No one who lives and loves will be immune to grief and loss. Yet while this experience is universal, many who experience the trauma of grief are left feeling alone and even alienated. People care and want to help, but how?
Michele Neff Hernandez experienced this in 2005 when her thirty-nine-year-old husband died after being hit by a car while riding his bicycle. Michele set out to find other widowed people, intent on learning what they knew about being widowed. What she discovered was the healing power of shared, expressed experience.
Her most transformative realization was that grief changes us. There is no going back or bucking up. Life is now different. She realized that working through her loss would not take her back to where she was but forward into a rebuilt life as a resilient, determined, and fully capable person who can live fully, love wholly, and give bountifully and even joyfully. While Different after You focuses on conjugal bereavement, its easy-to-digest steps offer life-affirming and potentially life-transforming resources for everyone reckoning with the individual or collective loss we all face.
