The Ritual, an excerpt from More Than Tears won first place in the 2000 Writer's Digest Short Story Contest. Two excerpts from “Tears” were contest winners. The Ritual won first place in the Writer’s Digest Short Story Contest and Shadows won first place in the Idaho Writers’ League Annual Writing Competition. Another story, The View From the Top, was published in the Winter 2006 issue of the Compassionate Friends magazine, We Need Not Walk Alone.
Each year approximately 2,500,000 people die in the United States leaving behind millions of grievers to deal with losses they are unprepared for. Janice Urie became one of those grievers when her teenage son, Sean, was killed in a traffic accident. With blunt honesty, she tells how she, her husband and their surviving son, Ryan, dealt with the pain, guilt, anger, denial, depression and other issues common to grievers.
Letters Ms. Urie wrote to her deceased son are interspersed throughout the book and convey her desperate search for faith and the answer to the age-old question, Is there really life after death? Readers will be intrigued with the ways in which her question was answered.
The primary message More Than Tears sends: Grief work is the hardest work you'll ever do, but you can recover and live a full and productive life.
Specific grief issues are addressed in shaded boxes at the end of each short, easy-to-read chapter. A more extensive section in the back of the book includes:
The author has had a great deal of experience in grieving but she is not a psychologist or grief counselor; therefore, no advice was included in her book until validated by similar advice in at least five different places.
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(Several groups have successfully used the books for fund raising projects.)