After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss Through the Years [Hardcover]

Ann K. Finkbeiner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1996

For a parent, losing a child is the most devastating event that can occur. Most books on the subject focus on grieving and recovery, but as most parents agree, there is no recovery from such a loss. This book examines the continued love parents feel for their child and the many poignant and ingenious ways they devise to preserve the bond. Through detailed profiles of parents, Ann Finkbeiner shows how new activities and changed relationships with their spouse, friends, and other children can all help parents preserve a bond with the lost child. Refusing to fall back on pop jargon about "recovery" or to offer easy suggestions or standardized timelines, Finkbeiner's is a genuine and moving search to come to terms with loss. Her complex profiles of parents resonate with the honesty and authenticity of uncomfortable emotions expressed and, most importantly, shared with others experiencing a similar loss. Finally, each profile exemplifies the many heroic ways parents learn to live with their pain, and by so doing, honor the lives their children should have lived.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A book that explores our own resilience in the midst of one of the most distressful forms of human suffering, the death of a child. Because children aren't supposed to die, the loss is not only painful but profoundly disorienting. Finkbeiner, whose only child died in 1987, refers to her own experience and the experience of others to show that while bereaved parents can never really let go, they can and do recover, often developing a new appreciation for their own lives. Says one parent: "You just don't treat life as lightly, and if you don't treat things lightly, they do become richer."

From Publishers Weekly

Finkbeiner, a medical and science writer in Baltimore, lost her son, T.C. (Thomas Carl), in 1987 in a train wreck, when he was 18. Determined to learn what researchers had to say about the long-term effects on parents of a child's death, she found that data on the subject was sparse and focused mainly on recovery steps taken immediately after the death. So she placed an ad in the newsletter of a local chapter of Compassionate Friends, a self-help organization for bereaved parents. She then interviewed respondents who had lost one (or more) offspring, stipulating that the death(s) had to have occurred at least five years before the interview. She met individually with 30 parents: Did they feel guilty? Did they feel better over time? Did their relationship to God change? The two main things she learned are that a child's death is disorienting indefinitely and letting go of a child is impossible. The author makes no claims to scientific rigor-interviewees were self-selected by virtue of having answered the author's ad. Those who have lost a child will find corroboration of many of their feelings in this enlightening and heartrending study.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 273 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (May 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684829657
• ISBN-13: 978-0684829654
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #576,632 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No one should have to read this book, September 15, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss Through the Years (Hardcover)

This book contains some of the most painful, and at the same time the most helpful writing I have read since the death of my own son. Those who will choose to read it will do so because they have experienced the most devastating loss imaginable - the death of a child. Ann Finkbeiner is right when she says her book is not for the newly bereaved. There are no comforting platitudes, no 12 steps, no meditations. No words of wisdom, no instructions for "getting over it", since, as she says, and everyone who has been there knows - there IS no getting over it. There's just learning a different way to live the rest of your life, learning to live with the pain. You'll only read it if you have the need to, and if you have need to, please know that I'm very sorry.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It confirms the long term aspects of our grief, September 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss through the Years (Paperback)

As others have written, this book explains what we are still going though years later and that there is no quick fix for the newly bereaved. But there are things that friends and family can do to help, at any stage; from the funeral to 40 years later. Julane Grant's book, When Your Friend's Child Dies, offers easy to understand, practical ways for friends to help us live with (we don't get over it)the grief. When our friends know what we are feeling, then they know that we want our child mentioned, we want to grab a hold of everyone's memory of our child. This book told my unspoken feelings and now I leave my copy on the coffee table and friends pick it up. I already know how I feel, I want them to know!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Loss of a child after several years, March 15, 2006

By 

M. Ellsworth (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss through the Years (Paperback)

I would recommend this book only to those who lost a child a few years before. For those who just lost a child, it may be too difficult to realize right away how long this will affect your life. Also, that you never "get over it", as long as you live.
It was well written and honest, by an author who experienced the loss of a child.