In the short span of nine months, the same time period required for birth, Beverly Kalinin nurses her sick husband and attends him lovingly in his dying. Painful mourning follows and she discovers a startling fact-that people grieve as they have lived. And the rate of successful healing is determined by the experience and quality of one's journey. Alone on the Yellow Brick Road is a sensitively written memoir of love, life, death, grief, and moving on.
Book Description
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lyrical, reflective, and compelling narrative of grief,
By
This review is from: Alone on the Yellow Brick Road ~ A Memoir (Paperback)
Beverly Kalinin has written a lyrical, reflective, and compelling narrative of grief. Her memoir Alone on the Yellow Brick Road is subtitled "On Love, Life, Death, Grief, and Moving On." Beverly tells the story of the emotional, psychological, and spiritual journey she took over three years, beginning with the cancer diagnosis of her husband Bob nine months before his death.
On the surface, the book tells a simple story of how - after 55 years of sharing their lives -- Bob died and Beverly survived. There's nothing especially unusual about such a story. Everybody will inhabit at least one of these roles during a lifetime, and many of us will play both of them at different times. What makes Beverly's book unusual is her ability to perceive multiple layers of emotional and psychic reality, and her capacity as a writer to bring to life the mythic elements of her journey with Bob. She threads her dreams and visions with waking perceptions and powerful memories, and uses this tapestry of images and sensations to help us connect with and learn from her lived experience of loss. In her foreword, Beverly suggests that how we have lived is how we will grieve, and tells us that she has written both a book on grief and a love story: "In the months following the death of my husband of fifty years I attended support groups where, listening to others, I perceived emerging patterns of their grieving processes. With time, I determined these patterns of healing were based on how the people had handled other problems in their lives. Generally, the degree of success they had had in living positively and well was consistent with how they dealt with grief. Finally, I decided that the history, spirit, and quality of one's life were directly consistent with that of one's mourning process." Reading Beverly's memoir made me reflect on the preciousness of my own relationship with Alix, whom I met twenty-two years ago. It's hard for me now to imagine living without her. My own prospective grief is hard for me to get a handle on. I can much more easily imagine how Alix would be devastated by my death, and then Beverly's book helps me to imagine how Alix will be able to go on with her life, living through the terrible pain of that loss, learning to live in the sunlight again. The consequence of such a reflection for me is my intense desire to appreciate every moment I have available to me with Alix, every ort of shared experience I have with Alix, every fragment of time and space we have in common. Thanks, Beverly! You wrote a good book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Alone on the Yellow Brick Road - A Memoir,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Alone on the Yellow Brick Road ~ A Memoir (Paperback)
A wonderful book, especially for those who have lost a loved one. It is very well written and a pleasure to read. It is a personal story of Bob's cancer, his fight to live, and Beverly's journey through life; ultimately, caring for the person she loved for over 50 years and then coping with the loss. Bob's favorite movie was The Wizard of Oz; hence, the title. Parts are light and humorous and other parts are, as we already know, sad. This book would be a much appreciated gift for someone trying to copy with a loss (as everyone will, at some point).
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
