AN UNCONVENTIONAL LOOK AT GRIEF
In their non-fiction book, Living Life after Losing One (Cedar Fork), Oregon mother of seven, Alice Rampton, and her friend Nikki King, mother of five, joined forces to take on the daunting task of looking at their grief in an unconventional approach.
Contrary to a common belief that grieving is something you do and get through; these women show us great strength. Grief, as a process for the rest of your life, is what we see in their writing; it becomes more bearable, and your emotions are not as intense.
Grief occurs in all lives, and in many ways. Rampton and King’s book focuses on the grief of one child lost to cancer and another one to a car accident, as well as a myriad of other possibilities with additional interviews. They believe that grief does not have to destroy a family or a relationship, but that trauma can give new life and new meaning to families in different ways.
Just as a broken bone that has healed is often stronger than the original, similarly the heart has the capacity to grow stronger from grief. Nowhere is that demonstrated more clearly than with these two women and their friends. While dealing with their relationships under incredible stress, they now know a personal strength they did not recognize previously.
In this work, Rampton and King discuss the roots of grief, the triggers, the ways of coping with it, the process and stages of grief taken on your grief journey, and the secrets to maintaining a healthy healing. Grief is so common and so poorly understood, and yet it was a motivator for them to interview a group of other mothers with the same loss experience, both anticipated or unforeseen.
To look at a new perspective on grief and to choose their futures, all the women speaking to us in the book sought to be alive again. Each one, in their own way, resorted to leaving the constraints of grief to support each other and to give and receive kindness and joy.
They eventually felt free from the restraints of grief and understood they had the right to be happy, to move on, to be optimistic. They began to give themselves, and each other permission to be more than their loss situation.
Grief is a powerful alarm system for all members of a family. The siblings are also studied in the storytelling. Once the women dealt with the acute pain of the loss, of a future without their child, they looked more realistically at where their lives were going.
They each acknowledged the hurt, the guilt, and the mistrust, and began to live again. They found new meaning in all of it by asking questions of themselves and the others who share this unique bond of being the parent who’s lost a child.
What was this all about? What’s the insight? Why did this happen?
Conclusion: Grief isn’t black and white.
BOOK REVIEW The Slumber Party from Hell – author, Sue Ellen Allen and reviewer Patricia L. Brooks
The Slumber Party from Hell, the book Sue Ellen Allen published in 2011, seems like an intimate chat with an old chum. It’s a book that is more like an overheard
conversation. You feel you’re intruding but you can’t stop listening.
In this well written work, The Slumber Party from Hell puts the spotlight on the Arizona prison system that is penalizing, but not rehabilitating its inmates.
Allen says it took her seven years in prison to realize the Arizona prisons are part of the problem as they focus narrowly on penalizing and punishing our prison population. She believes her life has changed completely from this experience of dealing with breast cancer as a prisoner, as well as the unnecessary death of her friend and roommate Gina to cancer while she too was in prison.
Allen knew it was the end of the world as she had known it once she stepped in to that life and she was determined to make the best of it.
Allen puts some of her self-made power to work by being a leader and role model while behind bars by volunteering her expertise and ideas learned on the outside as a professional woman and community leader. She helps many of the younger women who are struggling develop themselves within the confines of an unfair and unjust prison system.
She also attempts to shrink the negative impact of prison for herself and her fellow inmates by starting programs positive in nature. This is no easy feat because most of the rules are unrealistic and frustrating at best.
Although often her writing leaves you wishing things were not as she describes them, you find joy and humor in the small things she celebrates during those seven years of incarceration.
You are able to decipher what is really going on in some of the chaos and craziness to make a little sense of the journey, but in most areas to no avail. It is what it is and the few gems in the story are Sue Ellen herself, along with a couple of her friends – inside and out.
This is a story of a few founders of the truth in a world where innocence and beauty do not exist. Some readers will be engaged by Allen’s fierce convictions and continuous mentions of hope and gratitude for the lessons she is learning and the person she is becoming.
Others will be turned off by the blatant honesty of life in the Arizona prison system and the horrors she witnessed. But throughout it all, you will find humor and humanness to admire just as I did. You will find respect for her in your own way and you will surely be grateful for your life just the way it is today.
This week she is celebrating three years since her release March 18, 2009. She celebrated 10 years cancer free on Valentine’s Day, Feb 14, 2012.
Book Reviewer:
Patricia L. Brooks patricia@pplbrooks.com
480-250-5556
President/Founder – Scottsdale Society of Women Writers
President/Owner – Brooks Goldmann Publishing, LLC
www.blog.brooksgoldmannpublishing.com
Author – Gifts of Sisterhood www.amzn.com/B006MLA91Q