Landscape Without Gravity: A Memoir of Grief

By Barbara Lazear Ascher

Book Overview

In July 1989 Barbara Lazear Ascher learned that her brother, Bobby, had died of AIDS at the age of thirty-one. With an older sister's efficiency, she notified her parents and arranged Bobby's cremation; then, almost against her will, she began to grieve. This extraordinary book is a record of what she encountered in that landscape without gravity.

Here is a bold account of a sister coming to terms with her brother's death and with the type of grief that arises only when one sibling loses another--a grief that is all too often unacknowledged and borne in silence. Here too is a map for that hero's journey we call mourning. Ascher locates the moments of healing inside the kind of hurt that seems to last forever, making this profoundly comforting, invaluable reading for anyone--especially brothers and sisters faced with loss.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140234950
• ISBN13: 9780140234954
• Release Date: May 1994
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.9" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A wonderful guide

Guide Books along the Spiritual Path of Grief In her famous 1969 book, On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These stages do not occur in so neat and predictable a sequence, but are more like a cycle of radically charged raw feelings erupting from catastrophic personal loss (job, income, freedom, loved one). Anne Lamott writing in Traveling Mercies, compares this time of chaos to a turntable: Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence. Grief raises the tough questions that require spiritual answers found in the transcendent wisdom shared by those who have gone before and now serve as guides along this path of many detours and deaths. Here are a few resources that may ease the way. Allow them to help you with any grief no matter how old or unresolved. Unhealed grief lives on in wait of the next loss and the next chance to find peace. Maybe Thoreau had a similar thought in mind when he wrote, That part of you that is wettest is fullest of life. Speaking to grief's many moods, Barbara Lazear Ascher, whose journey of grieving began when she learns her brother has AIDS, observes in Landscape Without Gravity: A Memoir of Grief: Grief is like the wind. When it's blowing hard, you adjust your sails and run before it. If it blows too hard, you stay in the harbor, close the hatches and don't take calls. When it's gentle, you go sailing, have a picnic, take a swim. At 32, while 2½ months pregnant, Stephanie Ericsson, author of Companion Through the Darkness: inner dialogues on grief, lost her husband to a heart attack, and came to see grief as a dress rehearsal, Grief is the time when we are blessed with the opportunity to complete a natural process of spiritual death and rebirth before our own death. This book speaks of the complex and often taboo emotions we all feel when loss transforms our lives. In his collection of essays about faith and fiction, The Clown in the Belfry, Frederick Buechner observes this about life and death: If the Lord is indeed our shepherd, then everything goes topsy-turvy. Losing becomes finding and crying becomes laughing. The last become first and the weak become strong. Instead of life being done in by death in the end as we always supposed, death is done in finally by life in the end. If the Lord is our host at the great feast, then the sky is the limit. Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, writes of his own grief through the experience of losing his wife to cancer. In Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times, he shares thoughts on enduring a broken heart: The only whole heart is a broken one. No awake spirit can move through this world without enduring a broken heart. There is nothing real that makes life painless

A Profoundly Beautiful Work...

This is a powerful work of art in which the author gives life and meaning to the death of her only brother. Her journey of grieving begins the moment she learns her brother has AIDS, and we are privileged to share her experiences in the ensuing years without him. The death of a sibling is a topic that is often dismissed or diminished in its importance. In our society one is not expected to grieve so deeply or mourn so intensely the loss of one's brother or sister. Such mourning is reserved and more accepted for one's parent, spouse, or child. This starkly honest work, at once both intensely personal and profoundly universal, will forever erase any doubt that one might have had about the impact of sibling death, and provide comfort to all who have experienced such a loss. In Landscape Without Gravity, Barbara Ascher has recorded with great skill and insight the experience of grieving. She has given words to those unspoken feelings that all who grieve have struggled with, but have often been unable to express. Whether read by one who has experienced the death of a sibling, or by one who has lost a child, this book can serve as a support to all who seek comfort in the experiences of another who has journeyed before them. We witness the humility and understanding that can appear when one is willing to meet grief head on