Gay Widowers: Life After the Death of a Partner

By Michael Shernoff

Book Overview

A recent gay widower may find that once the shock and initial confusion of losing his partner is overcome, there are still many hard, lonely, and overwhelming stages of grief to be worked through. Often, the bereaved feels isolated, and looking around for comfort, realizes that he doesn't have many resources to turn to, but Gay Widowers: Life After the Death of a Partner is a start. By offering first-person accounts of becoming a widower, this book, the first of its kind, allows others who are about to lose or already have lost a partner to find support, validation, recognition, and fellowship. Its editor and contributors hope that by sharing their stories of loss, pain, and bewilderment, they will help others in mourning as well as make one more step forward in their own healing.Men of different ages and ethnic, religious, geographic, and economic backgrounds join together in Gay Widowers to remind other gay widowers that they are not alone and that their feelings of pain, anger, and emptiness are normal and legitimate. Not solely a book about life after the loss of a partner to AIDS, this book is about rebuilding life as a bereaved gay man, regardless of the cause of your partner's death. You will find encouragement for moving your life forward, without shutting your memories away, as you read about:

how homophobia can complicate a gay widower's grieving and mourning handling financial and legal matters before and after death specific mental health issues of gay widowers dating again similarities among gay widowers'responses to their partners'deaths making time for your feelings rather than avoiding them finding love after or during bereavement trauma theory's applications to gay widowers

By bringing forth these stories, Gay Widowers offers bereaved gay men, psychologists, counselors, and social workers--in a society where the mourning process is generally a heterosexual, social construct--a clinical overview of the psychodynamic issues relevant, and perhaps unique, to the mourning process of gay men.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0789003554
• ISBN13: 9780789003553
• Release Date: November 1997
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Standing the test of time

This book written in 1997 continues to be one of the few books around for gay men who lose their partners to death. I hope more will be written as this book points out--while there are plenty of issues that are similar--most of the issues for gay relationships are very different than for our heterosexual counterpart.

Important Book to Help Get Through It

This is the only book I know on the subject (there are lots of books on grief, but it's nice to have a book focused on gay men, since our situtations can be vastly different), and when I lost my partner, reading Gay Widowers provided a great deal of relief and information. Knowing that I wasn't alone, and reading about similar experiences was (and still is) important to my bereavement. I actually wish the book was longer.

Disenfranchised grief

The death of someone close to you is a pivotal event in your life. The closer that death is to you, the more difficult are the issues that present themselves. Be it a partner or a parent, a sibling, a close relative, or a pet, each death you encounter in life will surely affect you deeply, and also will provide opportunities for dynamic personal growth. Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people deal with issues of grief, loss, and bereavement in their lives. In our society unfortunately, members of this community find it much more difficult to address honestly and openly, those details and intimate emotions surrounding the death of a loved one. Fears of rejection, hostility, constant explanation and ignorance often make it impossible for a gay man or a lesbian, for example, to join a mixed group and openly share many details of their lives. Add to this the factor of the impact of AIDS onto those communities, and the potential for problems can escalate quickly.This book reveals both personal stories and usable information on the reactions gay men have to grief. Through the use of anecdotes and timely analysis, one gets a more complete picture of the incredible passage gay men undergo in their grief journeys. I currently am a grief counselor for The Hospice Caring Project of Santa Cruz and we have been involved in GLBT greif and bereavement since the early days of the AIDS epidemic. We are now offering to the LGBT Community a renewed outreach due to an increase in both AIDS deaths and deaths due to breast and ovarian cancers. A similar book needs to be written for the lesbian community.