Grief & Loss

Carrying Them with Us: Living through Pregnancy and Infant Loss is a reflection on what pastors David Engelstad and Catherine Malotky have learned since the day in 1984 when their eight-week-old daughter Erin died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Drawing on their own loss, they offer themselves as companions to parents who struggle to deal with the end of an eagerly anticipated pregnancy or the death of a joyfully welcomed baby. Readers will find in Carrying Them with Us comfort and wisdom, a spiritual perspective, and practical guidance.

The authors also invite into this journey the caregivers--family, clergy and medical professionals, and friends--who accompany grieving parents.

The book is organized around five questions the authors have found central to many parents' unfolding story: (1) How can this have happened? (2) Why do I feel like this? (3) How do I keep going? (4) What do I make of life after this? And (5) Who am I becoming?

Engelstad and Malotky show readers a path from devastating sadness toward healing, a way for grieving parents to keep going and, one day, to embrace new life.

Through their stories we come to appreciate the near-miraculous ways in which the dying communicate their needs, reveal their feelings, and even choreograph their own final moments; we also discover the gifts--of wisdom, faith, and love--that the dying leave for the living to share.

Filled with practical advice on responding to the requests of the dying and helping them prepare emotionally and spiritually for death, Final Gifts shows how we can help the dying person live fully to the very end.

Discover hope, comfort, transformation--the gifts given in grief

Too often, we think of loss like we might a broken bone. We leave the bone alone, protect it from bumps, and wait. We think eventually everything will go back to normal, the same as it always was. But losing a loved one is nothing like a broken arm. Loss is amputation, and the path to healing doesn't lead back to the same, only ahead to the different. A Grief Received offers a personal, authentic, and practical approach to weathering grief with hope. Writing with deep insight, JL Gerhardt draws on the loss of her younger brother when she was twenty-one, other personal experiences of grief, and her work in ministry alongside her husband, a minister and chaplain. Through nine practices grieving people can adopt to position themselves to receive the gifts of grief, Gerhardt provides touchstones readers will recognize and a path to personal transformation. Each chapter includes personal reflection questions and suggested resources. Gerhardt assumes the role of friend, partner, and speaker of sometimes-inconvenient but always-helpful truths. Readers will walk away comforted, directed, and inspired to seek God and God's shaping in their grief.