The Grief Recovery Handbook : The Action Program for Moving Beyond Death, Divorce, and Other Losses - Exceptionally well-written book which helped me through a most difficult time in my life. This book is an incredible gift to someone who is grieving. The authors share their most intimate griefs, thoughts, and outcomes with the reader. The book is easy to read. Could not put it down until I had finished it. I have shared this book with many of my friends and relatives who were experiencing loss and grief in their lives. They, too, have benefited by the wealth of information provided in this book about loss in our lives. The book leaves a reader with a sense of understanding about what and how we grieve.
When Children Grieve : For Adults to Help Children Deal With Death, Divorce, Pet Loss, Moving, and Other Losses - To watch a child grieve and not know what to do is one of the most difficult experiences for parents, teachers, and caregivers. And yet, there are guidelines for helping children develop a lifelong, healthy response to loss. In When children Grieve, John W James and Russell Friedman of the Grief Recovery Institute, along with psychotherapist Dr. Leslie Landon Matthews, have created a cutting-edge volume that will help free children from the false idea that they "shouldn't feel bad" and will empower them with positive, effective methods of dealing with loss. There are many life experiences that can produce feelings of grief in a child, everything from the death of a relative or a divorce, to more everyday experiences such as moving to a new neighborhood or losing a prized possession. Whatever the reason or the degree of severity if a child you love is grieving, the guidelines examined in this thoughtful book can make a difference. For example:Listen with your heart, not your head. Allow all emotions to be expressed, without judgment, criticism, or analysis. Recognize that grief is emotional, not intellectual. Avoid the trap of asking your child what is wrong, for he or she will automatically say "Nothing." Adults--Go first. Telling the truth about your own grief will make your child feel safe in opening up about his or her own feelings.Remember that each of your children is unique and each has a unique relationship to the loss event. Be patient. Don't force your child to talk. Never say "Don't feel sad" or "Don't feel scared. "Sadness and fear, the two most common feelings attached to loss of any kind, are essential to being human.
A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis - C.S. Lewis joined the human race when his wife, Joy Gresham, died of cancer. Lewis, the Oxford don whose Christian apologetics make it seem like he's got an answer for everything, experienced crushing doubt for the first time after his wife's tragic death. A Grief Observed contains his epigrammatic reflections on that period: "Your bid--for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high," Lewis writes. "Nothing will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."