Transcending Loss

“Compassionate, poignant, and practical. . . . Transcending Loss will be a great blessing on your lifetime journey of recovery.”—Harold Bloomfield, MD, psychiatrist and author of How to Survive the Loss of Love and How to Heal Depression Death doesn’t end a relationship, it simply forges a new type of relationship—one based not on physical presence but on memory, spirit, and love. There are many wonderful books available that address acute grief and how to cope with it. But they often focus on crisis management and imply that there is an "end" to mourning, and fail to acknowledge grief’s ongoing impact and how it changes through the years. “This is a book about death and grief, yes, but more important, it is a book about love and hope. I have learned from my experience and interviews with courageous people about pain, struggle, resiliency, and meaning. Their stories show over time, you can learn to transcend even in spite of the pain.”—from the introduction by Ashley Davis Bush, LCSW

Ashley Davis Bush published Transcending Loss (Berkley) in 1997. Since then she has grown her Transcending Loss brand by becoming a sought-after speaker for professional conferences and by reaching out directly to the bereaved through online communities where she has established tens of thousands of followers. In her new book Hope & Healing for Transcending Loss, Davis Bush offers daily readings--bite-sized lifelines and glimpses of hope for those coping with the death of a loved one. It comprises a brief introduction, a brief conclusion, and 365 daily meditations, plus a few additional pieces for particularly difficult occasions like death date, birth date, anniversary, holidays, and more. Scattered throughout are calming photographs for further contemplation or stillness. Davis Bush's writings focus on normalizing and validating the incredibly painful process of grieving. She offers a compassionate perspective on staying connected to the deceased, focusing on love, living with gratitude, channeling pain to compassion, transcending loss, making meaning, and living into a new self.

This is a book about death & grief, but more important, it is a book about love & hope. Prend is a licensed psychotherapist in Manhattan & a leader of bereavement support groups. She has learned from her experience & interviews with courageous people about pain, struggle, resiliency, & meaning. Their stories show that over time, you can learn to transcend even in spite of the pain. We all get broken by life sooner or later because loss is the price we pay for living & loving. But Prend explains how experience shows that we can become stronger at the broken places & find the opportunity in crisis. This book will guide you on your journey through times of healing & transcending.

From the office of a seasoned grief counselor, this book is an essential guide to grief. It shines a light into the darkness and illuminates the lifelong journey of integrating loss into life. It is a spiritual companion to higher healing that offers a shift, a redirection from pain and suffering to the sacred qualities of compassion, love, connection, gratitude, and transformation. This book takes Ashley Davis Bush’s seminal Transcending Loss grief model and elevates it to a new level by providing a light-filled lens with which to process and metabolize loss. Bush describes a dimension of higher healing which provides an essential balm to the shattered heart. She will lead you to a broad experience of support, to a source of light within and beyond the self that is essential to a healthy grieving process. A guide on your journey from shock to transcendence, this book shows you how Love, Connection, Compassion, Faith, and Transcendenceorient and soothe a broken spirit. At the end of each chapter, you will be introduced to five specific “Light-Shift Practices” that integrate the chapter’s concepts and facilitate the healing process. Grieving is a universal yet disorienting and devastating experience. But like the ancient Japanese art form of kintsugi which repairs broken pottery with golden lacquer, grief is healed by filling the cracks in your life with light, creating beauty from brokenness. Embracing a higher perspective makes the journey more bearable, the experience more meaningful, and the future more expansive.

List of Tables. List of Figures. Series Editor's Foreword. Preface. Prologue. Acknowledgements. What It Means to Be a Parent After a Child Had Died. The "Mothers Now Childless" Study: Research Design and Findings. When a Child Dies, Does Grieving Ever End? One Death - A Thousand Strands of Pain: Finding the Meaning of Suffering. Bereaved Parents' Search for Understanding: The Paradox of Healing. Confronting a Spiritual Crisis: Where is God When Bad Things Happen? Confronting an Existential Crisis: Can Life Have Purpose Again? Deciding to Survive: Reaching Bottom - Climbing Up. Remembering With Love: Bereaved Parents as Biographer. Reaching Out to Help Others: Wounded Healers. Reinventing the Self: Parents Ask, "Who Are We Now?". The Legacy of Loss. References. Resources. Appendices. Index.

Explaining the important difference between grief and mourning, this book explores every mourner's need to acknowledge death and embrace the pain of loss. Also explored are the many factors that make each person's grief unique and the many normal thoughts and feelings mourners might have. Questions of spirituality and religion are addressed as well. The rights of mourners to be compassionate with themselves, to lean on others for help, and to trust in their ability to heal are upheld. Journaling sections encourage mourners to articulate their unique thoughts and feelings.

Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity is a landmark contribution that provides fresh insights into the experience and process of mourning. It includes fourteen original essays by pre-eminent psychoanalysts, historians, classicists, theologians, architects, art-historians and artists, that take on the subject of normal, rather than pathological mourning. In particular, it considers the diversity of the mourning process; the bereavement of ordinary vs. extraordinary loss; the contribution of mourning to personal and creative growth; and individual, social, and cultural means of transcending grief. The book is divided into three parts, each including two to four essays followed by one or two critical discussions. Co-editor Adele Tutter’s Prologue outlines the salient themes and tensions that emerge from the volume. Part I juxtaposes the consideration of grief in antiquity with an examination of the contemporary use of memorials to facilitate communal remembrance. Part II offers intimate first-person accounts of mourning from four renowned psychoanalysts that challenge long-held psychoanalytic formulations of mourning. Part III contains deeply personal essays that explore the use of sculpture, photography, and music to withstand, mourn, and transcend loss on individual, cultural and political levels. Drawing on the humanistic wisdom that underlies psychoanalytic thought, co-editor Léon Wurmser’s Epilogue closes the volume. Grief and its Transcendence will be a must for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and scholars within other disciplines who are interested in the topics of grief, bereavement and creativity.

For most of us, mourning is something to be endured. We are often merely passive spectators of our own pain, and we see our grief period as a grim mountain that we must climb over. But Maurice Lamm tells us it can be much more. Bereavement, he says, can often be an enriching experience, even as it is a sorrowful and often tragic one. Our faith in a higher power can move us to not only live through the present but also to stride into the future with renewed energy and a revitalized outlook on life. In this, his sequel to the best-selling The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning (over 350,000 copies sold), Rabbi Lamm helps mourners not just get through their grief, but also grow through it. He gently steers mourners on the path that allows their sorrow to teach them important lessons about life. And he shows consolers how to listen and speak with their hearts so that they can provide real comfort to others. His marvelous insights on the days of shiva, the year of kaddish, and the lovingkindness of others reveal the richness and true purpose of Jewish mourning rituals and customs. They prepare us to receive consolation and ready us for the journey that will take us beyond grief. His "Words for a Loss When at a Loss for Words" is a treasury of readings for finding and giving comfort by transforming the spiritual ideas of an ancient faith into contemporary language. Here there are stories and fables that illuminate our complicated lives, meditations from the depths of human experience, and a gallery of unforgettable images that speak to our souls during times of loss. Rabbi Lamm's words will help all who walk the path of grief to find their way to consolation--and then beyond, to an appreciation of the blessings and opportunities that present themselves to us when we confront loss. And they can even take us further, to discover the celebrated Jewish art--of wringing blessing out of tragedy.