In a tragic instant in 1998, my relatively normal world as a mature man, family provider and wage earner, Christian, husband, and father changed drastically, but also, my God changed (or at least my perceptions and expectations of God and life in general were severely shaken). The world I went to bed with was not the world I awakened to early the next morning to learn that my only daughter was dead! The emotions that engulfed me were then and are to this day unfathomable--emotions, pain, doubt, anger, and many other religious and interpersonal struggles that I've called bitter grief. The faith and religion that I had depended on and expected to provide strength, understanding, and comfort for most of my fifty-four years in such a situation were now very quickly major parts of my problem. Simplistic efforts to console and explain, to ease my pain, to answer my questions, just angered me and aggravated my bewilderment. Eventually, this book emerged at first from the relentless conflagration of emotions and distress that first started their expression as a journal stressing my need for meaningful support and empathy following the open surprise, bewilderment, and guilt-ridden feelings of divine betrayal that gripped me after my only daughter was killed in a tragic one-vehicle accident. The total impact that my daughter's death had on me was finally confirmed sixteen years later following the unexpected death of my eldest son. This book recalls and reflects my personal experiences of dealing with bitter grief and, as a whole, describes my feelings, actions, and even my very questionable thinking from that traumatic beginning (the sometimes dark and unthinkable emotions and reasoning that followed my child's death)--not as I had expected that I should have or would have felt or thought, but as I actually did feel and think--triggering the overwhelming need to ask endless questions and then seek to understand. I had to ask and continue to ask why until I understood well enough to again be at peace with God! Why is perhaps the most fundamental question of life? Why does anything exist? And especially, Why does life exist? If there is a Creator God who loves us, why do pain and suffering exist? And I now realized that if one's religion and faith don't satisfactorily address the problem of severe human suffering and horrific tragedy, then they must lack the capacity to interpret the human experience or to provide a realistic or adequate world view. Thus, I had to ask why questions that reached well beyond the deaths of my children. For the first time, I had to step outside of my now crumbling former religious comfort zone to consider my tragic and bitter losses and God's role in my losses and His role in all the other terrible pain, suffering, and death that exists in the world. I had to ask myself very difficult questions and try to understand Why? the harsher and horrific things of life happen, but more specifically Why Jodi? Why me? and Why now? I've tried to honestly consider why life often seems so unfair, but this was a surprisingly difficult thing to do--to seriously question the things I had come to believe and to expect from life and from God. And then sixteen years later by God's sovereign choice, I got a second chance to look at and reassess Why? following the death of my eldest son (Brian). This book is also in some sense a lament and a chronicle (though somewhat topical and not strictly chronological) of my life as a distraught bereaved parent transitioning by means of bitter grief and sorrow to some new more stable normal under the sovereign leading of God as must others who also suffer bitter grief. This book is the story of my life since April 23, 1998, my experiences, successes, and disappointments; and I hope they will be of value to you as you deal with your own bitter grief and/or try to help others cope with theirs.

Tell Me Why My Children Died tells the gripping story of indigenous leaders' efforts to identify a strange disease that killed thirty-two children and six young adults in a Venezuelan rain forest between 2007 and 2008. In this pathbreaking book, Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs relay the nightmarish and difficult experiences of doctors, patients, parents, local leaders, healers, and epidemiologists; detail how journalists first created a smoke screen, then projected the epidemic worldwide; discuss the Chávez government's hesitant and sometimes ambivalent reactions; and narrate the eventual diagnosis of bat-transmitted rabies. The book provides a new framework for analyzing how the uneven distribution of rights to produce and circulate knowledge about health are wedded at the hip with health inequities. By recounting residents' quest to learn why their children died and documenting their creative approaches to democratizing health, the authors open up new ways to address some of global health's most intractable problems.

"This is a gem! A guidepost for healing the hurt and finding hope in the presence of grief. The Mundays show us not only how to survive the death of a child but how to find hope in living once again. A gift of great grace"...Darcie D. Sims, PH.D.

When faced with a sudden and unexpected crisis, when faced with a death of a child, where your whole life is changed forever, where interacting with life is a huge challenge, where everyday matters are difficult to cope with and life seems insurmountable, how does one go on? How does one gather the strength and the courage to pick up the pieces of a shattered life? This book is the story of a mother's journey in a sudden and dramatic crisis-a descent into darkness and the journey back into the light. It is a journey of hope, love, survival, self-empowerment, and healing. It is a journey she hopes will inspire and uplift all who have lost a child or a loved one. She discovers that her children are still "alive" in their spiritual bodies-dead to this world but alive as shining lights in the evening sky.

No parent can ever prepare for the death of a child...period. When a child dies, a parent's world is shattered. There are no words, no explanations, no information that can ever make sense out of a child dying before a parent. "Why My Child? A Clinical Guide for Helping Parents Survive the Sudden Death of a Child" provides clinicians, grief counselors, clergy, and other professionals or paraprofessionals a clearer understanding of the unique issues surrounding the parental loss of a child. In addition to helping foster more appropriate clinical interventions and therapeutic support for bereaved parents, "Why My Child?" outlines more realistic expectations for coping with such a life-changing loss. While nothing can take away the pain of losing a child, there are ways of supporting bereaved parents to help make their pain more bearable. As a marriage and family therapist, former clinical director of a mental health department, adjunct professor, and as a parent whose adult child died unexpectedly, I wholeheartedly recommend this powerful book as a much needed tool on the healing journey of grief. Thank you, Stephanie, for contributing your insight, skills, and wisdom to those who are so much in need. Shari Lowder, M.S., LMFT Clinical Consultant and Supervisor Catholic Charities Professional Counseling Services, Catholic Charities San Bernardino/Riverside

" A grieving mother wanting to share her real life experience about the mysterious and sudden deaths of her children. Dealing with the mysterious death of her healthy three month old baby girl, and trying to find out the cause has been a mystery for over twenty-five years. Waking up on morning to find that her baby girl is dead was such a tremendous harrowing experience to deal with, and to have her children witness the death was unbearable. After twelve years as a single mother, she finds the man of her dreams, having someone to stand by her side. Her dream was to become a grandmother, she was delighted with joy when her son became a father, until her dream was shattered. She gets a call in the middle of the night, that her son has died. Grief-stricken with tragedy for the second time, she can't understand why her wish was granted being blessed with a precious grandson at a price of losing her son. After her son's death she is faced with so many legal problems hitting her all at once, she is so distressed trying to survive without her son. She becomes so angry and bitter, fearing of losing her only child, sinking into a deep depression, and refusing to give in. Grieving mother decides to write a book, being the most hardest and emotional job she's ever had, but she is determined to finish with a goal to share her experience with families that have lost their children. There is nothing no one can say that will ease our pain, only the ones that have experience this horrible ordeal can relate to our pain. She will forever treasure the short time her children were in her life, but will forever be lost without them.

Yolande Mukagasana is a Rwandan nurse and mother of three children who likes wearing jeans and designer glasses. She runs her own clinic in Nyamirambo and is planning a party for her wedding anniversary. But when genocide starts everything changes. Targeted because she’s a successful woman and a Tutsi, she flees for her life. This gripping memoir describes the betrayal of friends and help that comes from surprising places. Quick-witted and courageous, Yolande never loses hope she will find her children alive. "This book was one of the first literary testimonies that I read in French about Rwanda. I found it profoundly moving — both realistic and introspective. Thanks to this beautiful translation, it is at long last available to the English-speaking public." Véronique Tadjo "Reading Yolande Mukagasana’s book in French at the age of fifteen changed my life. I realized that genocide is not a mass crime but a single murder repeated hundreds of thousands of times. With this testimony the genocide is no longer just a historical event, it is instead the story of a woman, a mother, a Tutsi. And this is what makes Yolande’s account universal." Gaël Faye