Leaning into Love
A Spiritual Journey through Grief
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Magnificent, profoundly moving . . . gives encouragement and solace to all." —Naomi Shihab Nye
"I'll find a way to be all right," Elaine promised Vic, her dying husband and best friend of 42 years. Leaving the hospital after he passed, she had no idea how. Her uplifting story of love, hope, determination, and triumph is a gift to the half million women who lose spouses each year.
Leaning into Love captures the heart--from the extraordinary closeness of Elaine's marriage to how she and Vic transform their struggle with cancer and despair into a conscious relationship with mortality. After Vic's death, Elaine leans into her ongoing love as grief leads her through overwhelming emotional and spiritual depths on a journey beyond their time together into her new life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this short memoir, Mansfield recounts her husband's grueling two-year battle with a rare, incurable lymphoma and her three years of grieving and growth (she now facilitates bereavement groups and writes on the subject). Vic Mansfield, a physics professor and student of Tibetan Buddhism, held onto life fiercely, and the author recounts with honesty as well as tenderness the impact of mysterious symptoms, conflicting diagnoses, emergencies, and setbacks on the couple's relationship. Sustaining her, she writes, were her sons, the couple's land, Rilke's poetry, spiritual rituals, and her friends, centered on Wisdom's Goldenrod, a community founded by the late Anthony Damiani near Ithaca to offer study of Western and Eastern philosophies. Mansfield's matter-of-fact, sometimes graceful narrative offers witness that healing is possible, notably within the context of multi-decade commitments to people, places, and ideas. Left intriguingly unexplored are the reasons for the couple's medical choices, how her husband's illness and death reflect the challenges of end-of-life care in America, and the impact of the author's sampling from an array of wisdom traditions rather than sustained dedication to one. This account may appeal most to Mansfield's peers who are interested in nonsectarian spiritual responses to loss.
Customer Reviews
Hard to put it down
I found it hard to put the book down. Beautiful, profound, highly personal autobiographical account. I look forward for more by the author.