Grief

"What's gone and what's past help," Shakespeare wrote, "should be past grief." But Thomas Attig argues that Shakespeare is wrong--that a grieving survivor need never let go. In The Heart of Grief, Attig gives us an inspiring and profoundly insightful meditation on the meaning of grief, showing how it can be the path toward a lasting love of those who have died. Recounting dozens of stories of people who have struggled with deaths in their lives, he describes grieving as a transition from loving in presence to loving in separation. The thing we long for most--the return of the one who is missing--is the very thing that we can never have, kindling the intense pain of our loss. But Attig argues that we can, in fact, build an enduring, even reciprocal, love, a love that tempers our pain. He tells stories, for instance, of a young girl taking some of her dead sister's practical advice as she enters high school, a widower realizing how much intimate life with his wife has colored his character, and an athlete drawing inspiration from his dead brother and achieving what they had dreamed of together. Far from forgetting our loved ones, Attig urges us to explore ways in which our memories of the departed can be sustained, our understanding of them enhanced, and their legacies embraced, so they continue to play active roles in our everyday and inner lives. Groundbreaking and original, inspiring and compassionate, The Heart of Grief offers guidance, comfort, and a new understanding of how we grieve.

When a loved one dies we mourn our loss. We take comfort in the rituals that mark the passing, and we turn to those around us for support. But what happens when there is no closure, when a family member or a friend who may be still alive is lost to us nonetheless? How, for example, does the mother whose soldier son is missing in action, or the family of an Alzheimer's patient who is suffering from severe dementia, deal with the uncertainty surrounding this kind of loss? In this sensitive and lucid account, Pauline Boss explains that, all too often, those confronted with such ambiguous loss fluctuate between hope and hopelessness. Suffered too long, these emotions can deaden feeling and make it impossible for people to move on with their lives. Yet the central message of this book is that they can move on. Drawing on her research and clinical experience, Boss suggests strategies that can cushion the pain and help families come to terms with their grief. Her work features the heartening narratives of those who cope with ambiguous loss and manage to leave their sadness behind, including those who have lost family members to divorce, immigration, adoption, chronic mental illness, and brain injury. With its message of hope, this eloquent book offers guidance and understanding to those struggling to regain their lives.

This book provides a concise, yet comprehensive guide to effective work with bereaved parents, combining a broad overview of current research, theory, and practice with the authors' own extensive clinical experience. Transcripts of individual, couple, and group meetings illustrate the delicate subtleties of this work, giving the reader helpful insights into more effective clinical practice. The authors emphasize the importance of approaching each parent as a unique person, while also considering the socio-cultural context of the bereaved. This book helps clinicians approach work with bereaved parents with a less scripted format, suggesting an alternative role as expert companion to the bereaved, allowing for a more uplifting experience for both parties.

"Stress" names a kind of grief unique to the modern period, a grief perpetually unresolved, evoked by the rapid and relentless changes characteristic of modernity. Yet, it was not until World War II, when the psychiatric difficulties of pilots and bombers in particular brought stress into the open, that stress became a topic of medical and psychological research and a named cause of disorders. The term borrows the notions of pressure and tension from the engineering world. Included is this book are a phenomenology of the experience of stress, a history of the construction of "engineered grief," and an assessment of stress management programs.

This thoroughly revised & updated edition includes new research & examples of recent events to help illustrate the effects of loss. 'Gift of Tears' is intended for counsellors, therapists, mental health professionals & others who find that they have to cope with the grief of clients & patients.

Almost twenty years ago, the first edition of this book presented the theory, research, and findings of the original widow-to-widow project - a mutual help program started by the author in the 1960's. This approach, pioneered by the author in the mid-sixties, emphasizes the social and psychological transitions that accompany widowhood, facilitating the process of change from wife to widow to woman. Over the past three decades since the initial study's completion in 1973, a growing number of mutual self-help programs have used this influential work as a model. In this new edition, Silverman surveys at the success of the widow-to-widow model, while also looking to the future. New chapters consider special issues faced by the older widowed and widows with young children, and the whole book has been revised and updated to reflect the last twenty years of progress in the field. A how-to section concludes the book with useful additional resources and suggestions for how to form community support groups and committees. The first edition has been used in a variety of courses on bereavement, death & dying and continues to be widely-read and referenced by professionals in the field. Widow to Widow is a unique contribution to the literature, and this new edition comes at a time when mutual help and community support groups are regaining popularity.

Much has been written in the last twenty years to advance our understanding of the bereavement process. However, few books have focused specifically on therapeutic intervention with the bereaved. This book fills that gap. It offers guidance to mental health professionals working with the bereaved in a variety of settings, from hospices and hospitals to elementary and secondary schools to private practice. The authors present individual and group approaches to assessment and intervention and include numerous case examples drawn from their own extensive work with the bereaved. While many therapy books assume that clients will be from white, middle-class backgrounds, this book includes a chapter on the impact of cultural factors. In addition, because the needs of younger grievers are often overlooked, the book includes two chapters on therapy with children and adolescents. The book closes with a chapter inviting readers to engage in self-examination to promote self-awareness and growth, for the benefit of both,patient and therapist. The therapeutic strategies are grounded in empirical studies and clinical experience. The authors draw from psychodynamic, existential, cognitive/behavioral, and family systems perspectives, bringing together the work of a diverse spectrum of theoreticians and clinicians including Freud, Bowlby, Yalom, Kubler-Ross, and many others, to fully address the needs of the bereaved.

This book tackles head on the often tabooed subject of death. It distils sophisticated clinical work into simple language, and describes simple techniques for talking to children about dying. The author makes sophisticated material accessible to a much wider range of practitioners than trained therapists.

This book is a brief but comprehensive survey of research, writings, and professional practices concerned with death and dying. It is interdisciplinary and eclectic--medical, psychological, religious, philosophical, artistic, demographics, bereavement, and widowhood are all considered--but with an emphasis on psychological aspects. A variety of viewpoints and research findings on topics subsumed under "thanatology" receive thorough consideration. Questions, activities, and projects at the end of each chapter enhance reflection and personalize the material. This fourth edition features material on: * moral issues and court cases concerned with abortion and euthanasia; * the widespread problem of AIDS and other deadly diseases; * the tragedies occasioned by epidemics, starvation, and war; and * the resumption of capital punishment in many states. The book's enhanced multicultural tone reflects the increased economic, social, and physical interdependency among the nations of the world. Topics receiving increased attention in the fourth edition are: terror management; attitudes and practices concerning death; cross-cultural concepts of afterlife; gallows humor, out-of-body experiences; spiritualism; mass suicide; pet and romantic death; euthanasia; right to die; postbereavement depression; firearm deaths in children; children's understanding of death; child, adolescent, adult, and physician-assisted suicide; religious customs and death; confronting death; legal issues in death, dying and bereavement; death education; death music; creativity and death; longevity; broken heart phenomenon; beliefs in life after death; new definitions of death; children's acceptance of a parent's death; terminal illness; and the politics of death and dying.

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, and shows us that these attemps, in their turn, are implicated in a potent phenomenology of mourning. 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.

This is a superb book. It is based on extensive interviews, careful and complete mastery of existing literature, and the research of others. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of mourning, childhood and adolescent psychology, and of specific diseases, particularly cystic fibrosis.