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A Grief Out of Season

Grief

Fintushel, Nicole and Nancy Hillard, Ph.D. A Grief Out of Season. Boston: Little Brown Company: 1991.

The one book we AKODs can rely on to get us through and help us understand is out of print! (Figures, right? Somedays it seems like nothing will go our way! :oD) I secured a copy at abebooks.com, which deals in out of print books. There are lots of places to look for it, and I highly recommend it!

Below, I've posted some brief passages from the book. Can you identify with any of them? (NB: I haven't finished reading the book yet, so be assured that more will be added to this page!)

"My main feeling was 'I can't believe this is happening to us...to me'...It was a dark mark on me. Like we had always had this good, stable, healthy existence and then suddenly this dark mark."
--Penny

"When my parents first told me, the only thing that came into my mind was the image of a huge tower of building blocks sent flying every which way in the air...I felt completely disoriented."
--Vivian

"...my parents functioned as the ultimate standard for me, the central term of any comparison. When they split up, I felt at a loss, a complete loss."
--anonymous young man

"Until their family came apart, they didn't realize its central place in their lives"
--authors

"For some children, the information they learn at this time not only permanently changes their perception of a parent but drastically alters their own sense of themselves."
--authors

"A number of adult children...were furious at the way they were first told - or rather, not told - of their parents' plans to divorce...When adult children are not told the news directly, they feel used and manipulated."
--authors

"For five days I walked around with this secret in my head that my mother didn't know, even though it was really her secret. It made my mother seem so vulnerable to me, like a little child who doesn't know about some big, major thing that's about to happen to them..."
--anonymous woman

"It was so traumatic. I was a mess. The year my parents split up, I cried every day...eventually they said "you ought to get over this." People don't understand. Death would be easier to deal with because the person is gone. I felt that I'd been tossed aside. I was no longer a priority in my parents' lives."
--Susan (nope, not me, but this passage says it all in my case!)

MORE TO FOLLOW!

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