Leaning into Love: A Spiritual Journey through Grief

In this short memoir, Mansfield recounts her husband's grueling two-year battle with a rare, incurable lymphoma and her three years of grieving and growth (she now facilitates bereavement groups and writes on the subject). Vic Mansfield, a physics professor and student of Tibetan Buddhism, held onto life fiercely, and the author recounts with honesty as well as tenderness the impact of mysterious symptoms, conflicting diagnoses, emergencies, and setbacks on the couple's relationship. Sustaining her, she writes, were her sons, the couple's land, Rilke's poetry, spiritual rituals, and her friends, centered on Wisdom's Goldenrod, a community founded by the late Anthony Damiani near Ithaca to offer study of Western and Eastern philosophies. Mansfield's matter-of-fact, sometimes graceful narrative offers witness that healing is possible, notably within the context of multi-decade commitments to people, places, and ideas. Left intriguingly unexplored are the reasons for the couple's medical choices, how her husband's illness and death reflect the challenges of end-of-life care in America, and the impact of the author's sampling from an array of wisdom traditions rather than sustained dedication to one. This account may appeal most to Mansfield's peers who are interested in nonsectarian spiritual responses to loss. (Oct.)