The Gift Of A Broken Heart

Grief can be profoundly disorienting and traumatic. Yet it can also open our hearts, strengthening our empathy, affection and compassion for other people. It may even open us up to new forms of joy.

In his book, The Gift of a Broken Heart, Bryan Welch movingly recounts his own journey through deep grief at the loss of his 25-year-old son to addiction. In searing detail, the book describes the pain of parents trying to grapple with an adult child’s mental illness and, finally, his death in the throes of the disease.

Grief is a part of every human life. We desperately try to avoid it. But it can provide profound instruction about how we can experience life, and love, more deeply.

The Gift of a Broken Heart explores how the simple acknowledgement of our shared vulnerability can help heal the traumas that separate us from one another, and might lead us toward a more loving, less divisive human world.

In these pages, Bryan expresses in intimate detail how he’s been learning what compassion might really look like, beyond being a big fancy noun. He doesn’t profess to know for sure what it is and how it works, but he’s committed to learning, and making plenty of mistakes along the way. He has no interest in letting the wound scab over or the heart be mended.

This is not a book about healing. It is, in part, a book about recovery—in the same sense that people describe being “in recovery” from addiction. They acknowledge that they will always be addicts, and they will always be in recovery.

Grief is with us. The deaths of our loved ones, our own disease and death, the end of a treasured relationship or some sad disappointment in the state of our world—grief has many points of origin, but it is here. And as long as we live, it will be.