When readers tell me that my new book, Doing Grief in Real Life, changed their life, I believe them. The book was written during a decade-long period of loss and grief unlike any my family had known. The pain was so thick some days, we wondered if joy or lightheartedness would ever come again. My daughter, Morgan, was unconvinced that planet earth was where she cared to be. So, on days that I wanted to call it quits, I kept writing for her. She tells me now that the book saved her life.
During that dark period, I knew we weren’t the only family suffering. In my healing work as a family educator and spiritual care provider, grievers told me repeatedly that they couldn’t seem to get their hands on any useful, practical tools to help them ease, tolerate, or heal grief of the past, present, or future. I decided, for all our sakes, it was high time to discover some.
That’s how Doing Grief in Real Life and my Model of Adaptive Grieving Dynamics came to be. I gathered and integrated the best and brightest contributions I could find from grief researchers and theorists far and wide. From there, I created a model of the grieving process that offers a more holistic way to think about and “do” grief. Then, I got busy writing a practical book full of information, stories, contemplations, ideas and inspirations to help grievers heal ourselves one day at a time.
If you’re a brainiac who wants to delve into the research and theoretical contributions of other grief experts whose work inspired my new way of “doing grief,” read my journal article, A New Mourning: Synthesizing an Interactive Model of Adaptive Grieving Dynamics, published in Illness, Crisis & Loss, Vol. 22(3), 2014. Or, if you want to get busy with practical ways to heal yourself, read Doing Grief in Real Life to become your own best grief expert. You’ll discover how life-changing it can be.
Listen to audio meditations from Doing Grief in Real Life here.
Buy your softcover or PDF e-book version of Doing Grief in Real Life at DoingGrief.com.