Martha Whitmore Hickman

This little book, now in its 39th or 40th printing--including at least one printing in Japanese, came about in a kind of "happenstance" way. I had written a memoir of my father(see below), and after it had run its course and was no longer available, I, thinking it deserved a wider audience, sent query letters to a number of editors, asking whether they would be interested in seeing it for possible reprint.

One editor, after expressing interest in seeing it, wrote that they didn't think they could find the audience for it, but might I be interested in writing a different kind of grief book, something similar in format to "Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much,"--a "point of purchase book," they were called because they were assembled on a small easel on the counter by the cash register. (There are shelves of such daily meditation books for sale now, including, I am told, "Meditations for Men Who Don't Do Much of Anything.")

I was not familiar with the form--though I had heard of "Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much--and I went to the bookstore, bought it, brought it home and studied the format, and called the editor and said, Yes, I thought I could do work in that style, and I would send her an Introduction and some sample pages. We agreed to meet in Lake Forest, outside of Chicago, where I would be attending a writers' retreat and she would be visiting her family.

We met for lunch. She was very enthusiastic about my work, and I was excited about the project, though I was intimidated by the though of a whole year's reflections. How about a slim volume--maybe 25 reflections--grieving people don't have the stamina for long reads? She wanted a year. Well fifty, maybe? That would probably be as much as grieving people could stay with it. She was pleasant but adamant. I could have a year to do it, but a year was what they wanted. I agreed, though with trepidation. After all, it isn't every day one is offered a contract to write a book.

How right she was. And how wrong I was. People ask me, "How did you find 365 quotes?" For years I have been a collector of quotes that speak to me, and particularly in the last several years, in the death of first my father, then a year later, my daughter, and within another year and a half the death of my mother, my stock of quotes had pressed the capacity of my Commonplace book. I read a number of books during that year of writing "Healing After Loss," and a quotation from Josephine Humphries or from James Agee, or even a sentence someone spoke on television,leapt out at me for inclusion in my book.

I have been richly rewarded by this book. The flow of royalties is gratifying, or course, but even more are the notes, letters, e-mails, or personal conversations balm to the griefs I still carry over the death of my parents and most particularly the death of my daughter.

When a woman from California writes how she stood at the edge of the Pacific and watched her brother toss into the ocean the ashes of his daughter while reading intermittently from a very tattered copy of "Healing After Loss," I stand with them, my grief not for me but for them. When two women wait until I have finished signing copies of a later book and after the knots of people have passed on and one of them says, the other close at her side, "You saved our lives," and they tell that they have each lost an adolescent boy, one by suicide, I put my arms around them both and there is no one in the world right now except the three of us, and my heart swells with gratitude that anything I did could mean that much to heal another's pain. There are more stories. There are notes without number and, if I look at some of the reviews on the internet from readers who have found healing and renewal in this book, I think, what a gift the book was to me, is to me, because I keep my own battered copy on me desk and I often turn to it and feel the bond of the grieving who somehow share their life with each other and with me, though we may never meet. So this small paperback book that you can slip in your pocket is my permission to trust life, to trust my writing, to trust God, of whom Wallace Stevens wrote, "God and the imagination are one."