Walking in Grace with Grief by Della Temple

She gives very practical advice about healing yourself, keeping a constant eye on your emotions, and letting yourself grieve without getting lost in it. But this book has much to offer even those who might find that a bit much. For those who share her new-age beliefs, Temple offers some very specific meditations to help move, gradually and gently through the stages of grief. Others will find it silly, but I would submit that it is no sillier than more conventional beliefs about the afterlife.

Some readers may find this tremendously comforting. I was also surrounded by some unusual friends who helped me navigate this world of death, Spirit, and life after life.”Īnd indeed Temple’s walk through this particular darkness is filled with spirit guides and conversations with her dead son. I accepted this as a natural occurrence, and our talks, Spirit to Spirit, became an integral part of my healing journey. I knew that my loved one was still “alive” in Spirit, and I often felt him surrounding me in love and comfort- especially during the first year after his passing. In the introduction she explains, “This is a spiritual book because I am a spiritual person. Temple was already a believer in what she calls “the metaphysical” before her son’s death. And the odd, almost dissociated numbness of the days that follow comes through as well. I will admit that as the mother of two almost-thirty-year-old sons myself, I found this bit almost too difficult to read. She does a novelist’s job of conveying the scene and its horror, of her feelings and reactions. Temple and her husband, David, are watching television one evening when guests arrive at their door: two well-dressed strangers come to tell them that their almost 30-year-old son has been killed in an car accident. The book opens as brutally and starkly as unexpected death itself. Della Temple faces this almost unthinkable tragedy and shares with readers how she survived it.

Never is this more true than when that loved on is your child. My loved one cannot be gone from me forever. This is too bad to have happened, so it must not have happened. Losing someone you love can cause the mind to resort to a strange logic. I think that what causes people to seek some kind of solace in dreams of an afterlife is the death of loved ones. Knowledge of our own eventual deaths is enough to drive otherwise rational people into magical beliefs about an afterlife, or so the argument goes. It is often said that humans turn to religion because they cannot cope with the fact that one day they will cease to exist.

Walking in Grace with Grief by Della Temple