Featured Author's Corner
Stay Here: On Love, Loss, and Remaining by Karen Goldfinger Baker
Stay Here: On Love, Loss, and Remaining by Karen Goldfinger Baker is a rare book. It’s an achingly beautiful and hauntingly real exploration of life and loss, a journey we will all take, though none of us are clamoring for the front row.
I have had the privilege to accompany Karen on this journey over the past couple of years, from the spark of an idea to the completion of this book. As we were developing her manuscript, I was simultaneously going through my own grief journey with the abrupt illness and subsequent death of my mother-in-law. Even though my role in this book was to help Karen bring forth her message as her book coach and development editor, I became her first reader, her test subject in real time. I needed this book, and I had it.
This book is a gift to all who are encountering the difficult road of loss. It doesn’t shy from the realness and humanity of death. It doesn’t drench loss in a saccharin bath, claiming silver linings. It doesn’t give you steps to achieve distraction in the chaos. Stay Here offers a compassionate bridge for you, a place of being that allows for the pain and for the contentment of the love that remains.
As you know, I love books. They open relationship with self, they open relationship with others. And this book in particular allows us to nurture these relationships.
Our culture and society don’t give us the space we need as humans with grief. We have an understanding that it is okay to grieve—and expected—but only as long as you stick to the timeline, stick to the program, come back to life when others are no longer comfortable with our grief. But Stay Here, with its lyrical poetry and prose, gives us permission to just be where we are. To experience grief on our own timeline, not the prescribed one given and encouraged by others.
So, today, this is my gift to you: Knowledge of this book. Access to this book.
I am sharing this book with you, not because I worked on it with the author and published it. I’m sharing it because I needed it, and it was there for me, like the hug in a cavernous room. I am sharing Stay Here because I want you to feel whatever you need to feel on your own terms during your own grief journey and know that there is a compassionate companion holding you up when the days feel long and the nights are unrelenting.
Stay Here: On Love, Loss, and Remaining by Karen Goldfinger Baker