Into a Reluctant Sunrise
A Memoir
- Counseling, Grief & Mental Health
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2020
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Publisher's Description
She sat on the driveway, asphalt cold and rough under her fingers, watching the sun come up. What happens after the unthinkable happens? The sun comes up. Again and again and again. Stillbirth is a numbing reality for thousands of families each year, and when Andrea L. Lingle's fourth child stopped moving one October day, she found herself living through just such a reality. Grief is a thoroughgoing despoiler. Nothing, from faith to family, is untouched by the immensity of grief. This is the story of a mother's journey into stillbirth, into grief, into a reluctant sunrise.
Endorsements (5)
“A beautifully written meditation on the death of a baby and the grief of a family. Wrenching and wry, insightful and outrageously authentic. Andrea Lingle travels where grief takes her, grasping and releasing and ultimately cleaving to the hand of the invisible Holy One whose love reveals itself as so vast only a broken heart could possibly contain it.”
“Andrea Lingle gifts us with a soul-searing honesty about her life, faith, and grief that is rarely exposed to others. If you know the depths of grief, especially the sorrow that accompanies the death of a child, this book holds balm for your heart. It is treasure, born from the darkest of times.”
“This book, in the hands and words of Andrea Lingle, is a mother's testimony written for Gwyneth, her stillborn daughter, and for many who grieve in death's darkness. Through sadness and anger, Lingle writes fiercely to her unanchored self and faith: why did Gwyneth die, why am I still alive? She writes alongside her own children, alongside her friend who shared stillbirth, alongside Jesus and Lazarus and the mothers in Scripture whose children were massacred by King Herod. She writes about encounters in the natural world, the world of her local woods and waters, and the gifts of darkness that awaken space for light in her. With meditations, photos, drawings to shade and color, with poetry, memories, and a newborn faith grammar, Lingle offers a gift to us, too, in our communities and circles, as mothers, sisters, daughters, and members moved by grief, loss, and transforming mercies.”
“Into a Reluctant Sunrise touches the heart of a human dilemma: love and loss will always be entwined. Lingle admits that it was not easy to learn to be the parent of a dead child, but feeling Gwyneth still near her, and hearing a small voice ask, 'Can you love me like this?' her reply had to be, 'Yes, I can.'”
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