live, how to love, and how to go on after loss. . . .We may never be comfortable with the idea of mortality or be able to comprehend the end of physical life. But ignoring death makes it more dreadful. . . . We need to become acquainted with the dying process because parents and children alike will eventually face it. We need to accept what we can’t control and control what we can, which is to insure that those left behind are not overburdened and utterly unprepared financially and emotionally. . . . By acknowledging death, talking about it, and planning for it, we can soften the hard facts of life for our children and enlarge our sense of life’s value and preciousness.”
~Linda Blachman in Another Morning: Voices of Truth and Hope from Mothers with Cancer Disenfranchised grief is "the grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported.”
~ Kenneth Doka “McNees has provided a remarkable anthology of insights, comforting words, stories, reassurance, and guidance for the journey of dying and grieving. Fourteen chapters delve artfully and compassionately into a full range of dying, death, and bereavement topics. An index by author ‘Names’ and another by ‘Titles and Selected First Lines’ make it possible to return and savor the many rich offerings she has gathered.”
~ Rev. Paul A. Metzler, The Center for Living with Loss, in newsletter, Association for Death Education and Counseling “I've been devouring the book, which is strangely comforting in a way I can't put my finger on. I gave it to my mother and brother, too, to help them come to terms with my father's death, which seemed sudden even though he was chronically ill. The book's greatest gift for us was that it contained the perfect poem for my mother to read at the graveside for my father's unveiling. It was a real act of courage for her to read it in public, without breaking down, and because the words were so beautiful and so apt, the poem itself helped start her on the path to healing.”
~ Robin Marantz Henig, author of How a Woman Ages and Pandora's Baby  “Seldom have I read a book that exudes such comfort, such an embrace of genuine insight, care and support....The book’s gift, and it is a rich treasure for the reader, is that it embraces who we are.... The book can be read cover to cover, or just pick out a page. Something will leap off the page, a story, a quote, a reading, narrative couplings of diverse themes colorfully worded by the author/scribe, to give you the needed word or embrace....This book needs wide circulation. The bereaved deserve this, and the book will help all of us.”
~ Rev. Richard B. Gilbert, director, World Pastoral Care Center, in Resources Hotline |
