A Broken Heart Still Beats: After Your Child Dies

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Summary: Rich, moving anthology of fine literature on grief
Review: This is not, it's refreshing to say, a self-help book. (Neither is it exclusively for those who've lost a child.) The authors have put together something much deeper and more complex. Drawing on literature throughout the ages and throughout the world--from Sophocles to Mark Twain to Rita Dove to Abraham Verghese--McCracken and Semel take the reader on a journey that is at once inspiring and heartbreaking. They, and the writers whose work they present, are unfailingly honest and vivid in their portrayal of grief. They shun the simplistic "just follow these steps and everything will be okay in the end" approach-- nobody here will try to convince you that you have to "get over" it. Some things in life, these writers point out, you don't get over; you just learn to live with them. And it's no failure or weakness or unwillingness to "do the steps." Read this book--whether you've suffered the catastrophic loss of a child or another kind of loss--to see what great writers have to say about learning to live again. And the next time you pick up a poem by Robert Frost, remember that he lost not one, but four, of his children.