Love in the Face of Grief, Lorraine Hedtke MSW, ACSW, PhD
Love in the Face of Grief, Lorraine Hedtke MSW, ACSW, PhD
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Love in the Face of Grief
Transformative Grief Practices for Maintaining Connection, Belonging, and Relationships After a Death

Author: Lorraine Hedtke MSW, ACSW, PhD

Narrator: Liana Bdéwi

Unabridged: TBD

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/01/2026

Synopsis

A deeply human guide for anyone experiencing grief and loss.

This book rejects the rigid pressures of conventional grief psychology, illuminating powerful truths: relationships and emotional connections don’t end at death. There’s no fixed timeline for “moving on.” And many of the guidelines we’ve been taught around grief are rooted more in self-help myth than in embodied healing wisdom.

Love doesn’t disappear when the one you love dies.

Drawing on decades of professional and personal experience with grief, counselor and professor Lorraine Hedtke offers a layered, relational approach to grief that helps you continue your bond with your loved one—gently, naturally, and with profound emotional honesty. Through client stories, practical tools, and powerful rituals, Love in the Face of Grief guides you into a transformative relationship with loss. You’ll learn how to:

Navigate the complex and sometimes contradictory emotions of grief—like despair, anger, relief, longing, guilt, and resentment—without shameExplore rituals for deepening your relationship with your loved one who’s passedDraw on the stories of the dead as sources of wisdom and active guidance—not just reminiscenceHonor and listen to the way they show up posthumously, in dreams, symbols, memories, and intuitionUse grief practices to access strength, resilience, legacy, and purposeDefine an active role in your life for your deceased loved one
This book approaches grief as a communal event, echoing the work of elders like Francis Weller, Joanna Macy, and Martín Prechtel. Hedtke shows you how connection to your loved one can be found in the most unlikely of places and cultivated throughout a lifetime. Love in the Face of Grief is a balm, an invitation, and necessary counterbalance to a culture that asks us to close up and move on. Above all, it shows us what to do with all our enduring love, even after the one we love is gone.

About The Author

Lorraine Hedtke, MSW, ACSW, PhD, is a veteran narrative therapist who has helped reshape modern grief psychology. A counselor and Professor Emerita at California State University, San Bernardino, she specializes in post-structural, narrative approaches with people who are dying and with families after a death. Lorraine is the proprietor of the Fabula Center for counseling and training in Redlands, California, and the coauthor, with John Winslade, of The Crafting of Grief: Constructing Aesthetic Responses to Loss. She lectures internationally to counselors, therapists, and medical professionals, and her work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and German. Featured on TEDx and widely published in professional texts and handbooks, Hedtke is a leading voice in relational approaches to bereavement, inviting the bereaved to sustain loving, story-rich connections with those who have died.

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Quotes

"[Lorraine's] words and her methodology will be a balm to many mourners, I am certain."
—HOPE EDELMAN, author of Motherless Daughters, Motherless Mothers, and The AfterGrief

"I recommend this book for all bereaved persons who have felt compelled to silence their loved one's stories, and every grief counselor seeking to help them speak those stories into fuller presence in their lives with others."
—ROBERT A. NEIMEYER, PhD, author of Living Beyond Loss and coauthor of Working with Continuing Bonds in Grief

"A deeply compassionate invitation to reimagine mourning."
—DAVID NYLUND, PhD, professor of social work at California State University, Sacramento and clinical training director at Gender Health Center

"A beautiful and relationship-affirming book that transforms how we think of death and loss."
—SHEILA MCNAMEE, PhD, professor emerita at the University of New Hampshire and cofounder of The Taos Institute

"A delightful, informative, and very useful book on dealing with the relationships we have after the death of people we have been close to."
—DR. SUSANNA CHAMBERLAIN, lecturer emerita at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Griffith University and private practitioner of counseling

"Lorraine guides us to find light rather than only shadow in our losses, providing us with solace, purpose and even joy as we keep our loved ones not only in our hearts, but in our lives."
—RABBI PATRICIA KARLIN-NEUMANN, senior associate dean for religious and spiritual life emerita at Stanford University

"A compassionate guide for anyone seeking solace and belonging in the wake of loss."
—CHRIS HOFF, PhD, LMFT, host of The Radical Therapist podcast and executive director of The California Family Institute

"Deeply humane, richly insightful, and radically compassionate, Lorraine's work will transform how we understand love, loss, and the enduring presence of those we carry forward."
—EMILY M. DOYLE, PhD, registered psychologist and master of counselling program director at Athabasca University

"The essential resource for clients and therapists who wish to treat the dead as our 'best consultants,' replace grief with transformative practices of belonging, and ensure love continues to guide and sustain the bereaved long after a physical life has ended."
—STEPHEN MADIGAN, MSW, MSc, PhD, director of training at the Vancouver School of Narrative Therapy

"A treasure trove of knowledge.... What a gift this book is for facing a human experience we all confront over the course of a lifetime."
—JILL FREEDMAN, MSW, codirector of the Evanston Family Therapy Center and coauthor of Narrative Therapy

"This grief guidebook offers comfort, revelations, and new ways of relating to our losses and to ourselves."
—SANDRA SHATTUCK, PhD, author of The Electric Life of Lilah Browne

"This is the grief book many of us have been waiting for."
—DAVID BANNON, author of A Hope Observed and Wounded in Spirit

"The book's themes of holding on rather than letting go and keeping loved ones close all remind me of my own experience of loss and grief while learning to embrace the past with loved ones dear to me. I realized these experiences helped to build the present and the future of who I am."
—ANGELA TSUN, MSW, PhD, honorary associate professor at the University of Hong Kong

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