Making Meaning of Loss: Change and Challenge Across the Lifespan

Making Meaning of Loss: Change and Challenge Across the Lifespan is about how change brings loss to our lives, how we make meaning of loss, and how our experience with loss directs our encounters with loss in the future. Each loss challenges us in this way: to rethink our world view, to ask who we have become, and to reinvent ourselves anew. Taking a lifespan approach, Hayes examines how we make sense of the losses that change brings in each period of our lives and how the way in which we meet the challenge that each loss brings directs our encounters with loss in the future. In addition, he provides suggestions for how earlier losses can become fruitful allies in encounters with change in the present and how caregivers can help others to make meaning of the loss in their lives. Above all, this book is about how caregivers can help others learn from the losses in their lives and to recognize what part of the past to bring along into the present in constructing a more reliable self for meeting the challenges of an uncertain future.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Loss as a Part of Life Chapter 2: Making Meaning of Loss Chapter 3: Mediating in Loss Chapter 4: Infants and Toddlers Chapter 5: Middle Childhood Chapter 6: Adolescents and Youth Chapter 7: Midlife Chapter 8: Late(r) Life Chapter 9: Caring for the Caregiver

About the Author :
Richard L. Hayes is professor emeritus of the University of Georgia and dean emeritus of the University of South Alabama.

Review :
Hayes reviews his lifetime of work on loss from his perspective as a human development scholar. He argues that loss is the nature of life, that it is cumulative throughout life, and that it is mediated on each occasion by cognitive-emotional skills and by continual assimilation and accommodation. Citing Lawrence Kohlberg and Jean Piaget, he claims that the capacity to problem solve expands as people age. Every individual comes to recognize that they are different from who they were in the past and is able to consider that a loss in the present is also a loss of what could be in the future, something a young child cannot do. Hayes reviews the meaning of loss at different ages. The final chapter describes vivid examples of the challenges COVID-19 posed for medical staff, teachers, and small business owners. The conditions they lived and continue to live with as they confront moral distress and ambiguous loss allow no time for processing their grief. Hayes emphasizes the need for support from others experiencing similar circumstances. This book is likely to be an important resource for anyone dealing with loss during a time of rapid change. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals. I found this to be a 'big' book—the work of a lifetime, in a sense, and a thoughtful, engaged life, obviously—one committed to deep and compassionate witnessing by an author who has dedicated decades to hearing the call of distress on the part of countless clients undergoing daunting trauma and transition... I frankly regard it as a minor masterpiece, and certainly the magnum opus of Richard L. Hayes' career as a clinical scholar. Its most commendable content contribution is providing a sweeping and yet well-integrated account of loss and its role in fostering change and meaning-making across the lifespan, and doing so in a way that does not require the reader to be a specialist in the numerous literatures on which he draws.