Family Relationships, Cancer, Death, Grief & Bereavement, Cancer Patients - Biography
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Overview
We are all destined to be touched by the subject of this book. In prose spare and unsparing, Ruth Coughlin addresses widowhood in its largest sense, acknowledging that the language of loss, like that of music and love, is universal. "No one can tell you about grief, about its limitless boundaries, its unfathomable depths," she writes in this first-person account detailing the shattering, harrowing circumstances of her husband's ten-month struggle against terminal cancer and the profound devastation that followed his death. "No one can tell you about the crater that is created in the center of your body, the one that nothing can fill." "The honesty, the day-to-day heroism of this beautifully told, unforgettable story," writes Michael Dorris in his introduction, "is the genuine article, the real stuff of forever." But here too are the specifics - the panic attacks, the dismantling of a life, the sorrowful hush that follows when death puts an end to a great love affair and a widow is left with nothing more to lose. Ruth Coughlin writes with beauty and honesty about love and marriage and preserving the day. "There is no right or wrong to widowhood; nobody's written the rules," Coughlin explains. "You make them up as you go along." Grieving: A Love Story is personal memoir at its best.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Ruth and William Coughlin married at mid-life and spent eight happy years together until June 1991, when Bill, a judge and the author of 15 novels ( Death Penalty ), was diagnosed with liver cancer. In this memoir, Coughlin, the book review editor for the Detroit News , recalls her husband's 10-month struggle to stay alive and her efforts to ensure that he would die with dignity. Her book differs from others of this genre in not romanticizing the suffering she and her husband endured. Optimistic and good humored, Bill was convinced that chemotherapy treatments would slow the growth of his cancer. The Coughlins alternated between confidence and despair until it became clear that there was no more hope. After her husband's death, the author embarked on a mourning that she describes as ``a narcissism that borders on the pathological.'' Offering no panaceas, her candor demonstrates that death and loss are facts of life. Author tour. (Sept.)Mary Carroll
Because love and loss are so universal, most readers will experience a shock of recognition as they share the emotions of Bill and Ruth Coughlin through months of chemotherapy, painful physical deterioration, the quiet release of death itself, and the devastating isolation of the survivor. New Yorker Ruth met Detroit attorney Bill when she edited his fifth novel. Their July-October marriage moved her to Motown, where she became book editor of the "Detroit News" and he served as an administrative law judge and continued to write. (His fourteenth and fifteenth novels, both Charley Sloan legal dramas, were "Shadow of a Doubt" and the posthumous "Death Penalty".) The strengths of "Grieving: A Love Story" are its precise details and fluid movement through time--back and forth between the endless weeks of tests and treatments, earlier, happier stages in the Coughlins' romance, and the undiscovered territory beyond Bill's death: "the first time in my life that I can even approach understanding what veterans of war mean when they talk about flashbacks." If truth rings, "Grieving" is a beautifully constructed bell.Book Details
Published
December 31, 1994
Publisher
G K Hall & Co,US
Pages
192
Format
Binding
ISBN
9780816159628