Act Grief

Coping with loss is difficult, but that doesn’t mean you have to suffer alone. Based on the proven-effective acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) treatment, Moving Through Grief provides simple and effective techniques to help you get unstuck and start living a rich and fulfilling life again, loss and all. ACT is all about embracing what hurts and committing to actions that will improve and enrich your life.

Genevieve Prentice is learning that reinventing herself is a bit like downsizing a house. Deciding what to keep and what needs to go gets complicated. After settling into life in Lake in the Clouds, Colorado, with her sister’s help, she’s finally finding her balance. But Genevieve’s newfound steadiness is threatened when her daughter Willow unexpectedly arrives carrying a mountain of emotional baggage.

In this profound and moving book, oncology nurse Janie Brown recounts 20 conversations she has had with the dying, including people close to her. Each conversation uncovers a different perspective on, and experience of death, while at the same time exploring its universalities. Offering extremely sensitive and wise insight into our final moments, Brown shows practical ways to facilitate the shift from feeling helpless about death to feeling hopeful; from fear to acceptance; from feeling disconnected and alone, to becoming part of the wider, collective story of our mortality.

For both professionals and laypeople, this book weaves personal stories with practical care guidelines, including: living with a life-threatening illness, signs of the dying process, the stages of grief, living wills, and other end of life issues. The Final Act of Living: Reflections of a Long-Time Hospice Nurse is an end of life book; a resource that flows like a novel, yet has the content of a textbook.

Losing a loved one is often our greatest fear in life. We are trying to find our way on unfamiliar grounds, not knowing where it will lead us to. Working through grief is such an unknown journey, yet it is one we must learn to navigate with new meaning and clarity. Without a one-size-fits-all approach to grieving, we are unsure of what to do in our own grief when it hits us. We often don't know what to do or what to say when trying to help others grieving a loss either. Thinking we are going to cause more pain, we do nothing to help the bereaving or we try to “fix them”.

I believe every experience we go through in life is to prepare us for what's to come in our lives - to teach us the life lessons we need to know so we can be best prepared to handle our ultimate test, somewhere in the future. I believe our lives are an accumulation of life lessons that can only be learned by personal experience, to be completely understood.