cover image Hannah's Gift: Lessons from a Life Fully Lived

Hannah's Gift: Lessons from a Life Fully Lived

Maria Housden. Bantam Books, $17.95 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-553-80210-8

In Hannah's Gift: Lessons from a Life Fully Lived, Maria Housden delivers a lyrical, heartbreaking and heartwarming account of her three-year-old daughter's illness and death. Among the values she learns from her extraordinary child's experience are joy, a Buddha-like stillness, candor and openness. When Hannah's seven-year-old brother asks the author questions about death, Hannah is fascinated and declares that she wants to be a butterfly when her body dies. When their church has a special service to honor and pray for Hannah, she's delighted. Housden, too, offers readers a gift, particularly those seeking to help a loved one through the process of dying and themselves through the grieving process. ( Feb. 26)