This impressive book is written by a family therapist and a physician who have counseled hundreds of post-abortive women. Honest, accurate, and practical, it offers hope and encouragement to women seeking healing after abortion. A must for post-abortive women, their friends and family, pregnancy center counselors and other who seek to help.

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Alistair Crown, psychiatrist, knew all there was to know about guilt, until he himself fell victim to it. He must now learn for himself to deal with a grief prolonged by guilt, a grief he cannot share.

Joe Harper has backpedaled throughout his life. A once-promising guitar prodigy, he's been living without direction since abandoning his musical dreams. Now into his thirties, having retreated from every opportunity he's had to level up, he has lost his family, his best friend, and his own self-respect.

The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and be stretched large by them. As seen on All There Is with Anderson Cooper Noted psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in this lyrical yet practical handbook for mastering the art of grieving. Describing how Western patterns of amnesia and anesthesia affect our capacity to cope with personal and collective sorrows, Weller reveals the new vitality we may encounter when we welcome, rather than fear, the pain of loss. Through moving personal stories, poetry, and insightful reflections he leads us into the central energy of sorrow, and to the profound healing and heightened communion with each other and our planet that reside alongside it. The Wild Edge of Sorrow explains that grief has always been communal and illustrates how we need the healing touch of others, an atmosphere of compassion, and the comfort of ritual in order to fully metabolize our grief. Weller describes how we often hide our pain from the world, wrapping it in a secret mantle of shame. This causes sorrow to linger unexpressed in our bodies, weighing us down and pulling us into the territory of depression and death. We have come to fear grief and feel too alone to face an encounter with the powerful energies of sorrow. Those who work with people in grief, who have experienced the loss of a loved one, who mourn the ongoing destruction of our planet, or who suffer the accumulated traumas of a lifetime will appreciate the discussion of obstacles to successful grief work such as privatized pain, lack of communal rituals, a pervasive feeling of fear, and a culturally restrictive range of emotion. Weller highlights the intimate bond between grief and gratitude, sorrow and intimacy. In addition to showing us that the greatest gifts are often hidden in the things we avoid, he offers powerful tools and rituals and a list of resources to help us transform grief into a force that allows us to live and love more fully.

Like seeing one's reflection on a still pond, Seasons of Solace: Reflections on Grief is a reflection of great loss resting upon nature's gentle beauty. Our greatest desire is that you will see your reflection in our reflections. Words on a page can never truly describe the emptiness found when someone we love slips beyond our reach. Yet, it is our hope that these words, born out of loss, can be a bridge to solace in your seasons of sorrow. May our hearts meet within these pages and find healing on our common path. May in our shared loss we find our shared life. May in our aloneness we discover our tears fall on the same earth and flow into the same ocean. And through these reflections may our great loss bring us into an even greater love. When we look into the still pond, into our own reflection, we can see others on the water's edge and know our solitary sorrow is not reflection our aloneness, but of our shared love. Perhaps you find here the comfort of experiencing that you are not alone. Such great loss, such great love, lives within us all. We invite you to join us within these pages in a place of healing in our seasons of solace.

Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher rediscovered in the twentieth century, is a major influence in contemporary philosophy, religion, and literature. He regarded Either/Or as the beginning of his authorship, although he had published two earlier works on Hans Christian Andersen and irony. The pseudonymous volumes of Either/Or are the writings of a young man (I) and of Judge William (II). The ironical young man's papers include a collection of sardonic aphorisms; essays on Mozart, modern drama, and boredom; and "The Seducer's Diary." The seeming miscellany is a reflective presentation of aspects of the "either," the esthetic view of life. Part II is an older friend's "or," the ethical life of integrated, authentic personhood, elaborated in discussions of personal becoming and of marriage. The resolution of the "either/or" is left to the reader, for there is no Part III until the appearance of Stages on Life's Way. The poetic-reflective creations of a master stylist and imaginative impersonator, the two men write in distinctive ways appropriate to their respective positions.