The death of a child is an overwhelming loss. "Why did my child die?" and "Is my child suffering now?" are questions that all people, of all cultures and backgrounds, ask. But characteristic of Western culture is a limited language for expressing grief, and a consuming guilt that undermines the recovery process. Dr. Sukie Miller, author of the landmark work After Death, turns to the beliefs and healing stories of other cultures to present a unique perspective that is both surprising and comforting. Sharing her research with a compassionate and grounded voice, she offers hope to those seeking meaning in what seems senseless, and heartening possibilities for returning to wholeness, even if we feel life cannot ever be the same. Wingate Parkard The Seattle Times A comforting, thoughtful approach to the excruciating questions that grief churns up...the best book on parental grief I have ever seen. Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. author of Kitchen Table Wisdom Dr. Miller has written a book that will revolutionize our thinking and restore our hearts. Howard K. Bell, M.Div. executive director of Pathways, a health crisis resource center, Minneapolis, Minnesota Impactful, spiritual, and enlightening. Sukie Miller's personal wisdom, clinical insights, engaging storytelling abilities, and findings from her innovative research are powerfully integrated. Sukie Miller, Ph.D., is a practicing psychotherapist and the founder and director of the Institute for the Study of the Afterdeath, as well as the pioneering Institute for the Study of Humanistic Medicine. She has served on the board of the Jung Institute of San Francisco and the Board of Medical Quality Assurance of the State of California. She lives in northern California. Chapter One: We Have No Language When your husband dies, you become a widow. When your wife dies, a widower. Children who lose their parents are called orphans. But we have no name for the parent who loses a child, nor for the brothers and sisters of a child who dies, nor for the others -- aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, even the friends, contemporaries, and adults -- who experience the loss of a child they love. I hadn't realized the significance of there being no word for a child's survivors, and no word for the state of having lost a child, until I sat with those survivors over many years and began hearing the unpronounced fears that most people harbor for the children they love -- for these almost seem built in, whether we speak of them or not. The fact that there is no name for the one who has lost a child is of enormous consequence: the nameless live in a kind of limbo. They still exist, but in a new stratosphere where their namelessness effectively isolates them from the rest of the world. When we don't name things, they remain out of reach. I have never known a parent or anyone else who has lost a child not to describe a period of feeling completely out of touch, beyond the reach of anyone else's comfort or understanding. And it's true. You can't engage on any deep level with someone whose name you don't know. You can't effectively ask for something that you can't name: "Bring me that -- no that -- no that!" is unbearably inefficient. More than 145,000 infants, children, teenagers, and young adults die every year in this country alone. At least as many families experience a miscarriage or stillbirth every year. So many people sharing a similar agony, and we have only the most halting language -- a few poor adjectives for what our culture considers the most tragic of personal experiences. They say we are bereaved, or that we are distraught or inconsolable. But this hardly approaches our emotional state and doesn't nearly describe who we have suddenly become when our child or brother or sister or friend dies. Because we are no longer who we were, and we never will be again. Language Is How We Relate Language is how we relate to one another and the world. However it is expressed -- spoken, or written, or sung; nonverbal, symbolic, even digital -- language is what allows us to express what we feel, who we are, what we know. It is that crucial link between what we're experiencing inside -- in the case of the death of a child, a unique combination of flashing turmoil that turns into grief that shifts to rage that becomes numbing despair -- and what's going on around us: other people's shock, other people's discomfort, other people's efforts to help, and the whole wide world that incredibly, astonishingly, continues to rotate on its axis and go on, business as usual, as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened at all. Without language it is difficult to think, let alone empathize. And when we are dealing with the unthinkable to begin with and then have no words with which to approach it, no wonder that psychological wisdom says that the death of a child is the most difficult death for survivors to endure. No wonder recovery seems so impossible. Without language those of