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Gay Widowers

Life After the Death of a Partner

• By Michael Shernoff

• Price: $19.95
• Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
• Pages: 190
• Published by: Routledge
• Publication Date: 5th November 1997
• ISBN: 978-1-56023-105-9

About the Book

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.

Table of Contents

Contents Foreword

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Surviving a Partner’s Death Deeply in the Closet
• Do You Have a Partner?
• Postcard from Grief
• Excerpts from a Diary
• No Return
• Tracing Time
• The Merry Widower
• A Dream Is More than a Wish Your Heart Makes
• Trading Places: A Hillside Chat with Don Bachardy
• Going It Alone
• I’m Not Done Yet
• Conclusion: Mental Health Considerations of Gay Widowers
• Index