You Can Heal Your Heart Finding Peace After a Breakup, Divorce or Death
We wrote this book to explore how we grieve and find healing after enduring any type of loss, such as a breakup, divorce, or death. Grieving is challenging, but it is our thoughts that often add suffering to our pain. We hope that this book will expand your awareness and thinking around loss to include love and understanding. Our intention is for you to feel your grief fully without getting stuck in the sorrow and suffering.
I’ve been working in the field of grief for most of my life. I’ve been fortunate to write four books on the subject, including two with the legendary Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the renowned psychiatrist and author of the groundbreaking book On Death and Dying. During my lectures, I’m continually asked, “Does this grief work apply to divorce?” Even at parties, the newly single person will find me and ask, “Can you help me? I’ve just gone through a breakup and heard you know a lot about grief.” It’s always a reminder that the work I do applies to the ending of relationships and marriages as well as the end of life. The truth is that loss is loss and grief is grief, no matter what it’s about or what caused it. I can’t count the times I’ve heard people talk harshly about themselves during a breakup or when a marriage has ended, and I’ve often thought back to my friend Louise Hay, author of the international bestseller You Can Heal Your Life, who always says, “Pay attention to your thinking.”
A few minutes after I’d begun, I could feel something happen in the audience, and I noticed people turning to one another and whispering. I had no idea what was going on, so I just continued speaking. Then it hit me: Louise had walked in and sat down. Despite her efforts to be unnoticed, she just carries that kind of energetic force with her. At lunch, she and I caught up on mutual friends and what was new, and then she said, “David, I’ve been thinking about it, and I want you to be with me when I die.” “I would be honoured,” I replied immediately. Since I am a death and grief expert, it’s not unusual for me to get asked things like that. Most people don’t want to die alone; they want to know that their lives and deaths will be witnessed by someone who is comfortable with the end of life. To that end, the acclaimed actor Anthony Perkins asked me to be with him when he died. Best-selling author Marianne Williamson asked me to be with her and her father when he passed. And I was there when my mentor Elisabeth Kübler- Ross took her last breath. Then I asked, “Is there anything going on? Something about your health that I should know about?” “No,” she replied. “I’m 82, healthy as I can be, and I’m living my life fully. I just want to make sure that when the time comes, I live my dying fully.