Competitive Grieving

Download or read book Competitive Grieving written by Nora Zelevansky and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Entertainment Weekly Pick of Summer’s Best New Books Wren’s closest friend, her anchor since childhood, is dead. Stewart Beasley. Gone. She can’t quite believe it and she definitely can’t bring herself to google what causes an aneurysm. Instead of weeping or facing reality, Wren has been dreaming up the perfect funeral plans, memorial buffets, and processional songs for everyone from the corner bodega owner to her parents (none of whom show signs of imminent demise). Stewart was a rising TV star, who—for reasons Wren struggles to understand—often surrounded himself with sycophants, amusing in his life, but intolerable in his death. When his icy mother assigns Wren the task of disseminating his possessions alongside George (Stewart’s maddening, but oddly charming lawyer), she finds herself at the epicenter of a world in which she wants no part, where everyone is competing to own a piece of Stewart’s memory (sometimes literally). Remembering the boy Stewart was and investigating the man he became, Wren finds herself wondering, did she even know this person who she once considered an extension of herself? Can you ever actually know anyone? How well does she really know herself? Through laughter and tears, Nora Zelevansky’s Competitive Grieving shines a light on the universal struggle to grieve amidst the noise, to love with a broken heart, and to truly know someone who is gone forever.

Download or read book Grief and the Healing Arts written by Sandra L. Bertman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly three decades, Sandra Bertman has been exploring the power of the arts and belief--symbols, metaphors, stories--to alleviate psychological and spiritual pain not only of patients, grieving family members, and affected communities but also of the nurses, clergy and physicians who minister to them. Her training sessions and clinical interventions are based on the premise that bringing out the creative potential inherent in each of us is just as relevant-- perhaps more so--as psychiatric theory and treatment models since grief and loss are an integral part of life. Thus, this work was compiled to illuminate the many facets that link grief, counseling, and creativity. The multiple strategies suggested in these essays will help practitioners enlarge their repertoire of hands-on skills and foster introspection and empathy in readers.

Download or read book The World Without You written by Joshua Henkin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's July 4, 2005, and the Frankel family is descending upon their beloved summer home in the Berkshires. They have gathered to memorialize Leo, the youngest of the four siblings and an intrepid journalist killed on that day in 2004, while on assignment in Iraq. But Leo’s parents are adrift in a grief that’s tearing apart their forty-year marriage, his sisters are struggling with their own difficulties, and his widow has arrived from California bearing a secret. Here award-winning writer Joshua Henkin unfolds this family story, as, over the course of three days, the Frankels contend with sibling rivalries and marital feuds, with volatile women and silent men — and, ultimately, with the true meaning of family.

Download or read book When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis written by Helen Bailey and published by Bonnier Publishing Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writer Helen Bailey's world fell apart in early 2011 when she and her workaholic husband took off on a well-earned break to Barbados and days after arriving Helen watched helplessly from the beach as he was dragged out to sea in a rip-current and drowned. Alone and more than three thousand miles from home, she was a wife at breakfast and a widow by lunchtime. With her life as she knew it shattered, Helen began to chronicle living after such devastating and shocking loss in a blog - Planet Grief - and gained a worldwide following from many who had experienced huge loss, whether through death or divorce. And now her blog has become a book. Anecdotal, witty, heartbreaking and utterly grounded, When Bad Things Happen to Good Bikinis covers all the obvious struggles in the aftermath of a loss, as well as many not-so-obvious but just as poignant everyday obstacles. Helen has emerged from her nightmare, and her story will bring wry humour, comfort and hope to a huge number of people, whatever their circumstances.

Download or read book The Love Songs of a Lonely Man written by Richard Paul Haight and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2002-12 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Love Songs of a Lonely Man is a selection of poems wtitten over a twenty year span, but 80 ercent or more are recent. Some of the "love songs" are conventional, at least in the sence of wooing and heart palpitations, the blues, and evanescence. That the conventional themes are given unconventional treatment is suggested by the titles of some of the poems: "The Love Song of an Inadequate Man," "Advice to a Sophomore Co-ed Who's suffering From Acute Horniness," "Forgive Me, Wife." However, most of the poems are love songs in the broader sense of passionate engagement with the world and with life at this time, under these circumstances. The author has had varied experiences as a laborer, medical lab tech, radio-TV anouncer and sportscaster, university professor, principal in large-scale grant projects, officer in a funding agency, mountain route newspaper carrier, and many other ups and downs. The perspectives in his poems, accordingly, are many, ranging from those of a bag lady to those of the "Sibyl on the Rhine," from those of a student who has shot fellow students to those of a grumpy old man who can't sleep and is discussing sex in his imagination with "famous dead men" - Picasso, Goethe, Hesse. The poems themselves are in several styles and forms, but all are "accessible." Some are sololoquies in voices as varied as those of Hildegard von Bingen, oedipus, a Death Mother, a Latino bead artsist, and a Union (Civil War) soldier. the poems demonstrate a flair for psychological insight, storytelling, and powerful imagery. speaking in his own voice the author is always passionate, is often cranky, sometimes has a twinkle in his eye. One motif is american culture in such poems as "The Bellringers of Palm Springs," "Of Meadows and Parking Lots," "The 600 Block of Elm Between Pleasant and Arcadia," and several others. A second major motif is religion; the author's perspective is revealed in "Sin Is" and is elaborated in "Osiris and Medea," "Oedipus Instructs the Tribes of Isreal," "Hildegard Confesses to Febrile and Apasionata," and others. Still a third major motif is simplistic morality and moral evil, found in "How Am I Different," "Errors of Love," "Are Women the Cause of Men?" "Dearest Lucinda," and others. And a fourth motif is art and artists, in such poems as "You Can't See a Tabula Rasa Until It Disappears," "How a Poet May Self-Aggrandize," and "The poet of Beads." A feature of the collection is a group of poems culled from a once large group based on dreams women share with the author. Over time those inlcuded in Love Songs have become "more poem that dream." the poems are unambiguously feminine in detals, imagry, and themes. "Encounter With the Turban and His Beast" is unambiguously humorous and has an odd resonance with the events of 9/11. "I Hold Pain in My Arms" is based on a dream following an abortion. And "Dona Nobis Pacem" is a vivid women-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown dream-poem. Though it is not an emphasis of this collection of poems, some autobiographical details leach out. The unpleasant details are fiction and the pleasant details are lies.

Download or read book The Great Believers written by Rebecca Makkai and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER ALA CARNEGIE MEDAL WINNER THE STONEWALL BOOK AWARD WINNER Soon to Be a Major Television Event, optioned by Amy Poehler • One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “A page turner . . . An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis.” —The New York Times Book Review A dazzling novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster. Named a Best Book of 2018 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, The Seattle Times, Bustle, Newsday, AM New York, BookPage, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Lit Hub, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, New York Public Library and Chicago Public Library

Download or read book A Peace Divided written by Tanya Huff and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second book in the action-packed Peacekeeper series, a continuation of Huff's military sci-fi Confederation series following former Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr.