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Ceylon Moon
Ceylon Moon is a poetry collection built around memory, dreams, aging, identity, nature, and the uneasy business of trying to make meaning from a finite life. Aaron Gedaliah organizes the book into five sections that gradually move from childhood and personal recollection into dream life, questions of sanity, imagined voices from the natural world, and finally the experience of growing older. That structure gives the collection a real sense of progression. Early poems such as “I Am Becoming” capture the almost overwhelming vitality of childhood, while later poems look back on youth from a much greater distance. Gedaliah explains in the preface that childhood, dreams, sanity, nature, aging, and the absurdity of life are the central concerns of the book, and those themes keep returning in different forms.
The collection is especially strong when Gedaliah lets an ordinary experience open into something much larger. A toddler running downhill, a morning beside the Mekong, an old temple, a text message from a former lover, a pair of glasses, or a sleepless night can all become occasions for thinking about memory and identity. The poems frequently move between the physical world and an interior one, so landscapes, music, paintings, dreams, and personal recollections seem to talk to one another. That quality is especially vivid in “Ceylon Moon,” where a neglected piece of art becomes almost sentient, carrying with it distant places, submerged memories, and an atmosphere of longing. The language throughout the collection tends toward the sensory and dreamlike, with recurring images of moonlight, water, twilight, trees, music, silence, and shifting shades of blue and violet.
Gedaliah also has a playful philosophical streak, particularly in the “With [in] Sanity” and “The Voices” sections. Poems such as “Being Insane” and “Being in Between” treat sanity and madness less as fixed opposites than as forces people continually negotiate, with conformity on one side and freedom, impulse, and creativity on the other. In “The Voices,” stone, trees, clouds, mountains, and the sea are given their own perspectives, and the effect is surprisingly intimate. Nature becomes a way of talking about stability, memory, surrender, and the human desire to find significance outside ourselves. “A Song of the Sea,” for example, imagines the sea as an ancient rhythm binding us to existence, while “A Song of Letting Go” turns the seasonal loss of leaves into a meditation on accepting time and change.
Toward the end, the collection becomes increasingly concerned with aging, physical decline, estrangement from a more automated world, remembered intimacy, and the approach of death, but it keeps returning to gratitude and connection. “Because My Time Is Limited” places the speaker’s brief life against an immense and indifferent universe, yet arrives at astonishment. The closing poem, “What Is Life?,” reduces the book’s many questions to a simple chain connecting truth, memory, love, and the fragile experiences that give a life its meaning. I’d recommend Ceylon Moon most to readers who enjoy reflective, philosophical poetry and who are drawn to writers such as Rilke, Pessoa, Camus, or poets who use dreams, art, music, and nature as ways of thinking about consciousness. It should especially resonate with readers who’ve reached an age where memory feels less like a record of the past and more like something living alongside the present.
Pages: 84 | ASIN : B0HFQPBLZN
Our Families and Communities
How to Show Up for the Dying & Their Loved Ones offers practical, compassionate guidance from diagnosis through death and into the long landscape of grief. Was there a particular death or caregiving experience that first made you think, “People need to be taught how to do this”?
Absolutely! For sure, the foundation of how I show up, I learned in my big family and through my work as a midwife, but there was still a lot I needed to learn.
When I first moved to Paonia, a small rural town in Western Colorado, I met three families, each with a young parent dying of cancer. Without giving it much thought, I dove into caring for all three of them, and the nine children between them. Caring for them was excruciating, and also beautiful. The way our community came together reminded me of what we all long for when we say “It takes a village.” Our little town supported them as I imagine a tribal community would. Most of us, myself included, had never been so intimately involved with the dying process. With the support of one of our local death doulas, Carrie Lerner, we were taught about this sacred and ancient rite of passage. As a birth midwife with decades of experience caring for families at the veil, I stepped in and took on a leadership role with all of them. This included: caring for their children, taking the dying partners to appointments, feeding their families, cleaning their houses, and taking care of their partners. When the time came, I participated in cleaning their bodies after death, transporting their bodies in my minivan to their resting places, and facilitating their burial and cremation ceremonies.
These three parents, Freeda, Javier, and Jordan, died 6 months to the day of each other. Two days after Jordan died, I thought to myself, “I’ve just received a download, and I need to share what I’ve learned with others!” Having never written anything substantial before, I began the long and oftentimes unbearable process of writing this book.
As a midwife, who traditionally would have been at the bedsides of the birthing and the dying, I was surprised by how little I knew about the dying process. This led me to assume that most other people in the Western world also know very little about it, and could benefit greatly from what I had learned.
Your framework includes self-care, sacrifice, staying close, bravery, and sitting in the fire. How did those five principles emerge?
Ahh, what’s up with the five principles you ask? Jake Woods, Freeda’s husband, is to thank for this book. He said, “Moriah, there’s something different about the way you show up, and you need to share your ways.” So I got to thinking about what it is that I bring to caring for others, and out of that inner exploration emerged these five principles. Caring for the dying and their loved ones is hard, but it’s not rocket science.
These principles are to be used like road signs to help folks remain on course with their intention to show up. They’re anchors to help us stay grounded so that we don’t unintentionally drift away when people need us most. If at any point during the process of leaning in to offer support, someone feels unsure about what to do or say, I encourage revisiting these five principles. While I wrote the principles and they emerged from somewhere in me, I’m still very much a student of them. I haven’t mastered any of the ideas or tools in this book. What I’ve found is that when I get stuck, if I sit and reflect on these principles, my next best step always emerges. I hope that is the case for others too.
Caregivers often become almost invisible because attention naturally centers on the ill person. What do caregivers most need from their communities?
That’s a really great observation and question. Sad but true in many situations. The absolute best way to care for someone who is dying or facing a terminal illness is to care for their caregivers. Those who are sick can’t fully lean into their caregivers unless their caregivers are well supported. If their caregivers are not well supported, they themselves will try to support them, or lessen the burden of what they have to carry. I see this as an example of what is broken within our “human ecology.” For example, when a primary caregiving parent is under-supported, their child or children will actually try to care for them. Even though this isn’t fair to the child, the support has to come from somewhere for the child to be stable. Similarly, if after a birth everyone’s attention goes to the baby, the mother will struggle if her needs are unseen. The same is true with the dying.
In nature, the actions and reactions that take place in an ecosystem are like a spiderweb. When one strand is broken, the web starts to unravel. One strand does not equal a web. One strand equals: At Risk of Breaking.
Primary caregivers are one strand within the web of life that surrounds them. They need to be held up and supported by many competent layers of support, so that the person facing death can actually lean into them. This is essentially what the whole book is about: Finding our place in the web of our families and communities. It’s not just the primary caregivers who need support. Those who are supporting the primary caregivers need support, and those who are supporting those who are supporting the primary caregivers also need support, and so on…
The book opens with the broader Standing at the Veil initiative. What do you hope that movement becomes?
Thank you for asking. I believe the book has value for readers on its own, and it’s also a doorway into the Standing at the Veil global support initiative. Two and a half years after completing the first draft of this book, my only brother was diagnosed with cancer. There are no words to describe the pain I felt at my inability to help him and his family more, given that we live thousands of miles apart. And in this way, our family isn’t unique. So many of us in the Western world live far away from those we love and have deep ties with, and at the same time we’re surrounded by people who’ve also chosen to live geographically distant from their loved ones.
While my brother was in the hospital, I spoke with his partner about her needs. She said she longed for people she could rely on and lean into within walking distance from their home. Her needs included: food prep, house cleaning, help with errands, help with projects around the house, and childcare so that she could attend to my brother’s needs and her work. And then, of course, there were her needs for self-care and emotional and spiritual support. She said she desperately wanted someone to physically hold her and a shoulder she could cry on.
Instead of allowing myself to become immobilized by my inability to help them, I channeled my energy into the Standing at the Veil project I’d been gestating. My dream is to empower and train people to feel more confident, comfortable, and capable of showing up for their friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, and those in their local communities.
With trainings for lay people and professionals, along with workbooks, social forums, a global interactive map, and limitless local, national, and international resource links, I believe Standing at the Veil has the potential to transform our current death and dying landscape.
Just as viruses and bacteria constantly evolve in order to adapt, survive, and thrive, I believe this vision of a global support network will reawaken dormant seeds of ancient wisdom and reshape how we show up for each other during the dying process. And on a much bigger level, support the transformation, evolution, and adaptation of our species as we re-learn how to cohabitate with each other and all of nature on this beautiful planet we all call home.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Standing at the Veil | Website | Amazon
Blending tips and tools, personal stories, essential guidance, and reflective exercises, she invites readers to relearn what our ancestors have always known: how to hold each other while Standing at the Veil. From navigating medical decisions, and helping facilitate hard conversations, to caring for the body and supporting grief “from release to forever after,” this book illuminates a path toward rebuilding a healthy human ecosystem—and opens a doorway to the wider Standing at the Veil global support initiative.
How Learning to Say Goodbye Taught Me How to Live
Joffre McClung’s How Learning to Say Goodbye Taught Me How to Live is a spiritual memoir shaped by the final months of her best friend Rob’s life. After surviving a series of painful losses, McClung learns that Rob has stage-four breast cancer and makes a difficult promise to remain present without disappearing into grief again. What follows is both an intimate account of accompanying a loved one toward death and a record of the inner work that experience demands. McClung writes from inside the uncertainty, anger, tenderness, and exhaustion of anticipatory grief, giving the book an emotional immediacy that feels more like an honest conversation than a lesson delivered from a distance.
The heart of the book is the friendship between McClung and Rob. Their daily calls, disagreements, laughter, spiritual conversations, practical decisions, and moments of fear create a vivid portrait of love under pressure. Rob’s illness unfolds alongside major changes in her life, including the death of her partner, a difficult move, renewed closeness with her family, and the gradual acceptance of care she’d often struggled to receive. McClung doesn’t reduce Rob to her diagnosis. She presents her as complicated, funny, stubborn, frightened, generous, and deeply human. The brief chapter devoted to Rob’s rescue dog, Dudley, is especially affecting because it shows how devotion can be expressed through something as simple as staying close.
Each chapter pairs the unfolding story with a spiritual principle and a set of reflective questions. McClung explores emotional honesty, self-compassion, forgiveness, surrender, intuition, gratitude, intimacy, belief, and the balance between giving and receiving. Her language is direct and personal, and she’s willing to show the moments when her own ego becomes controlling, judgmental, or desperate for certainty. That self-awareness gives the guidance weight. These ideas aren’t presented as abstract theories. They arise from hospital visits, financial worries, frightened phone calls, family tensions, meditations, hard conversations, and the daily choice to keep loving when love can’t guarantee the outcome.
By the time McClung reaches Rob’s final days, learning to say goodbye has become an act of attention. The memoir’s deepest insight is that grief can reveal the beliefs, wounds, and fears that quietly shape a life, while love can give us the courage to meet them. McClung’s story will speak most strongly to readers who see spiritual growth as active, emotional work and who want companionship through the strange territory of loss. It’s a candid, compassionate book about staying awake to life precisely when the heart is tempted to close. A fearless and tender memoir that turns saying goodbye into an invitation to live with a wider heart.
Pages: 168 | ASIN : B0793PZ6KD
Grief, Hardship, and Loss
Held in the Vanishing is an intimate memoir about caring for your parents who have different forms of dementia while balancing marriage, parenting, work, and grief. What inspired you to share your family’s experiences with readers?
Held in the Vanishing is truly an intimate sharing of my family’s story. I really didn’t hold anything back. Each chapter—or, rather, each vignette—began as a journal entry or vivid memory from the past six years. So when pen first hit paper, I wasn’t writing for anyone other than myself.
Journaling is an outlet for me. It’s a safe place to release whatever my mind, body, and soul are carrying. I don’t have to worry about whether any of it makes sense because it’s just for me. But the power of journaling comes when I see the words take shape on the page. Suddenly I can encounter an experience or emotion almost as if I’ve stepped onto a balcony and am looking down upon it. I can see more of it—objectively, but still in its raw form. Writing has a way of unconcealing meaning I couldn’t see before, or disclosing a perspective that wasn’t available to me while I was in the thick of the experience.
And I don’t just write in my journal. I go back and reread what I’ve written. I reflect on it. I learn from it. I grow from it.
Over time, as I reread these entries, I began to see a story taking shape—my story. And I began to wonder whether other people living through similar grief, hardship, and loss might see something of themselves in it.
So one weekend, I sat down and started stitching the entries together.
After I finished my first draft, I gave it to my neighbor, who works for a Denver-based nonprofit providing senior living and care, and asked her whether she thought it was worth sharing. Her response was a resounding yes: other people needed to read this story.
That’s when I decided to publish it.
My hope is that Held in the Vanishing helps caregivers feel less alone in this God-awful journey. I also hope people who love or know caregivers come away with a better understanding of what caregiving can ask of a person. It’s a chapter of life that isn’t understood well enough. It isn’t honored or respected enough. And it is terribly under-resourced, which only adds to the hardship of living it.
Maybe telling my story this openly and vulnerably can bring a little more light to that.
But more than anything, I want people experiencing this kind of loss and grief to recognize themselves somewhere in these pages and know they aren’t alone—not in what they think, not in what they feel, and not in the impossible decisions they sometimes have to make.
You begin by showing your parents as vibrant people within a multigenerational household. Why was it important to establish who they were before dementia?
Knowing who my parents are is integral to knowing who I am.
I never wanted this story to be about dementia. It’s more about what dementia steals from us—what it’s stealing from my parents and how the life we shared is being stolen. It’s also about how it shapes and changes us.
The opening chapter paints a picture of the life we built together because readers need to understand what we had to understand what is being lost—and what continues to change. We had a beautifully shared life—my parents, my husband, my son, and me. It was everything I had ever wanted. That life deserves to be remembered, and my parents deserve to be known not just as two people living with dementia, but as the vibrant, funny, loving people they are.
That’s one of the hardest things about this kind of loss: remembering who my parents have always been while continuing to discover who they are becoming—and who I am becoming.
You write honestly about anger, resentment, exhaustion, and guilt. Why was it important not to soften those emotions?
These are real emotions that come with caregiving. We’re not given the option to soften them.
My story is real. There’s nothing made up or embellished. If I had softened the anger, resentment, exhaustion, or guilt, I wouldn’t have been authentic with myself or with my readers—especially other caregivers who know these emotions all too well.
How could they see themselves in my story if I wasn’t willing to let them see all of me?
I think there’s something important in acknowledging that we can feel anger and resentment and still love deeply. We can be exhausted and still show up. We can question our decisions and still be doing the best we know how to do. Those emotions aren’t evidence that we’re failing at caregiving. They’re part of being human while doing something extraordinarily hard.
What do you hope caregivers recognize about themselves when they read your story?
I hope caregivers recognize that they are living an impossibly hard life and that it’s ok to break down. It’s ok to realize that our love for the people we’re caring for can change colors. Sometimes it’s gray and dull. Sometimes it’s black and blue. Sometimes it’s red and fiery. And that’s ok.
As caregivers, we get to feel whatever we feel. And that can include every emotion imaginable—guilt, shame, resentment, anger, and even hate. None of those feelings means we don’t love deeply.
My story isn’t intended to offer guidance or advice, and I certainly don’t want it to be preachy. But through journaling and the hard inner work I did along the way, I learned how to hold my parents while also learning to hold myself.
If my story can offer another caregiver even a glimmer of hope or reassurance that whatever they’re feeling, it’s ok—that they’re ok—then I’ll feel good about having shared it.
Author Links: GoodReads | LinkedIn | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Responsibility flooded her days, and in the long vigilance of care, her own life began to disappear alongside her parents’.
Love didn’t disappear. It changed color.
Strange, unfamiliar — yet unmistakably love.
Held in the Vanishing is an unflinching memoir of caregiving written from inside that unraveling. Told in brief vignettes, Mougne traces what it means to hold two parents and a family together — what is given, what is neglected, and what must be carried without language.
This is not a story of redemption or tidy acceptance. It stays with erosion and disappearance, and with the quiet reckoning that follows: losing your family as you knew them, losing yourself alongside them, and slowly finding the stillness necessary to hear your own voice again.
For anyone walking the long, unfinished middle of caregiving, Held in the Vanishing offers companionship, witness, and a measure of comfort in the darkest days.
Your Good Death: Why End-of-Life Healthcare Is So Difficult and How to Make It Work for You
Karen Lutfey Spencer’s Your Good Death is a research-based examination of how Americans experience serious illness, caregiving, palliative care, hospice, and death. Drawing on more than a decade of sociological research, interviews with patients and professionals, and her own family’s experiences, Spencer shows how medical decisions are shaped by far more than personal preference. Insurance rules, fragmented communication, institutional routines, financial incentives, and the availability of caregivers all influence what choices patients can realistically make. The book’s central contribution is its clear explanation of how these systems operate, often invisibly, around people who are already managing fear, pain, exhaustion, and uncertainty.
Spencer organizes the book around vivid personal accounts that make complex policy questions immediate and comprehensible. One of the earliest patients, Lilly, captures the emotional contradiction at the center of end-of-life planning when she says, “Where do I want to die? I don’t.” Such moments allow the book to acknowledge mortality without turning it into an abstraction. Spencer’s restrained, attentive narration respects the people whose stories she tells, while her sociological analysis identifies patterns across their experiences. The result is an effective balance of narrative and scholarship. Readers encounter the consequences of delayed referrals, uncertain prognoses, treatment momentum, caregiving burdens, and poor coordination through individual lives.
The book is especially persuasive in its critique of the language of patient choice. Spencer argues that giving patients nominal authority doesn’t guarantee that they receive timely information, practical support, or a meaningful range of options. As she writes, “‘choices’ are not simply a function of unfettered patient preference but are also shaped by medical, economic, and social systems.” Her discussions of palliative care and hospice are particularly useful because they explain the services in relation to patients’ actual needs. Later chapters translate this analysis into concrete guidance about requesting referrals, assessing quality of life, recognizing changes that clinicians may not see, planning for caregiving, and communicating preferences before a crisis narrows the available paths.
Your Good Death is a fantastic institutional analysis and practical guide. Its recommendations emerge naturally from the evidence, so the book rarely feels prescriptive or simplistic. Spencer recognizes that a good death has no universal form, and she asks readers to define their own priorities while understanding the conditions that may support or obstruct them. The autobiographical passages add moral weight to the research, particularly in the epilogue, where earlier lessons about palliative care, hospice, autonomy, and family presence converge in one final caregiving experience. Thoughtful, compassionate, and analytically rigorous, the book equips readers to approach end-of-life healthcare with greater knowledge, confidence, and attention to the systems surrounding every personal decision.
Pages: 288 | ASIN : B0GV4FSYQT
The Good Death: A Guide for Supporting Your Loved One Through the End of Life
Suzanne B. O’Brien’s The Good Death is a compassionate and practical guide to accompanying a loved one through the end of life with less fear and more intention. Drawing on her years as a hospice and oncology nurse, O’Brien argues that death is not merely a medical event, but a deeply human, physical, emotional, spiritual, and familial passage. The book moves from stories of hospital deaths shaped by panic or denial, such as Vivian’s futile surgery and Alice’s spared CPR, into concrete guidance on advance directives, caregiving phases, pain management, family burnout, funeral choices, green burial, and the Peace of Mind Planner. Its central conviction is simple but unsettling: most of us are unprepared for dying, yet preparation can transform terror into tenderness.
What stayed with me most was the book’s insistence that knowledge can be a form of mercy. O’Brien writes with the authority of someone who has stood in the room at the final breath, and her best passages have the quiet gravity of witness. The story of little Tammy, marked with her grandmother’s lipstick kisses and repeating that death was “beautiful,” could easily have become sentimental, but it lands because O’Brien has already shown us the harsher alternatives: sterile rooms, frightened families, bodies kept alive past dignity. I found the writing most powerful when it braided instruction with reverence, when a comfort kit, a pain scale, or a bedside commode became part of a larger language of love.
I also appreciated the ambition of the book’s ideas, even when I felt their certainty pressing hard against mystery. O’Brien’s belief in the sacredness of death gives the book its warmth and courage. Her practical wisdom is hard to dismiss. The three phases of end of life, the Support System Scheduler, the questions about bathing, music, visitors, and disposition of the body, all feel humane because they honor the tiny details where love either falters or becomes incarnate. Her discussion of home funerals, living wakes, and green burial also widens the reader’s sense of what’s possible after death in a way that restores agency to families.
By the end, I felt both sobered and strangely steadied. The Good Death doesn’t make dying easy, and it shouldn’t, but it makes the terrain less lonely by naming what so many people are afraid to name. Its greatest gift is not that it removes grief, but that it teaches the reader how to remain present inside it, with clean hands, clear wishes, and an open heart. I’d recommend this book especially to family caregivers, hospice volunteers, adult children of aging parents, and anyone who knows that avoiding death has never protected us from it.
Pages: 272 | ISBN : 978-0316574860
The Ultimate Soul’s Purpose
Hydrangeas From Dad follows you through the devastating loss of your father and the mysterious hydrangea text he sent from beyond, opening into a courageous memoir of grief, soul, family, and spiritual healing. Why was this an important book for you to write?
First of all, I admired my dad for the man he became in the last 25 years of his life. Once he retired and no longer had to fully provide for 5 kids, a wife, and his mother, he became a real father to me. And I was gradually able to let him in after spending my childhood feeling detached from him. During retirement, Dad visited me several times a year, called frequently, and moved to FL, and was closer, so I could visit him. We finally had a relationship.
Secondly, I thought the way he lived his life was authentic, courageous, and full of gusto, and he encouraged me to live the same way. I told him when he was dying that I would write a book about him and his life, and I was committed to that promise.
And, the third reason was that his message to me from the afterlife was so powerful and life-changing that I knew I needed to share the story with others. My desire was to help others who had also lost a loved one, maybe a parent, to know with certainty that our soul relationships continue after the body is gone. I found that awareness to be so comforting during the early months and ongoing years of grieving that Dad was no longer physically with us. I trusted that others could find comfort in this story, too. And his message to me ignited the fire of complete authenticity in me to live my life fully and honestly! I wanted to share that message too, knowing that physical life as we experience it is short, but HOW we live prepares us for the possibility of a glorious afterlife.
What was the first thing you felt when you saw the text from your father’s phone with the photo of blue hydrangeas?
I was honestly shocked! I think my heart stopped beating, and I lost my breath for a moment. But my mind couldn’t process this, and I tried desperately to find another explanation other than this was Dad reaching out to me right after a man on television talked about how important it was to call your parents while they were still alive. I was trying to digest all of that. It was more of an emotional experience than it was anything cognitive. It was tumultuous! My gut was in knots. I stared at the screen in disbelief. And after a few moments, I convinced myself that my sister had planted a flower bush in Dad’s yard and used his phone to send me a picture of it. I needed to believe in that to get through the night and let my gut and heart settle down.
How did writing about your father’s final days change your relationship to those memories?
I commented to my siblings that they lived through my dad’s dying and moved on; and, I lived it off and on for 10 years, the length of time it took me to finish the manuscript. Writing about those 5 days of my dad’s dying kept me anchored in the experience of dying. It also helped me appreciate living even more because I now knew what it was like to have a loved one leave this physical world and their physical body. I became more intimately attached to death and dying and re-writing the definitions of this for myself. And, through this awareness, I knew that preparing oneself for the afterlife by HOW we lived in THIS life was the ultimate soul’s purpose.
Were there parts of your spiritual journey that you felt afraid or hesitant to share so openly?
After serious reflection on this question, I would have to say the part of my spiritual journey that I had hesitation or fear to share openly was about my venture into the world of shamanism. Not because of my own trepidation, but because I feared being judged harshly and my book being discredited because of that.
I live in the Bible Belt of the US. People are predominantly Christian, and fundamentally so. I consider myself a Christian, but open to receiving influence from many other religions as a spiritual seeker. Shamanism would be seen as a pagan practice by many. But I had to push through this fear of rejection and dismissal because my spiritual journey, prompted by my Dad’s text message from the afterlife, was and still is about being my TRUE self!
Now, I welcome questions from anyone. I love the opportunity to better explain how studying shamanism and the powerful rituals as they were taught by Don Oscar Miro Quesada, taught me how to fully and completely love! My heart was blocked by layers of anger, disappointment, and despair for most of my life. The practice of Anyi, “sacred reciprocity,” and the initiations and blessings received from don Oscar and the Universal Shamanism community removed the barriers I didn’t even know I had. Somehow, I was set
free, became lighter, more positive, and loving; and this has been a treasured gift.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Mary Ellen McDonald | Mary Ellen Connett McDonald | Connett Therapy and Coaching | EquiHeart | Website | Fierce Feminine Fire | EquiHeart Guided Horsemanship | Amazon
If you are:
– Wrestling with the mysteries of life and death
– Questioning why we love, even when loss seems inevitable
– Anticipating or grieving the passing of a parent or other cherished soul
– Feeling lost, displaced, or hollow after such a profound absence
– Living in the shadows instead of embracing your deepest truths and longings
Then this book is here for you-a companion for your soul’s journey to:
– Ease the sorrow of losing those you love, and bring gentle healing to your heart
– Affirm the eternal nature of your soul and the souls of those who have passed
– Understand that death cannot sever the bonds of love you share
– Live fully in alignment with your soul’s deepest purpose
– Cultivate spiritual practices that nurture and sustain your soul
– Move toward the highest state of fulfillment-union with God, Source, or Great Spirit
May this journey light your path, opening your heart to healing, connection, and the limitless presence of your soul in every moment of your life.
First-Hand Knowledge
Reach Out with Acts of Kindness is a heartfelt and practical guide offering compassionate, straightforward advice on how to support people facing illness, grief, or crisis. Why was this an important book for you to write?
After going through a traumatic time, I felt called to write this book. I could not not write this resource in which I share my passion for reaching out to others in hardship. We will all face obstacles and hurdles throughout life, and support from family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, etc., is vital for those hurting attempting to move forward.
I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?
I am a private person, so sharing my feelings with readers was the hardest part of writing the book. Those who are deeply entrenched in a troubling period or have gone through a tumultuous time can relate to the many mixed emotions I express in the book and that anyone in crisis may experience. There were many dark, unsettling instances too personal to include that were left out, in respect for my family.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
I share first-hand knowledge of what may help and what may not help those struggling, and also include examples from others who endured trauma, regardless of the circumstance or predicament. Specific ideas and suggestions to lend support are featured. I’m a firm believer that everyone has a gift, whether it’s picking up the phone to touch base, sending a thinking-of-you card, delivering a meal, completing an errand, mowing the grass, etc. I emphasize lending support in an area that is most comfortable and easy for the giver. Readers are invited to consider what their gift may be.
Could you tell me what one thing you hope readers take away from Reach Out with Kindness?
The goal of Reach Out is for readers to understand the importance of reaching out and connecting with anyone struggling with simple acts of kindness.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Instagram | Amazon
At some point in life, everyone will face a roadblock, obstacle, or will be touched by someone experiencing a challenging, tumultuous period. No one is immune to struggles, but outsiders are often unsure how to best offer comfort and support.
Reach Out is a call to action for creating a culture of compassion and empathy by illuminating how to be there for others when they need it the most. This relatable resource highlights specific ways to help others in crisis as well as the aftermath. Everyone has a gift to offer, whether it is just picking up the phone to touch base, sending a card of concern, delivering a meal, mowing the grass, or other helpful acts. What is your gift?
