Customer Reviews

Gay Widowers: Life After the Death of a Partner

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The death of someone close to you is a pivotal event in your life. The closer that death is to you, the more difficult are the issues that present themselves. Be it a partner or a parent, a sibling, a close relative, or a pet, each death you encounter in life will surely affect you deeply, and also will provide opportunities for dynamic personal growth.

Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people deal with issues of grief, loss, and bereavement in their lives. In our society unfortunately, members of this community find it much more difficult to address honestly and openly, those details and intimate emotions surrounding the death of a loved one. Fears of rejection, hostility, constant explanation and ignorance often make it impossible for a gay man or a lesbian, for example, to join a mixed group and openly share many details of their lives. Add to this the factor of the impact of AIDS onto those communities, and the potential for problems can escalate quickly.

This book reveals both personal stories and usable information on the reactions gay men have to grief. Through the use of anecdotes and timely analysis, one gets a more complete picture of the incredible passage gay men undergo in their grief journeys.

I currently am a grief counselor for The Hospice Caring Project of Santa Cruz and we have been involved in GLBT greif and bereavement since the early days of the AIDS epidemic. We are now offering to the LGBT Community a renewed outreach due to an increase in both AIDS deaths and deaths due to breast and ovarian cancers. A similar book needs to be written for the lesbian community.

This is the only book I know on the subject (there are lots of books on grief, but it's nice to have a book focused on gay men, since our situtations can be vastly different), and when I lost my partner, reading Gay Widowers provided a great deal of relief and information. Knowing that I wasn't alone, and reading about similar experiences was (and still is) important to my bereavement. I actually wish the book was longer.

This book written in 1997 continues to be one of the few books around for gay men who lose their partners to death. I hope more will be written as this book points out--while there are plenty of issues that are similar--most of the issues for gay relationships are very different than for our heterosexual counterpart.

This is a very good tool and does provide insights to the problems with loss and greieving it did help me very much when I was first faced with the death of my spouse I valued this book and I hope that it can help you also. very much, cope and deal with your losses. Gods love and strength