The Choice

Now available in paperback -- Jan Hatanaka's powerful, life-enhancing book on how six people, encountering significant adversity, made a conscious choice to work to build a life of meaning.

Using six stories from her casebook as a therapist, Hatanaka explores and illustrates the complex relationships that exist between death and grief and the path that can lead to reconciling that grief.

Included in her stories is her own heart-wrenching and dramatic experience following a major health crisis. Hatanaka draws on her personal, clinical, and academic experience as she takes the reader through the Grief Reconciliation Process, describing the actual steps taken by people who manage to build a life of meaning in the face of significant adversity.

The Choice is brilliant in its simple, gentle, and profound exploration of the reality of suffering as part of the human experience. It exposes the hope that can be hidden in affliction.

The Choice will be of great help to those currently in the grips of personal adversity; the loved ones of those who are suffering; and health-care professionals, including medical practitioners, counsellors, therapists, and spiritual advisors.

Jan Hatanaka, the founder of Grief Reconciliation International Inc., holds positions at York University, Toronto, in the Department of Nursing, the Religious Studies program, and the York Institute for Health Research. She has a B.Sc. in Nursing from the University of Ottawa, a Master's degree in Education and Counselling Psychology from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Wales. Dr. Hatanaka's approach to grief and reconciliation is informed by her personal experience; her extensive academic research on the universality of grief and loss; and her in-depth discussions with hundreds of individuals willing to recount their personal stories.