cover image After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges

After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges

Diane Cole. Summit Books, $19.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-671-74944-6

A series of severe personal losses and crises prompted freelance writer Cole's examination of grief as a transforming experience. While a college senior, she discovered the lump on her lover's jaw that signaled his immediate, harsh bout with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy; within that year her mother's terminal cancer was diagnosed. Not long after her mother's death in 1975, Cole was held hostage by Muslim terrorists in her B'nai B'rith Washington, D.C., office; in the years that followed her marriage, she suffered through two lost pregnancies and a lengthy struggle with infertility. These events provide the framework for Cole's examination of the grieving process and the possibility it offers--or its imperative--that one acknowledge sorrow but also let go of negated dreams and dashed hopes to make room for ``a new life.'' While some readers may object to the repetitive, detailed depiction of Cole's personal travails, most will find wisdom in her nonprescriptive distillation of the psychological literature on grieving and its rendering in literary works. One is inspired by her ultimate willingness to cast off the burdens of regret and sorrow to embrace new, unexpected joy. First serial to McCall's. (Jan.)