Love in the Face of Grief
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:
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.
Read the Testimonials
Lorraine offers a unique and important voice in this field. Her emphasis on creating storied connections to our deceased loved ones offers a necessary contrast to the conventional, outdated model of bereavement. Her 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
With gently revolutionary prose, inspiring accounts of numerous bereaved people, and clear, practical guidelines for reclaiming relationship with the dead to recruit them as resources for our changing future, Love in the Face of Grief turns the ethos of ‘letting go’ on its head and conjures a real world in which love is stronger than death. I recommend it 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
Aauthor of Living Beyond Loss and coauthor with Edith Steffen of Working with Continuing Bonds in Grief Therapy
Lorraine offers a unique and important voice in this field. Her emphasis on creating storied connections to our deceased loved ones offers a necessary contrast to the conventional, outdated model of bereavement. Her 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
With gently revolutionary prose, inspiring accounts of numerous bereaved people, and clear, practical guidelines for reclaiming relationship with the dead to recruit them as resources for our changing future, Love in the Face of Grief turns the ethos of ‘letting go’ on its head and conjures a real world in which love is stronger than death. I recommend it 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 with Edith Steffen of Working with Continuing Bonds in Grief Therapy
A deeply compassionate invitation to reimagine mourning. Lorraine Hedtke offers tender and practical pathways that honor love rather than pathologize it, gently challenging conventional grief psychology while opening space for continued bonds. This book is both an embrace for bereaved people and a paradigm-shifting resource for clinicians seeking wiser, more humane ways to accompany grief.
David Nylund, PhD
Professor of Social Work, California State University Sacramento & Clinical Training Director Gender Health Center
Lorraine Hedtke moves death and bereavement discourse beyond modernist grief psychology. Instead of ‘getting over’ one’s loss, the task is to cultivate ways to continue the relationship beyond the deathbed. In Hedtke’s hands, sustaining relations with those who have died transforms our loss into rich connections that remain with us throughout our lives. This is a beautiful and relationship-affirming book that transforms how we think of death and loss.
Sheila McNamee, PhD
Professor Emerita, University of New Hampshire and cofounder of the Taos Institute
Lorraine has written a delightful, informative and very useful book on dealing with the relationships we have after the death of people we have been close to. It is deeply embedded in her research and years of experience dealing with grief and post-death connections. An accessible and significant means of enhancing life beyond the pain of loss.
Dr. Susanna Chamberlain
Lecturer Emerita, School of Humanities and Social Sciences,Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia and private practitioner of counseling
Jewish tradition regards one who accompanies the dead to the grave (leviat hamet) as performing a priceless meritorious act. Lorraine Hedtke deepens this understanding and teaches us that the merit goes in two directions. She helps us to see that the dead accompany the living, not just at one moment, but throughout a lifetime. With tenderness and compassion, she 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, Stanford University
Lorraine’s groundbreaking work has reshaped how the counseling community approaches death and grief, bringing narrative therapy principles to bear in deeply meaningful ways. Her innovative ideas challenge conventional grief models and offer a profound alternative—one that emphasizes connection, belonging, and the enduring presence of loved ones. Lorraine’s vision is not only timely but essential. This book promises to be 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, The California Family Institute
Dr. Lorraine Hedtke’s voice is so very necessary in the landscape of grief literature. This book doesn’t just rethink loss; it invites us into a living conversation with it. With profound clarity and quiet courage, it offers a practice of continued belonging to our loved ones who have died, challenging the worn scripts of ‘move on’ by teaching us practices of loving relatedness with our grief. 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, Athabasca University, Calgary, Canada
A treasure trove of knowledge. Readers will experience Lorraine’s support, encouragement, and love as though she is right there by our sides. She offers a multitude of ideas and suggestions while making it abundantly clear that we are all different and there is not one right way to respond to grief. What a gift this book is for facing a human experience we all confront over the course of a lifetime; what a gift it is to discover that as well as grief, even in this difficult time, there is joy to be found.
Jill Freedman, MSW
Codirector, Evanston Family Therapy Center and coauthor of Narrative Therapy
Lorraine Hedtke has written 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, Vancouver School of Narrative Therapy
While Dr. Hedtke’s counseling career and academic history ground her expertise, what we readers feel most is her powerful desire to guide us through a new kind of grief journey that honors the process rather than demands a final point of moving on. Filled with relatable stories, insights into the history of grief practices, and writing prompts that foster shifts in perception, this warm hug of a book holds us every step of the way in a healing transformation we knew we wanted but did not know how to achieve. This grief guidebook offers comfort, revelations, and new ways of relating to our losses and to ourselves.
Sandra Shattuck, PhD
Author, The Electric Life of Lilah Browne Retired professor of writing and literature https://rawwordsediting.com
Love in the Face of Grief is practical, compassionate, and sensible. In plain language Lorraine Hedtke guides us through sections that are easy-to-follow and genuinely useful. Real-world examples are informed by vast amounts of research. And there is much more. Hedtke writes from deep personal loss in a book that is calm, gentle, and understanding. Each page recognizes the love we will always feel for our dead as the author asks us to consider what that means now, "to look backwards to capture stories and knit them into your present life." Hedtke helps us to see how we can live with the reality of loss. This is the grief book many of us have been waiting for.