A broken heart
opened to love.
"This is not a book about getting over grief. It is a book about what grief can make of you if you let it."
In The Gift of a Broken Heart, Bryan Welch — business executive, farmer, and longtime Buddhist — writes with devastating honesty about the years after losing his 25-year-old son to addiction.
What emerged from that loss was not healing in the traditional sense. It was something stranger and more profound: an opening of the heart.
As Welch moves through the wreckage of parental grief, something unexpected happens. His vulnerability generates a new sense of warmth. His pain opens a gateway to compassion—for others, for himself, for the strangers he passes on the street. This, as much as the loss itself, becomes his son's legacy.
Before his son died, Welch had built careful narratives to keep suffering at a distance. Grief tore all of that down. What it left behind was an unexpected spaciousness: the freedom to feel without the exhausting work of pretending.
With a foreword by Shelly Tygielski and praise from Tara Brach, Judith Lief, and David Nichtern, this book is for anyone who is grieving, or will grieve one day soon — which is to say, almost everyone.
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