Making Meaning of Loss: Change and Challenge Across the Lifespan

Making Meaning of Loss: Change and Challenge Across the Lifespan is about how change brings loss to our lives, how we make meaning of loss, and how our experience with loss directs our encounters with loss in the future. Each loss challenges us in this way: to rethink our world view, to ask who we have become, and to reinvent ourselves anew. Taking a lifespan approach, Hayes examines how we make sense of the losses that change brings in each period of our lives and how the way in which we meet the challenge that each loss brings directs our encounters with loss in the future. In addition, he provides suggestions for how earlier losses can become fruitful allies in encounters with change in the present and how caregivers can help others to make meaning of the loss in their lives. Above all, this book is about how caregivers can help others learn from the losses in their lives and to recognize what part of the past to bring along into the present in constructing a more reliable self for meeting the challenges of an uncertain future.

Richard L. Hayes is professor emeritus of the University of Georgia and dean emeritus of the University of South Alabama.