Grief Memoirs: Cultural, Supportive, and Therapeutic Significance bridges literary studies and psychology to evaluate contemporary grief memoirs for use by bereaved and non-bereaved individuals. This volume positions the grief memoir within life writing and bereavement studies through examination of the genre’s characteristics, definitions, and functions. The book presents the views of memoirists, helping professionals, community members, and university students on writing and reading as self-expressive, self-searching, and grief-witnessing acts after the loss of a loved one. Utilizing new data from surveys assessing grief support and bibliotherapy, this text discusses the compatibility of grief memoirs with contemporary grief theories and the role of interdisciplinary methods in assisting the bereaved. Grief Memoirs: Cultural, Supportive, and Therapeutic Significance will help educators advance the understanding and interpretation of loss within psychology, literature, and medical humanities classrooms.

The Pure Lover is David Plante’s elegy to his beloved Nikos Stangos, their forty-year life together, and its tragic end. Written in vivid fragments that, like the pieces of a mosaic, come together into a glimmering whole, it shows us both the wild nature of grief and the intimate conversation that is love.

Gail Griffin had only been married for four months when her husband's body was found in the Manistee River, just a few yards from their cabin door. The terrain of memoir is full of stories of grief, though Grief's Country: A Memoir in Pieces is less concerned with the biography of a love affair than with the lived phenomenon of grief itself-what it does to the mind, heart, and body; how it functions almost as an organism. The book's intimacy is at times nearly disarming; its honesty about struggling through grief's country is unfailing. The story is told "in pieces" in that it is ten essays of varying forms, punctuated by four original poems, that examine facets of traumatic grief, memory, and survival. While a reader will perceive a forward trajectory, the book resists anything like a clear chronology, offering a picture of deep grief as something that defies the linear and explodes time. "A Strong Brown God" tells the story of two of Griffin's significant relationships-with her husband, Bob, and with the Manistee River-and includes the history of what drew them all together. "Grief's Country" follows Griffin from the morning after Bob's death through the first disoriented, fractured months of PTSD. "Heartbreak Hotel" takes Griffin on a tragicomical flight the first Christmas after Bob's death to a Jamaican resort-which includes an unscheduled stop at Graceland-where she contemplates the notions of home and haven. Grief's Country will speak directly to anyone who has lost a dearly loved one, offering not one story but ten different faces of grief to contemplate. It will also appeal to general readers of memoir, including teachers and students of nonfiction, especially as it includes a variety of formal models. Those interested in the subject area of death and dying will find it useful as a book that bypasses recovery narratives, truisms, and "stages of grief" to get as close as possible to the experience itself.

Winner of the Nautilus Silver Book Award After her mother's death, a first-generation Serbian-American woman explores what it means to grieve consciously in a society that barely acknowledges grief. Throughout, she grapples with love, loss and legacy, as well as personal and familial transformation.

"This book is a MUST READ for anyone who has lost a loved one or is seeking an honest story about what it is like to traverse the journey of grief. Jean's powerfully candid story is rich, insightful, and illuminates a truth in all our lives that is sadly unnoticed and often silenced." Juli Fraga, Psy.D., Licensed Psychologist A mother grasps her dying son's hand, struggling how to let go and aghast at what life will become after his death. The Last Tear is the harrowing true story of my only child James, a dynamic 17 year old who was diagnosed in 2008 with an extremely rare form of cancer, dying eleven months later on the eve of Mother's Day. Rather than allowing cancer to define his days James became even more focused on school, college applications and his future, inspiring not only his peers but the larger community including President Obama. My crippling sorrow that paralyzed for years is shared with candor and will touch anyone who has struggled with excruciating grief. Poignant and at times difficult, The Last Tear eventually uplifts as it transcends a tale of cancer and death to embrace the larger canvas of how to live authentically with sorrow as a new companion.

"Grief Memoirs bridges the gap between literary studies and psychology to provide an in-depth examination of contemporary grief memoirs, evaluating their literary, cultural, therapeutic, and educational functions and benefits for bereaved and non-bereaved individuals. This volume will present readers with definitions of the genre within existing literature and survey studies, and the genre's characteristics, functions, and their implications for literary studies and psychology utilizing memoirists of discussed narratives, therapists, and the bereaved. This text also includes discussions on the compatibility of grief memoirs with current grief theories; writing and reading as self-expressive, self-searching, and grief witnessing acts assessed by the authors; and the therapeutic and educational value of grief memoirs. This book will be ideal in helping professionals and educators advance the understanding and interpretation of loss within literary, psychological, and medical humanities classrooms"--

This book offers both an introduction to the methods and language of moral psychology as a philosophical field, and to sadness as an emotion.