One Foot Forward

As surely as you will die someday, your spouse, partner, or significant other may outlive you. Yet very few people in this country, health care professionals included, are comfortable talking about end-of-life issues, death, and widowhood. The end is sudden and devastating, even if it has been forecast, but more so for those tragically taken "before their time." How does one continue on-past the lingering questions, the new plans, the change in perspective-when this most transformative of life events eventually happens? One Foot Forward is here to help. The insightful, vital, and thoughtful stories of 20 widowed men and women in One Foot Forward by Judith Fox are woven together with beautiful portraits to document bereavement, acceptance, and perseverance in the face of the life-altering death of a spouse.

Fox, herself widowed at the age of 50, interviewed people from a variety of backgrounds and cultures; people whose spouses died as a result of chronic illnesses and sudden deaths; people who were widowed in their 20s as well as their 70s.

The journeys through bereavement in One Foot Forward are as singular as the subjects' relationships and lives, yet the grief and life-affirming determination to survive, and eventually thrive, are universal. Remarkably, most people do keep putting one foot forward, some to profound effect: most even construct new and often more meaningful lives. In that sense, these are stories of triumph-of the human spirit finding a way to blossom after devastating loss.

"While my kids are trying to reach me at home to see if I'm dead or alive, I'm at Arthur Murray's dancing the waltz with a 16-year-old boy." -Margaret Bdun-Nur'

"Allan's part of the fabric of my life and just because he died doesn't mean that he's gone."
-Coryl Crane

"I was a 'macho, I-can-do-it-for-myself and I-don't-need-any-help' kind of guy until I became my wife's caregiver."
-Ken Fousel

100% of the author's royalties will be contributed to the National Hospice Foundation.