For a parent, losing a child is the most devastating event that can occur. Most books on the subject focus on grieving and recovery, but as most parents agree, there is no recovery from such a loss. This book examines the continued love parents feel for their child and the many poignant and ingenious ways they devise to preserve the bond. Through detailed profiles of parents, Ann Finkbeiner shows how new activities and changed relationships with their spouse, friends, and other children can all help parents preserve a bond with the lost child.
Based on extensive interviews and grief research, Finkbeiner explains how parents have changed five to twenty-five years after the deaths of their children. The first half of the book discusses the short- and long-term effects of the child’s death on the parent’s relationships with the outside world, that is, with their spouses, other children, friends, and relatives.
The second half of the book details the effect on the parents’ internal world: their continuing sense of guilt; their need to place the death in some larger context and their inability sometimes to consistently do so; their new set of priorities; the nature of their bond with the lost child and the subtle and creative ways they have of continuing that bond. Finkbeiner’s central point is not so much how parents grieve for their children, but how they love them.
Refusing to fall back on pop jargon about “recovery” or to offer easy solutions or standardized timelines, Finkbeiner’s is a genuine and moving search to come to terms with loss. Her complex profiles of parents resonate with the honesty and authenticity of uncomfortable emotions expressed and, most importantly, shared with others experiencing a similar loss. Finally, each profile exemplifies the many heroic ways parents learn to live with their pain, and by so doing, honor the lives their children should have lived.
Therese Goodrich Former Executive Director of The Compassionate Friends, member of Bereaved Parents of USA This book is just excellent. This...story had to be written by a bereaved parent for other bereaved parents worldwide...Ann Finkbeiner has found a way to investigate her own grief and perhaps find some resolution to this difficult task of grieving. Thousands of bereaved parents and professionals will benefit from her work.
Dr. Robert S. Weiss author of Learning From Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies and Staying the Course: The Emotional Social Lives of Men Who Do Well at Work; Research Professor at University of Massachusetts-Boston Ann Finkbeiner provides the very best description we have of what it is like to suffer the death of one's child...The book is beautifully written and deeply felt...It can be of value for bereaved parents who can be helped by it to understand their pain and sorrow and to understand the different ways fathers and mothers grieve...it should be required reading for professionals who would help bereaved parents and who would understand how deeply invested are parents in their children.
Camille Wortman, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, State University of New York at Stony Brook By focusing on the long-term impact of losing a child, Ann Finkbeiner has raised issues and concerns that are rarely addressed. Her book is thought-provoking, deeply moving, and filled with insight and hope. I recommend it enthusiastically to parents and professionals.
