Lessons Learned On Grief

This is a memoir of my personal and professional experiences with grief. The story begins with my wife becoming sick with cancer at age 27. Her sickness and death was devastating and transformed my world. The first several chapters are about my personal grief journey. I was a middle school counselor when she died, and in dealing with her loss I embarked on a new career as a bereavement counselor. At first I was just a volunteer facilitating support groups for widowed men for the American Red Cross in a program called "First Step". I eventually did a my doctoral study on this program. When this program ended, I was invited to begin a bereavement program for St. Brigid parish in Westbury, NY. I facilitated support groups there for over three decades. Eventually, I started another bereavement program for St. Bernard's parish in Levittown, which features specialty groups for bereaved parents and survivors of suicide. Most of the book is about lessons I have learned from my clients about loss. In addition to support groups, I have seen clients privately for many years. My lessons on grief also include what I have learned from people who I trained to become support group facilitators, from students in my graduate course at Hofstra University, and from my work for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The book is has a broad perspective; it speaks about many different losses, i.e. death of a spouse, child, sibling, parents and complicated grief. It is unique in that most books on the topic are either personal accounts from well-known people, i.e. Option B by Sheryl Sandberg or professional works by experts in the field, i.e. Living Beyond Loss by Monica McGoldrick. This both combines both perspectives in an easy to follow writing style. It is written for grieving individuals and their caregivers. Since it is a memoir, I am the main character but I also speak about the many individuals who have influenced me in my work. People who have suffered unimaginable losses, and yet somehow managed to survive and lead meaningful lives. They have inspired me to write this book so others can benefit from their grief journey.

Loss can have many meanings from loss of family or friends, loss of something valued, a loss of an ability. This book discusses those losses, how we react to them and how we can adapt to them. It explores both the common themes and challenges that characterise the human experience of loss.

A guide to living life in the moment uses lessons learned from the dying to help the living find the most enjoyment and happiness.

A View from the Fog recalls one womans struggle to accept the loss of both parents in a single automobile accident. It is an account of both grief and hope, darkness and light, love and loss. As a lay minister raised in the United Methodist Church, Jada still felt like a three-time orphan. Her mother and father are dead, and God has gone silent. With prayer support and loving friends, Jada heard God speak again, I love you and will never leave you. Jada has asked and wrestled with some of the questions you will probably face in the fog. She does not presume to offer answers, only hope in the presence of a loving God, the God who truly loves you and would never, ever leave you.

In this groundbreaking new work, David Kessler—an expert on grief and the coauthor with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross of the iconic On Grief and Grieving—journeys beyond the classic five stages to discover a sixth stage: meaning. In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler Ross first identified the stages of dying in her transformative book On Death and Dying. Decades later, she and David Kessler wrote the classic On Grief and Grieving, introducing the stages of grief with the same transformative pragmatism and compassion. Now, based on hard-earned personal experiences, as well as knowledge and wisdom earned through decades of work with the grieving, Kessler introduces a critical sixth stage. Many people look for “closure” after a loss. Kessler argues that it’s finding meaning beyond the stages of grief most of us are familiar with—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—that can transform grief into a more peaceful and hopeful experience. In this book, Kessler gives readers a roadmap to remembering those who have died with more love than pain; he shows us how to move forward in a way that honors our loved ones. Kessler’s insight is both professional and intensely personal. His journey with grief began when, as a child, he witnessed a mass shooting at the same time his mother was dying. For most of his life, Kessler taught physicians, nurses, counselors, police, and first responders about end of life, trauma, and grief, as well as leading talks and retreats for those experiencing grief. Despite his knowledge, his life was upended by the sudden death of his twenty-one-year-old son. How does the grief expert handle such a tragic loss? He knew he had to find a way through this unexpected, devastating loss, a way that would honor his son. That, ultimately, was the sixth state of grief—meaning. In Finding Meaning, Kessler shares the insights, collective wisdom, and powerful tools that will help those experiencing loss. Finding Meaning is a necessary addition to grief literature and a vital guide to healing from tremendous loss. This is an inspiring, deeply intelligent must-read for anyone looking to journey away from suffering, through loss, and towards meaning.

In everyday language, "Smith offers us important teachings and reflections for dealing with death and embracing life" (Jack Kornfield, author of "A Path with Heart").

How we cope with grief and come to terms with the death of a loved one shapes our world. In this comprehensive guide to the mourning process, Dr Volkan, a world-recognised authority on grief, shows how each mourning is as individualised as our fingerprints, encoded with our past history of losses. Anecdotal and compassionate, this is a profoundly moving and informative study of how grief and loss shape all our lives.

From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father: “With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief … captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you’d rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie’s words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided” (The Washington Post). Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.