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Shadow child: an apprenticeship in love and loss
By Beth Powning. 2005
Like many young women, Beth Powning faced decisions of whether and when to start a family. At age twenty-four she…
became pregnant, but eleven days past her due date, she delivered a perfect, stillborn son. In this exploration of motherhood and loss, we're taken on a powerful journey into the heart of grief and renewal. National Bestseller. 2005.Chicken soup for the grieving soul: stories about life, death, and overcoming the loss of a loved one (Chicken Soup For The Soul Ser.)
By Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen. 2003
Accounts of people who have lost a loved one. Each story details the particular death and explains how the author…
dealt with grief and found the courage to go on. Sections include "Final Gifts," "Coping and Healing," "Special Moments," and "Living Again." 2003.Cease: a memoir of love, loss, and desire
By Lynette Dawn Loeppky. 2014
The memoir tells the story of a young woman who has decided to leave an eight-year relationship. As Lyn begins…
to plan her exit, her partner Cecile suddenly falls ill. In a tumultuous drop towards a complicated end, the young woman is forced to become sole caregiver to the woman she had been planning to leave. Set against the "family values" of rural Alberta, this is a story about how we love and why we stay, especially in a time of crisis. 2014.Tuesdays with Morrie: an old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
By Mitch Albom. 1997
Some twenty years after college, Mitch Albom rekindles his relationship with a former professor who is terminally ill. His weekly…
visits with his dying mentor become a colloquium on the meaning of life, and Albom gains insight into "love, work, community, family, aging, forgiveness, and, finally, death." Bestseller. 1997.Éloïse: letters to a lost child
By Loïse Lavallée, Christopher Stone. 2002
Loïse Lavallée's daughter was severely injured by a drunk driver when she was a seven-month-old; for the next twelve years…
Éloïse needed constant medical attention, numerous corrective surgeries and was totally dependent in every aspect of daily life. A day before she was to turn thirteen years old she died quietly at home, in her mother's arms. For the next two years Loïse wrote letters to her daughter that reflect the long road she traveled from complete despair to taking the first hopeful steps to rebuilding her own life. 2002.The oil of joy for mourning: 365 daily meditations to comfort the widowed
By Jan Sheble. 1997
Comfort, support, and encouragement are offered for the grieving widow or widower. Contains 365 daily meditations to help lead people…
through the mourning process to a healing that only God can provide. 1997.Intolerable: a memoir of extremes
By Kamal Al-Solaylee. 2012
As a gay man living in an intolerant Middle East, Al-Solaylee escaped first to England and eventually to Canada, where…
he became a journalist and academic. While he was enjoying the cultural and personal freedoms of life in the West, his once-liberal family slowly fell into the hard-line interpretations of Islam that were sweeping large parts of the Arab-Muslim world in the 1980s and 1990s. The differences between his life and theirs were brought into sharp relief by the 2011 revolution in Egypt and the civil war in Yemen. Bestseller. Canada Reads 2015. 2012.A promise of salt
By Lorie Miseck. 2002
On a bitterly cold Edmonton day, Lorie Miseck's sister disappeared. Struggling for words to use in the face of sudden…
and complete horror, she tries to document the event, and the lonely and painful aftermath. How do you express the truly unimaginable? 2002.Option B: facing adversity, building resilience, and finding joy
By Sheryl Sandberg, Adam M Grant. 2017
After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure…
joy again. Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build. Combines Sheryl's personal insights with Adam's research on finding strength in the face of adversity. "Option B" goes beyond Sheryl's loss to explore how a broad range of people have overcome hardships including illness, job loss, sexual assault, natural disasters, and the violence of war. Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere. and to rediscover joy. Bestseller. 2017.In the slender margin: the intimate strangeness of death and dying
By Eve Joseph. 2014
Part memoir, part meditation on death itself, this book is an exploration of death from an “insider’s” point of view.…
Using the threads of her brother’s early death and her twenty years of work at a hospice, the author utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture to discern the unknowable mystery that awaits us all. 2014.The year of magical thinking
By Joan Didion. 2005
Writer reflects on her emotional response to the unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, after a visit to…
their comatose daughter. Discusses the shock of suddenly facing a crisis, the memory of their time together as a family, and the meaning of marriage. National Book Award. Bestseller. 2005.The immortalization commission: science and the strange quest to cheat death
By John Gray. 2011
For most of human history, religion provided a clear explanation of life and death, but in the late 19th and…
early 20th centuries new ideas - from psychiatry to evolution to Communism - seemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands. Gray investigates the belief that the science-backed Communism of the new USSR could reshape the planet, and the belief among a group of Edwardian intellectuals that there was a non-religious form of life after death. c2011.What dying people want: practical wisdom for the end of life
By David Kuhl. 2002
Facing death, and the fear and anxiety that arise from it, is part of the human experience. Though much as…
been done to address the physical pain suffered by those with a terminal illness, Western medicine has been slow to understand and alleviate the psychological and spiritual distress that comes with the knowledge of death. Dr. Kuhl attempts to bridge that gap. 2002.The queen of Whale Cay
By Kate Summerscale. 1997
Joe Carstairs was renowned in the 1920s as an 'invert' who smoked cheroots and dressed as a man, as an…
heiress to the Standard Oil fortune and as the fastest female speedboat racer in the world. In 1934 she disappeared to create her own kingdom, founding and ruling a colony of 500 black Bahamians.No flowers-- just lots of joy
By Fiona Castle, J Greenough. 1996
A sequel to GIVE US THIS DAY, in which Fiona Castle remembers the final months of her life with her…
husband Roy Castle before his death from lung cancer in 1994."You'll get over it": the rage of bereavement
By Virginia Ironside. 1996
"You'll get over it" records the trauma and chaos of loss without resorting to truisms or offering answers. It recognises…
that bereavement often entails both anger and hatred. Grief may not always manifest itself in floods of tears; sometimes it shows itself simply in dry feelings of nothingness. Loss may heighten rather than deaden the sex-drive; it may offer the sufferer a new sense of status and power.We have always been here: a queer Muslim memoir /
By Samra Habib. 2019
Growing up in Pakistan, Samra Habib lacks a blueprint for the life she wants. She has a mother who gave…
up everything to be a pious, dutiful wife and an overprotective father who seems to conspire against a life of any adventure. Plus, she has to hide the fact that she's Ahmadi to avoid persecution from religious extremists. As the threats against her family increase, they seek refuge in Canada, where new financial and cultural obstacles await them. When Samra discovers that her mother has arranged her marriage, she must again hide a part of herself--the fun-loving, feminist teenager that has begun to bloom--until she simply can't any longer. So begins a journey of self-discovery that takes her to Tokyo, where she comes to terms with her sexuality, and to a queer-friendly mosque in Toronto, where she returns to her faith in the same neighbourhood where she attended her first drag show. Along the way, she learns that the facets of her identity aren't as incompatible as she was led to believe, and that her people had always been there--the world just wasn't ready for them yet. 2019.How to Die: A Book About Being Alive
By Ray Robertson. 2020
“He who would teach men to die would teach them to live,” writes Montaigne in Essais, and in How to…
Die: A Book on Being Alive, Ray Robertson takes up the challenge. Though contemporary society avoids the subject and often values the mere continuation of existence over its quality, Robertson argues that the active and intentional consideration of death is neither morbid nor frivolous, but instead essential to our ability to fully value life. How to Die is both an absorbing excursion through some of Western literature’s most compelling works on the subject of death as well as an anecdote-driven argument for cultivating a better understanding of death in the belief that, if we do, we’ll know more about what it means to live a meaningful life.Dead Mom Walking: A Memoir of Miracle Cures and Other Disasters
By Rachel Matlow. 2020
"A hilarious memoir of effervescent misadventures." --Toronto Star"How am I laughing at someone's mother's cancer? How? We think we can't…
laugh about death, about cancer, about our mothers and their suffering . . . and we can't, but we can. And there's so much relief in that. I laughed, I cried, I laughed and laughed and laughed." --Carolyn Taylor, BARONESS VON SKETCH SHOWA traumedy about life and death (and every cosmic joke in between)When her mother is diagnosed with cancer, Rachel Matlow is concerned but hopeful. It's Stage 1, so her mom will get surgery and everything will go back to normal. But growing up in Rachel's family, there was no normal. Elaine, an alternative school teacher and self-help junkie, was never a capital M "Mommy"--she spent more time meditating than packing lunches--and Rachel, who played hockey with the boys and refused to ever wear a dress, was no ordinary daughter.When Elaine decides to forgo conventional treatment and heal herself naturally, Rachel is forced to ponder whether the very things that made her mom so special--her independent spirit, her belief in being the author of her own story--are what will ultimately kill her. As the cancer progresses, so does Elaine's conviction in doing things her way. She assembles a dream team of alternative healers, gulps down herbal tinctures with every meal, and talks (with respect) to her cancer cells. Anxious and confused, Rachel is torn between indulging her pie-in-the-sky pursuits (ayahuasca and all) and pleading with the person who's taking her mother away.With irreverence and honesty--and a little help from Elaine's journals and self-published dating guide, plus hours of conversations recorded in her dying days--Matlow brings her inimitable mother to life on the page. Dead Mom Walking is the hilarious and heartfelt story of what happens when two people who've always written their own script go head to head with each other, and with life's least forgiving plot device.Still: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Motherhood
By Emma Hansen. 2020
“Still is one of those rare books that catches you up and does not let you go. With grace, courage,…
and honesty, Emma Hansen adds an important voice to this tragic and too-often silenced subject. I loved this book.” —Beth Powning, author of Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss A moving, candid account of one woman’s experience with stillbirth.Emma Hansen is 39 weeks and 6 days pregnant when she feels her baby go quiet inside of her. At the hospital, her worst fears are confirmed: doctors explain that her baby has died, and she will need to deliver him, still.Hansen gives birth to her son, Reid, amidst an avalanche of grief. Nine days later, she publishes a candid essay on her website sharing photos from the delivery room. Much to her surprise, her essay goes viral, sparking positive reactions around the world. Still shares what comes next: a struggle with grief and confusion alongside a desire to better understand stillbirth, which is experienced by more than two million women annually, but rarely talked about in public.At once honest, brave, and uplifting, Still is about one woman’s search for her own definition of motherhood, even as she faces one of life’s greatest challenges: learning to live after loss.