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Shattered Motherhood Surviving The Guilt of a Child's Suicide

For a mother, the death of a child under any circumstances is unbearable. When the child is severed from the mother’s life by his or her own hand, the cleaving is particularly brutal. It is a bereavement with no equivalence in human experience.If you are a mother today, you are mothering in patriarchy. What that means, and how it might impact a mother grieving the loss of her child to suicide, is a subject Donna Johnson explores in this profound book. Johnson, in her counselling role in a police service, worked closely with mothers who lost a child to suicide, supporting them through those firsttraumatic days, weeks and months as the impact of suicide reverberated throughout their lives.What struck her was the absence of specific supports for mothers and the prevalence of a type of paralys