Alive in This World: Tracking Light Through the Wilderness of Grief. This item is unavailable.Alive in This World: Tracking Light Through the Wilderness of Grief

Who are you when your world ends? Where do you go when the signposts are obliterated, and how do you live when you've forgotten how to breathe?

In this remarkable memoir of loss, Lyssa Black Fassett learns that the only way through is to surrender to this strange new world. After the sudden death of her 22-year-old son from a heroin overdose, grief grabs the author by the hand and tosses her into the waves. But, as if by miracle, grief then welcomes her back to dry land . . . over and over again. In the midst of such chaos, this motion feels like an ember kindling in the darkness of a distant mountain-impossible but undeniable.

As the author embarks on her journey, she is led to a therapist and "energy tracker" who changes her life. Lyssa's search for her son becomes a long, experiential collaboration, both in the session room and through learning adventures out in the world. Slowly, a door opens-she sees a path beyond her broken mind, with the possibility of a fuller life than she could've ever imagined.

Alive in This World is an unexpected story that reads like an archaeological dig of the soul, uncovering all that is hidden and all that is there to be revealed.

Lyssa Black Fassett is a writer, musician, former researcher, and lover of the natural world. She has had a lifelong interest in spiritual, religious, and philosophical thought, experimenting with various practices such as insight meditation, shamanic journeying, and goddess traditions, eventually leading to a master's degree at Harvard Divinity School. But none of this remotely prepared her for the sudden death of her 22-year-old son from a heroin overdose. Her story details a kind of "archaeological dig" of a transformation born of traumatic grief, years of struggle and grace, a perceptual shift pointing the way home to herself, and to an altered, yet unbroken, relationship with her son. Lyssa lives with her husband in the small town northwest of Boston where they raised their child.