Grief Biography

From Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg's anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie's driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.

In the early 1990s, Heather McCalden lost both her parents to AIDS. She was seven when her father died, ten when she lost her mother. Raised by her grandmother, Nivia, she grew up in Los Angeles, also known as ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, she begins researching online the history of HIV as a way to deal with her loss, which leads her to the unexpected realization that the AIDS crisis and the internet developed on parallel timelines.

Andrzej (Andrew) Stanisław Kawczak was born in Poland in the mid-1920s. After the war, Andrzej studied and practiced law. However, he preferred to pursue an academic career in philosophy and obtained a doctorate from the University of Warsaw in 1960, specializing in logic. In 1960 he obtained a Ford Foundation scholarship to study at Columbia University in New York City. After twenty years of living under Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, he and his wife opted to stay in the West. In 1961 he obtained a position as a professor of philosophy at Loyola College in Montreal. It was a position ...

My Disappearing Mother: A Memoir of Magic and Loss is far more than a memoir on the devastation that comes with dementia, a cognitive impairment that affects fifty-five million people worldwide. Finnamore beautifully chronicles her mother's rich and varied life journey, from her birth in Puerto Rico during the height of the Depression to ferrying to the United States, in hopes of a better life. On U.S. soil, her mother, Bunny, started working as a performer for enlisted men, then became a secretary, and eventually a professional clairvoyant.

After losing her long-term partner, Mary Deal shares the turmoil and oftentimes bewildering depths of her grief. This memoir exposes the spectrum of emotions which those suffering loss experience. The author holds back nothing of her odyssey of despair. Her experiences and much she has learned to help herself provide other survivors a chance to see that they are not alone. Though everyone’s grief is different, all grief is surprisingly similar in its basis. Hope is found in familiarity with another’s grief and no one should endure the bereavement process alone.

As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn't seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. He spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer's greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with his memories of a difficult, complicated childhood.

As a troubled teenager, Tamara Laroux just wants the pain to go away. Crying out to God for forgiveness, she makes the heart-wrenching decision to end her life. As she plummets from her body to a place of vast darkness, torment, and agony, Tamara instantly realizes the finality of her rash decision and begs God to save her.

A 29-year-old son and only child passes. He nudges his mother to open up to spirit so she can build a new relationship with him. Letters to David unlocks a door to spirit and offers hope for parents who have suffered tragic grief. There is an immediacy and accessibility to Claudia and David's relationship that provides laughter, tears, and hope to those grieving what they see as the "end" of a relationship. Enclosed, you will find valuable tools for healing and growth. We don't die, and our loved ones remain with us forever.

Diagnosed with cancer at age twenty-six threw all the life plans Emily had made out the window. In between attempting to fight Hodgkin's lymphoma and working, full-time Emily discovered she was in a deep state of grief. She realized in the middle of it all she had lost herself and would need to not only fight the cancer, but her mind in order to survive.

Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer’s relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen’s novels, the scope of Austen Years widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father’s last letter.

For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, while Russell is still alive, Sloane's apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place. When Russell dies exactly one month later, his suicide propels her on a wild quest to right the unrightable.

The two women named Tamar, whose lives are detailed in the Bible (Genesis 38 and 2 Samuel 13), form the backdrop of heart-tugging stories by these powerful women. In The Tamar Stories Sisterhood, nineteen women tell compelling stories of grief, mental illness, divorce, domestic violence, and so much more. Like Tamar I and Tamar II in the Bible, the sister authors share intimate stories of profound loss and pain from their own lives. Each woman has overcome so much because of the power of God through Christ Jesus, bringing redemption, healing, forgiveness, empowerment, hope, peace, and joy. ...

Laura Trujillo had been close to her mother for most of her adult life, raising her four children within a few miles of their beloved grandmother’s Phoenix home. But just three months after moving her young family to Cincinnati for a new job, Laura receives shocking news: Her mother had taken her own life—by jumping off a ledge into the Grand Canyon, a place Laura knew her mother had always loved.

One breath. One moment. One foot in front of the other. That's how Patty Gilbride describes her method for surviving the days after losing the love of her life. In Something More Than Love, the author details the last six weeks of her life with her husband and the impending reality of life without him. Through a series of emotional journal entries, this raw and deeply personal narrative describes the heart-wrenching truths of being an advocate and caregiver for her steadfast partner of 22 years after he was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer.

Este libro nos invita a reflexionar sobre la paradoja entre el duelo que no se cierra y el volver a sonreír a medida que la herida cicatriza. Luego de que en su anterior obra nos brindara su testimonio sobre las capacidades diferentes de su hija y del duelo por su pérdida a los 26 años, Laura nos plantea ahora, el después de esa experiencia. El texto llevará al lector a transitar un camino que lo transportará desde un sentimiento de vacío hacia un proyecto de vida basado en el amor. De la desesperanza y la impotencia, a la transformación del dolor en amor.

Texas businessman Mike Fechner had it all. Money. Investments. Prestige. Until he did the unthinkable. He sold his company and poured his life's earnings into a ministry for the poor. With a strong faith in God at his core, this millionaire turned missionary envisioned a long future serving the urban Dallas poor and the people of poverty-stricken Africa.

Mesmerized, at times unnerved, by his 97-year-old father's nearly superhuman vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an investigation of the human physical condition. The result is this exhilarating book - both a personal meditation on mortality and an exploration of flesh-and-blood existence from crib to oblivion. It's an exploration that paradoxically prompts a renewed and profound appreciation of life.

In the aftermath of a heartbreaking tragedy, a scholar and writer uses Dante's Divine Comedy to shepherd him through the dark wood of grief and mourning - a rich and emotionally resonant memoir of suffering, hope, love, and the power of literature to inspire and heal the most devastating loss.

As young adults, John and Kara—father and daughter—had much in common. Avid sports lovers. Life of the party. Abiding faith in God. And a diagnosis that blindsided and benched them: aggressive, terminal cancer. John and Kara battled their diseases with cutting-edge medical treatments. Both had countless prayers lifted on their behalf. Both believed in a powerful, loving God who could heal. Yet one lived and one died. How can we accept both endings as from the hand of God? Did one person have greater favor? Deeper faith?

The story goes like this: on a freezing winter night in 1941, a new piece of chamber music was performed to a crowd of prisoners of war on a three-stringed cello, clarinet, violin and pub piano with sticky keys. It was the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. Listeners since then have been captivated by the ecstatic music and mythology of Messiaen’s masterpiece. Michael Symmons Roberts’ own lifelong fascination with the Quartet leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power.