Book Description
Lee Scheingold's rich, painful intellectual and personal journey—following the death of her husband, famed political scientist Stuart Scheingold—is described from the points of view which have informed her life: psychoanalysis, clinical social work, Buddhism, and family medicine. Yet it is poetry that is the connecting thread, beginning with the Russian poems which she studied long ago in college. She describes her return journey to Russian literature in the wake of profound grief. This is an emotional and yet academic account from an author who has approached her life with almost continual self-reflection. As a result of this examined life, the factors and life experiences which enabled her to tolerate, and even welcome, the feelings of grief are explored. Two psychoanalyses and a ten-year practice of Buddhism are examined in detail with the issue of meaning foregrounded. Emotions have central stage here, but ideas are close behind. For Lee Scheingold, poetry links the two. The deeply evocative style of the book resembles poetry itself.
