Saying Goodbye: How Families Can Find Renewal Through Loss

by Barbara Okun, Joseph Nowinski

The new definitive text on grieving in today's world.

With advances in modern medicine, the nature of death and dying has undergone a dramatic shift. A diagnosis of a life-threatening disease is not always an immediate death sentence, and one can survive months or even years before succumbing to a terminal illness. It can give us the gift of more time with our loved ones-but it can also complicate the grieving process, prolonging the emotional pain, bringing family issues to the forefront, and creating new challenges for everyone involved.

Published in collaboration with Harvard Health Publications, Saying Goodbye explores what this means for those who may be left "living with death" for an extended period of time. Guiding readers through this complex journey, Okun and Nowinski introduce and explore its five stages-crisis, unity, upheaval, resolution, and renewal-and offer a road map that will help readers navigate their way through the realities of death and dying.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 4, 2011

Reviews

[Mohsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a pretty sold book with stories that one can easily relate to, if their family are at least more than two individuals. Mine isn’t so mostly what I felt was a sort of envy, isolation and loneliness being the only child and all. To be fair, some chapters were of great consolation but again, I felt they failed to address the burden us sole caregivers experience.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice book that gives a template for how grief has changed and ways that family can move forward through a grieving process. It's a nice reference particularly for families who are struggling with a terminal illness being diagnosed in their family. Not as helpful for a sudden loss.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this because I heard the author on NPR and was intrigued. The NPR interview was better than the book...