Grieving the Death of a Mother

Written by Harold Ivan Smith

Narrated by Mike Carnes

A mother's death can make a shambles of schedules, priorities, agendas, commitments, and, sometimes, even our most important relationships. A mother's last breath inevitably changes us. Drawing on his own experience of loss, as well as those of others, Harold Ivan Smith guides listeners through their grief, from the process of dying through the acts of remembering and honoring a mother after her death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ChristianAudio.com
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781545918975

Harold Ivan Smith

Harold Ivan Smith is a bereavement specialist on the teaching faculties of Saint Luke's Hospital, Kansas City, Missouri, and the Carondolet Medical Institute, Eau Claire, Wyoming.

Reviews for Grieving the Death of a Mother

[lit_chick_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“Mothers are not dead until we stop telling stories about them or repeating, often to a new generation, ‘My mother always said …’” (116)My mother, diagnosed mid-August with acute myeloid leukemia and given a prognosis of three of six months, died in the early days of 2013. She held on, I believe, in order to spend one last Christmas with her “girls,” adults all in their forties and fifties now, but forever “girls” to her. I saw what it cost her to hang on, and marvelled for a last time at the steely determination with which she stood at her stove, making the filling for her favoured Christmas meat pies. Days later, she did it again, this time manually kneading several dozen homemade rolls. And all the while, black and blue from the multitude of platelet and blood transfusions that were keeping her alive – although as the days and weeks wore on, more and more were required and did less and less. When someone asked me at her wake how she had managed when she learned of her shocking prognosis, I answered, “With great strength and great grace. Like she always did.”I like the way Harold Ivan Smith has chaptered his book: The Dying, The Passing, The Mourning, The Burying, The Grieving, The Remembering, The Honouring. While he draws heavily on his experience of loss when his much-loved mother died, he acknowledges that not all mother-child relationships are loving. There are those which are much more complicated, even some which are characterized by hurt and pain. Several well-known public figures have trusted Smith with their own memories of “motherloss.” My disappointment in Grieving the Death of a Mother is that when I found my own story within its pages, I wanted to connect more deeply with those who shared it; alas, the book is relatively short at 150 pages, and time did not permit – the memories shared are really only snippets of experience.One thing is certain: regardless of our age, class, culture, or relationship, we are irrevocably changed by the death of our mothers. I am grateful to my mother, so vibrant and so full of life before her diagnosis, who left us with a lifetime of stories. In closing, I have to acknowledge that I did not intend to review this book, nor did I intend to say much about my own grief and loss; these are very private matters for me. But these words veritably typed themselves, so I expect all things are as they should be.