Honoring Grief

Alexandra Kennedy, MA, LMFT, is a psychotherapist in private practice thirty-nine years and author of Losing a Parent; The Infinite Thread: Healing Relationships Beyond Loss; and How Did I Miss All This Before? Waking Up to the Magic of Our Ordinary Lives. She is an adjunct faculty member of John F. Kennedy University and has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz Extension and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. She has been interviewed in USA Today, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Boston Herald, as well as on NPR's Talk of the Nation, CNN's Sonja Live, and on KQED's Family Talk and New Dimensions Radio. Foreword writer Stephen Levine is an American poet, author, and teacher, who along with his wife and spiritual partner Ondrea Levine, is best known for his work on death and dying. He is the author of Who Dies, Healing into Life and Death, Turning Toward the Mystery, Becoming Kuan Yin, and many other books.

“This is a gentle, quiet book. Alexandra Kennedy has traveled these pathways; authentic, genuine, heart-shredding grief is a fiercely intimate, intensely private matter, experienced in vastly unpredictable ways. We are thrust against our will into some brand new world, unique for each and every one of us. While she offers gentle suggestions, simple tools, and practices along the way, Kennedy wisely counsels there is ‘no map, no schedule.’ There is tremendous mercy here. We are too often rushed through what must be allowed its time, its season, to ripen, to die, to heal. Kennedy is wise and compassionate, and she refuses to desecrate this holy mystery of loss. Rather, she offers simply to accompany us as we walk a path only we can follow. Kennedy teaches us to trust that Death knows the way to lead us into Life. For us, we can trust that Kennedy knows of what she speaks.”