Pilgrimage through Loss: Twelve Pathways to Strength and Renewal after the Death of a Child

by Linda Lawrence Hunt

Overview

The death of a child immerses parents into a life-long challenge of living with one of life's most heartbreaking losses. Pilgrimage through Loss tells the story of one family's journey, along with interviews from thirty other mothers and fathers who add their voices to the silences that often surround suffering in our 'mourning-avoidant' culture. Hunt illuminates the varied pathways parents eventually discover that open their lives to strength and healing. Rather than prescribing a path that will lead to recovery, Hunt encourages parents to find the pathways that work for them as they seek to engage life again with meaning and hope. Each chapter includes questions for reflection and discussion, plus recent research on grief and loss. Pilgrimage through Loss not only helps grieving parents, it also provides an insightful resource for those wanting to understand and come alongside a family in grief.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611643787
Publisher:	Westminster John Knox Press
Publication date:	01/24/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Linda Lawrence Hunt is a scholar, teacher, speaker, and author. A former professor at Whitworth University, Hunt left after twenty years to direct the Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship, named after her daughter, who died in a bus crash while performing humanitarian work in Bolivia. She has authored or coauthored five books, including the best-selling Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk across Victorian America. It was the recipient of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Washington State Book Award, and the national Willa Cather Award for nonfiction.

Editorial Reviews

"Award-winning author Linda Lawrence Hunt does it again… With due respect to many books about grief, it is Hunt's spiritual insight and compelling prose that will make one reader want to tell another and another about this extraordinary book."

-Ronald C. White, Jr., Author, A. Lincoln: A Biography and Fellow, The Huntington Library

"A wonderful memoir! …creative, joyful, poignant and memorable… this will be an excellent resource for grief groups, too."

-Rev. Marilyn H. Corvin, Retired United Church of Christ Minister, Former Staff Chaplain, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, Palo Alto, CA

"This beautifully written and comforting book unveils with grace the paths taken by parents as they faced a great loss, the death of their child... It's also a book for aunts, uncles, grandparents and friends who seek words and ways to offer encouragement as they walk beside those traveling through grief. Having been there, let me add: this is a book I will give to many and reread often."

-Jane Kirkpatrick, speaker and author of A Simple Gift of Comfort and The Daughter's Walk

"Linda brings a message of hope and inspiration to readers. Linda shows how our hearts can expand to fully integrate this loss into our lives and encourages all who must deal with this kind of tragedy."

-Carolyn Ringo, RN, MSW, Perinatal/Pediatric Palliative Care Coordinator, Providence Sacred Heart Children's Hospital, Spokane, WA

"The most difficult thing about the death of your child, after enduring that loss itself, is learning that your way of grieving may be very different from that of your spouse and others who loved that child. It is all so delicate, and how we negotiate this painful time is crucial to ourselves and our marriage and our friendships -- and no less to the memory of the child who died. In Pilgrimage through Loss Linda Lawrence Hunt does such a fine, lovely job of explaining that although we can never escape this grief, we can, in our own way, do our best by it."

-Frank Deford, American sportswriter, novelist, and author of Alex: The Life of a Child

From the Publisher