After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss through the Years - Softcover

Finkbeiner, Ann K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080185914X ISBN 13: 9780801859144

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Named one of the 25 top-rated autobiographies in mental health by Independent Practitioner Magazine

After a child dies, the parent's world changes entirely. Years later, this new world has changed the parents. The exact nature of this change―the long-term effects of the death―illuminates the nature of the bond between parents and children.

Ann Finkbeiner lost her son in a train accident when he was 18. Several years later, she noticed she was feeling better and wondered whether this feeling was what was meant by "recovery." As a science writer, she read the psychological, sociological, and psychiatric research into parental bereavement. And as a bereaved parent, she asked hard questions of thirty parents whose child had died at least five years before, of all causes and at all ages.

In this book, Finkbeiner combines the research and the parents' answers into a description of the parents' new lives. The parents talk about their changed marriages and their changed relationships with their other children, with their friends and relatives. They talk about their attempts to make sense of the death and about their drastically changed priorities. And most important, they talk about how they still love their children, how the child seems to see through their eyes and live through their actions. They move on through their grief, they get on with their lives, but they never let go of their children. Their wisdom is here presented to any in need of it.

About this title

Review:

A book that explores our own resilience in the midst of one of the most distressful forms of human suffering, the death of a child. Because children aren't supposed to die, the loss is not only painful but profoundly disorienting. Finkbeiner, whose only child died in 1987, refers to her own experience and the experience of others to show that while bereaved parents can never really let go, they can and do recover, often developing a new appreciation for their own lives. Says one parent: "You just don't treat life as lightly, and if you don't treat things lightly, they do become richer."

About the Author:

Ann K. Finkbeiner is an award-winning science journalist and regular contributor to Science, The Sciences, and USA Today and coauthor of The Guide to Living with HIV Infection, also available from Johns Hopkins.

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 080185914X
• ISBN 13: 9780801859144
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288