Love And Loss

We have all felt fear, whether it’s our racing heart as we make a speech or the profound awareness of our own mortality as we await medical results. Of course, the flip-side of fear is courage: as Nelson Mandela famously said, ‘I learned that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it.’ The 25 true stories showcased here capture the full range of the fear and courage experience. At times humorous, often poignant, they shine a light on just what it means to be human.

Loving and grieving are two sides of the same coin: we cannot have one without risking the other. Only by understanding the nature and pattern of loving can we begin to understand the problems of grieving. Conversely, the loss of a loved person can teach us much about the nature of love. Love and Loss, the result of a lifetime's work, has important implications for the study of attachment and bereavement. In this volume, Colin Murray Parkes reports his innovative research that enables us to bring together knowledge of childhood attachments and problems of bereavement, resulting in a new way of thinking about love, bereavement and other losses. Areas covered include: patterns of attachment and grief loss of a parent, child or spouse in adult life social isolation and support. The book concludes by looking at disorders of attachment and considering bereavement in terms of its implications on love, loss, and change in a wider context. Illuminating the structure and focus of thinking about love and loss, this book sheds light on a wide range of psychological issues. It will be essential reading for professionals working with bereavement, as well as graduate students of psychology, psychiatry, and sociology.

Part memoir, part lies, this imaginative tale is a story about loving a woman made of paper, about the wounds made by first love and sharp objects.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful memoir of a love that leads two people to find a courageous way to part—and a woman’s struggle to go forward in the face of loss—that “enriches the reader’s life with urgency and gratitude” (The Washington Post) “A pleasure to read . . . Rarely has a memoir about death been so full of life. . . . Bloom has a talent for mixing the prosaic and profound, the slapstick and the serious.”—USA Today ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR Amy Bloom began to notice changes in her husband, Brian: He retired early from a new job he loved; he withdrew from close friendships; he talked mostly about the past. Suddenly, it seemed there was a glass wall between them, and their long walks and talks stopped. Their world was altered forever when an MRI confirmed what they could no longer ignore: Brian had Alzheimer’s disease. Forced to confront the truth of the diagnosis and its impact on the future he had envisioned, Brian was determined to die on his feet, not live on his knees. Supporting each other in their last journey together, Brian and Amy made the unimaginably difficult and painful decision to go to Dignitas, an organization based in Switzerland that empowers a person to end their own life with dignity and peace. In this heartbreaking and surprising memoir, Bloom sheds light on a part of life we so often shy away from discussing—its ending. Written in Bloom’s captivating, insightful voice and with her trademark wit and candor, In Love is an unforgettable portrait of a beautiful marriage, and a boundary-defying love.

Natascha McElhone, star of The Truman Show and Californication, was filming in LA, seven months pregnant with her third child with her other two young children playing in the gym across the road when she got a call from a friend that would change her life forever. Her husband, Martin, the love of her life and father to her delightful children and an apparently healthy man in his early 40s had died suddenly of a heart attack. In the weeks and months that followed the devastating shock Natascha continued to write her diary and letters to Martin (something she had always done as, due to her work, she was used to being far from home). They were letters of love, letters about their gorgeous boys, letters about the birth of the new baby and diary entries detailing the mundane and heartbreaking details of her new life: house repairs and terrifying family finances; trying to keep the children's lives as normal as possible in the face of such abnormal new circumstances. The result is a powerful, honest and moving story of a magical love affair and all-consuming grief, of being a mother alone and trying to live for the future.

“The happiest, saddest, sweetest book about rock ‘n’ roll that I’ve ever experienced.”—Chuck Klosterman Mix tapes: We all have our favorites. Stick one into a deck, press play, and you’re instantly transported to another time in your life. For Rob Sheffield, that time was one of miraculous love and unbearable grief. A time that spanned seven years, it started when he met the girl of his dreams, and ended when he watched her die in his arms. Using the listings of fifteen of his favorite mix tapes, Rob shows that the power of music to build a bridge between people is stronger than death. You’ll read these words, perhaps surprisingly, with joy in your heart and a song in your head—the one that comes to mind when you think of the love of your life. Praise for Love is a Mixtape “A memoir that manages, no small feat, to be funny and beautifully forlorn at the same time.”—The New York Times Book Review “Humorous, heartbreaking, and heroic.”—Entertainment Weekly “The finest lines ever written about rock ‘n’ roll . . . Like that song on the radio, every word of Rob’s book is true. Love is a mix tape.”—Rolling Stone “Many of us use pop culture as a mirror of our emotional lives, but Sheffield happily walks right through the looking glass.”—Los Angeles Times “Sheffield writes with such aching remembering, you feel like you are invading his privacy . . . and it’s the truth of those details that make this memoir so touching.”—Newsweek

Have you ever wondered what a therapist really thinks? Have you ever wondered if a therapist truly cares about her patients? Have you tried to imagine the unimaginable, the loss of the person most dear to you? Is it true that `tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all? ` Love and loss are a ubiquitous part of life, bringing the greatest joys and the greatest heartaches. In one way or another all relationships end. People leave, move on, die. Loss is an ever-present part of life. In Love and Loss, Linda B. Sherby illustrates that in order to grow and thrive, we must learn to mourn, to move beyond the person we have lost while taking that person with us in our minds. Love, unlike loss, is not inevitable but, she argues, no satisfying life can be lived without deeply meaningful relationships. The focus of Love and Loss is how patients' and therapists' independent experiences of love and loss, as well as the love and loss that they experience in the treatment room, intermingle and interact. There are always two people in the consulting room, both of whom are involved in their own respective lives, as well as the mutually responsive relationship that exists between them. Love and loss in the life of one of the parties affects the other, whether that affect takes place on a conscious or unconscious level. Love and Loss is unique in two respects.The first is its focus on the analyst's current life situation and how that necessarily affects both the patient and the treatment. The second is Sherby's willingness to share the personal memoir of her own loss which she has interwoven with extensive clinical material to clearly illustrate the effect the analyst's current life circumstance has on the treatment. Writing as both a psychoanalyst and a widow, Linda B. Sherby makes it possible for the reader to gain an inside view of the emotional experience of being an analyst, making this book of interest to a wide audience. Professionals from psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and bereavement specialists through students in all the mental health fields to the public in general, will resonate and learn from this heartfelt and straightforward book.

When Lara Margaret Marjerrison's eldest sister died by suicide her world was rocked off its axis. In an effort to reconcile the irreconcilable, she turned to her creative outlets, primarily painting and poetry. In surrendering fully to her creative process, she found a way to turn her broken heart into art. What remains is a beautiful guidebook to grief and finding life and magic again in the forever-changed landscape.