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Title: The Loss That Is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father by Maxine Harris ISBN: 0-452-27268-8 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: September, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.64 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Companion for Adult "Children"
Comment: I was looking through books on death and dying, when I saw this book. I ignored it, but kept feeling drawn to it. The title seemed a bit extreme, yet I kept wanting to pick it up. When I started reading, I realized that one of the people it was about was me.
If you have lost a parent as a child, please read this book. It is not a self-help book - but it leads to healing by acknowledging that the loss of a parent is a major event in the life of a child, changing that child's view of the world and affecting his or her life into adulthood. Like attending a 12 step program, and feeling instantly at home, this book opens doors to a community of like-minded souls.
Our culture used to minimize the effects the death of a parent has on a child. While adults grieved in their own healthy or unhealthy ways, children were often ignored, sent off to relatives, cut off from one-side of the family and often introduced to a new, substitute parent and expected to never talk about the parent they lost.
My own father died a sudden, fairly publicized death when I was 17 and my sister was 11. I've been painfully aware that there was one life before he died, and another one after, as clean a break as you could make cutting a thick rope with a sharp knife. But no one else - aside from therapists - seemed willing to talk about it. With children, it is important that the grieving process not be ignored or minimized, for how they process their grief will have a lasting effect on how they live their own lives.
While reading the stories in this book, I felt deeply saddened and warmly comforted. The book validated what I have known to the core of my heart for a long time. The death of a parent makes a hole that lasts forever.
Now, that hole isn't dark and deep forever. It isn't a huge pit you fall into and can't get out of, though at times it might feel like that. Instead, it is a loss, or an absence, that is always there, sometimes small, sometimes large. It can be healed, to varying degrees. But it is there, and it will not go away. Ignoring it only seems to enlarge it.
Harris' book offers the comfort of knowing that the reactions we had to our parent's death -- and still have, as we procede through life without that parent -- are not abnormal. I realized that many of the things I did that weren't so good for my life were 'normal' reactions (and thank goodness I've learned from them all).
Better yet, some of the things I've done that have seemed a little odd to others are actually healthy and quite common. For example, in my personal pages I have a web page for my father -not a grieving memorial, but a place filled with photos and memories to share with my own children, who never met him, and with other family members. In the chapter entitled "Staying in Touch," Harris tells how some of us talk with our parent, years after they've died. Other cultures have rituals to remember a lost parent. It isn't morbid -- it is a way to grieve, heal and move on without trying to erase memories that need not go away.
She tells stories of over 60 individuals, each with a very different situation. The chapters cover the grown children's struggles to grow up without one -- sometimes two -- parents; to risk loss in love and other relationships; the changed relationship with the surviving parent; issues in parenting their own children; dealing with their own mortality.
This book is not a self-help book, but a book that anyone who has lost a parent before they were 18 should be aware of and read when they are ready. It is also an excellent book for the surviving parent who wants to be aware of their own child's needs.
For me, this was an excellent and helpful book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Read this if you lost a parent at an early age.
Comment: There is no word describing people who lost a parent at an early age -- but this book makes clear that such a loss is truly forever. This will be reassuring for some. The authro describes the multiple impacts of such a loss. In general, because a child is totally unprepared for the death of a parent, and the parent represents the whole world to the child, this loss is far more grievous than losing a parent when one is an adult. Indeed, it can be compared to the loss of an entire family or community that is only suffered by persons who are victims of genocide or war. Yet others, who do not know of this type of loss, will never understand its magnitude. The message of the book is that one can be orphaned even if just oneparent dies, because frequently the other will be devastated, or will move away.
Rating: 5
Summary: Unspeakable Grief
Comment: My father died suddenly 44 years ago, shattering the illusion of security that nearly every other child takes for granted : the ongoing presence of a loved and caring parent.I was almost seven years old, but it has been the single most determining experience of my entire life. No other book I have ever read on the subject (and there are regrettably few) has offered as much illuminating information or insight into this under-researched,too-often- unacknowledged life changing loss.This author leaves no stone unturned, no question unanswered.She deftly gets out of the way of the 66 individuals
telling their poignant stories of early parental death and allows the details to emerge, vividly evoking both the internal and external realities of the event as well as its aftermath.Her interpretive narration provides more insightful observations and accurate conclusions than I have received from decades of psychotherapeutic intervention, all conveyed with a tone of deferential respect.
This book is a must-read not only for anyone who has endured the overwhelming trauma of losing a parent through death
in childhood, but also for those therapists who accompany them on their lifelong journeys of emotional healing. We need more informed professionals, who can recognize the particular
lifelong shockwaves that this kind of loss entails. Maxine Harris
has provided the most definitive and comprehensive resource available for adults who cannot imagine what it would be like for your parents to die and have no-one send you a sympathy card-
or even act as if anything significant had happened at all!A friend in her 40's called me to relate the recent death of her father and the funeral gathering, during which she was surrounded
by friends and family, consoling her as she scattered his ashes over a canyon near her childhood home. Then she sighed and remarked,"Öh, you know how it is...we're the age when our parents die..." I replied, "No, actually, I don't know how that is...but there is this book that will tell you what MY experience was like.It's called THE LOSS THAT IS FOREVER."
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Title: Longing for Dad: Father Loss and Its Impact by Beth M. Phd. Erickson ISBN: 1558745491 Publisher: Health Communications Pub. Date: May, 1998 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Never the Same: Coming to Terms with the Death of a Parent by Donna Schuurman ISBN: 0312262108 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Motherless Daughters : The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman ISBN: 0385314388 Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 01 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Letters from Motherless Daughters : Words of Courage, Grief, and Healing by Hope Edelman ISBN: 0385315228 Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 01 April, 1996 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: A Music I No Longer Heard: The Early Death of a Parent by Leslie Simon, Jan Johnson, Jan Johnson Drantell ISBN: 068481319X Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: March, 1998 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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