Death benefits
Subtitle: how losing a parent can change an adult's life-- for the better
By: Jeanne Safer.
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2008
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 226
ISBN-13: 9780465072118
Subjects: Death -- Social aspects; Parents -- Death -- Psychological aspects; Adult children -- Psychology
Description: Although most of us lose a mother or father in later life, few of us are psychologically prepared for the experience. This book explores the uncharted territory each of us enters when a parent leaves us, and offers a blueprint for positive change in every aspect of our lives. It demonstrates through powerful stories (including the author's own revelatory experience) how parent loss is the most potent catalyst for change in middle age and can actually offer us our last, best chance to become our truest, deepest selves. Psychotherapist Safer challenges the conventional wisdom that fundamental change is only for the young, and that loss must simply be endured or overcome. Filled with moving and engaging stories of real men and women re-imagining themselves after a parent's death, this is a fresh, impassioned, and sophisticated look at self-transformation in later life.--From publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-220) and index.
Table of contents: title: My death benefit (autobiography); title: Death benefits : the last taboo; title: Going through the stuff : choosing a legacy; title: Using the good china : deserving a life at last; title: My body, my self : health and beauty benefits; title: Till death do us part : marriage and divorce; title: Lifted up in my mother's arms : religious epiphanies; title: A voice of my own : creative self-expression; title: Father knows best? The punitive parent dies; title: Mom's best friend : the end of emotional caretaking; title: The eleventh hour : near-death revelations; title: Perspectives from the deathspace; title: In their end is my beginning : cultivating death benefits.