{"id":637,"date":"2014-10-06T08:05:38","date_gmt":"2014-10-06T12:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/?p=637"},"modified":"2014-10-06T08:28:54","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T12:28:54","slug":"book-healing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/book-healing\/","title":{"rendered":"A Book for Healing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a>It was a twenty-mile drive to the book launch celebration for Elaine Mansfield\u2019s memoir<\/a>, Leaning into Love: A Spiritual Journey through Grief<\/strong>. A week before, I\u2019d bought the book for a friend who recently lost her husband. I\u2019d started reading it and could not give it away until I finished the whole book myself.<\/p>\n

The gathering at Damiani Wine Cellars<\/a> was impressive. It was almost like stepping back into the book as all the people I\u2019d just read about (and seen pictures of on Elaine\u2019s blogs<\/a>) now walked among the crowd, smiling with filled wineglasses. Reading the memoir, I\u2019d witnessed how family and friends make a difference in dying a good death and living a good life. I\u2019d come to love the sons who participated in rituals in the woods and the friends who brought soup and read poems. But there was one person in particular I was looking for.<\/p>\n

I recognized Elaine\u2019s mother-in-law from the photos I\u2019d seen of her son who died. They had the same eyes and face-shape. She was sitting alone at a table so I took my plate of hors d\u2019oeuvres and joined her. Introducing myself, I explained how I bumped into Elaine six years ago in the tiny kitchen of the oncology unit at Rochester\u2019s Strong Memorial<\/a> Hospital. My daughter and I were first entering the wilds of cancer as the Mansfields were exiting.
\n\u201cDid your daughter die?\u201d she asked right off, leaning towards me. Ninety-eight years old, she didn\u2019t waste time getting to what was on her mind.<\/p>\n

We talked about our children. We talked about life in general, the unfairness and the heartbreak. My twenty-year-old daughter <\/a>was with me the last third of my life before she died; this woman\u2019s son had lived for two thirds of her life. We both knew you can’t measure or score grief.
\n\u201cI\u2019m going to be okay. Will you be okay?\u201d I wanted to ask but didn\u2019t. Then suddenly she was gleaming proudly.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want you to meet my grandsons,\u201d she said as she introduced me to David and Anthony and the granddaughter-in-law from the book. \u201cAnd this is our new fianc\u00e9e,\u201d she said, hugging another young woman\u2019s arm. Illuminated before me were the messages I took from the book: life ends but love lasts long after,\u00a0 embrace the grief. And new life follows loss.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a twenty-mile drive to the book launch celebration for Elaine Mansfield’s memoir, Leaning into Love: A Spiritual Journey through Grief. A week before, I’d bought the book for a friend who recently lost her husband. I’d started reading it and could not give it away until I finished the whole book myself. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[268,274,64,273],"class_list":["post-637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1","tag-a-book-for-healing","tag-elaine-mansfields-new-book-leaning-into-love-a-spiritual-journey-throughgrief","tag-healing-from-loss","tag-journey-through-grief"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}