Book Reveiw: Where the Tree Falls, the Forest Rises, an anthology of death and renewal

Where the Tree Falls, the Forest Rises: stories of Death and Renewal

An anthology, by Charlene Elderkin

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (February 4, 2013)

ISBN-10: 1479320374

·       ISBN-13: 978-1479320370

 

I am the last person who considers attending to death and all that goes with it in a supportive way. I think it’s selfishness on my part, a fear not of death itself, but of the ugly and inability to discipline my emotion in the moment.

 

Stories of death was not necessarily something I looked forward to, even with the Wendell Berry poem, and the exemplary Driftless Workshop credits to the author.

 

I was wrong.

 

These thirty amazing journey stories, some from first-time authors, from all walks of life and representing many cultures and belief systems, rip out our deepest angst and force us to examine the intertwining nature of humanity.

 

From the opening story, a daughter’s quest to spend time with her dying father that echoes the book's title, to Elderkin’s experience with her mother, and on to a sister never met—to spouses and children, each story tugs at the heart in a way that makes fear supercilious.

 

Each story is accompanied by a photo and short biography of the author.

Beautifully designed and easy to read, these stories, journals, and poems are meant to touch and hold anyone who’s ever experienced the death of a close one, and was changed because of the person’s life and passing.

 

About the author: Charlene Elderkin is a hospice volunteer, a home funeral educator, a member of the National Home Funeral Alliance, and co-founded the Threshold Care Circle, the first home funeral educational organization in the Midwest. An experienced speaker with audiences ranging from a handful to several hundred, giving presentations on home and green funerals to the Wisconsin Coroner and Medical Examiner’s Conference and the Chicago Memorial Society. Her works on death related topics have been published in Essential Inklings, The Correspondence, Lilipoh, and she co-authored an advance-planning book, My Final Wishes, available at www.thresholdcarecircle.org.